>a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development
So who should be in charge? Legislative committees? Government bureaucracies? Yeah, those should work :)
Letting people face the consequences of their venality? Now we're getting warmer.
These actually have a pretty great track record of, specifically, setting the direction of technological development. Often in a way that's more of a "here's what we want; now, private industry, go do it and we'll offer you X in return" rather than specifying the minutia, to be clear, but it's absolutely not a crazy notion. And I don't just mean NASA or the US MIC (DARPA, notably), but things like postwar Japan's heavily-government-directed R&D efforts and research-pooling initiatives, or Germany's skating-where-the-puck's-headed moves on renewable energy R&D and manufacturing back in (IIRC) the late 90s and early 00s. That we ought to rely on public efforts to direct technological development, at least to some significant degree, isn't obviously a bad idea.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Edward-Feigenbaum/dp...
Or how about the US?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-f...
So I presented three counter-examples. If you prefer to stay on an abstract plane, I think I'm out.
My post wasn't abstract. I'm just not interested in going example-for-example when my point was never "this literally always works and nothing else ever does", which is the point you seem to wish I'd advanced.
> So I presented three counter-examples.
To what end? The thing you scoffed at and dismissed remains not obviously a bad idea.
This does not mean it always works out well, but the benchmark for "damn solid" in this space is very very far from "perfect", in much the same way that an excellent batter in professional baseball still fails to get on base more than half the time—your line of attack here is just as baffling as someone countering "Joe's a solid clean-up hitter" with "yeah but look at this list of times he struck out!" It's omitting the context of what constitutes good in the space—meanwhile, he's near the top of the league in RBI. Continuing to trade anecdotes about times Joe hit a home run or times he hit an easy pop-fly to center field is just pointless noise, entirely beside the point.
That's why I keep pushing back that what you're trying to do here isn't even relevant to the point I was making, which point is quite far from being controversial, incidentally. I don't think both of us posting Amazon links to books covering the successes and failures of government-lead tech initiatives when I am not denying that plenty of failures exist in that space in the first place, is productive. If that's the way you want this to go, just pretend I've posted a series of links to mainstream macro, IPE, and tech and econ history textbooks in response to each of your (probably mostly valid!) "counter-points", because that's what I'd do, but it doesn't seem like a valuable exercise when I'm not even denying that examples of failures of these kinds of initiatives exist.
> your line of attack here is just as baffling as someone countering "Joe's a solid clean-up hitter" with "yeah but look at this list of times he struck out!"
Yes, but "Joe" has OPS numbers (which are more meaningful than the outdated RBI number, incidentally). What are your big Planning home runs?
Your "specific and oft-cited cases" are vague and not specific, on the level of "hey, Japan and Germany!" While mine are actually specific disasters.
"which point is quite far from being controversial," -- I think you mean in Ivy League faculties and scholarly journals, not in actual business publications.
"the Japanese Economic Miracle & MITI" -- yes, in fact I'm quite familiar with those. After the country was destroyed and a new society was being built, it was hardly possible not to hit a home run. Opportunity was everywhere you looked. How's it done since 1990? You haven't addressed that.
As for DARPA & NASA: you're half right. DARPA did help guide the Internet towards TCP and away from OSI. Note that the "industrial planners" in the US and in Europe were on the wrong side of that one, all the way. The French had Minitel, which was actually a pretty good idea, and then frittered it away.
As for NASA: the shuttle was a master class in how to waste money, so I don't think you want to point at that. And both NASA and DARPA were consistently opposed by nearly everyone on the left end of the ideological spectrum, It's only after you see how they turned out that you can manage to hold them up as shining examples. At the time I'm sure you'd have been opposed.
So drop the snobbery. I know the history better than you do.
Then stop pretending to be confused when I allude to cases that ought to be extremely familiar to anyone who's read up on this topic?
And stop making plainly-crap lines of argument like "it's hardly possible not to hit a home run" when a country is rebuilt after being destroyed when that's just... extremely not true, and the Miracle is such a big deal precisely because it's remarkable (though not unique—I'll go ahead and pre-empt the attack against a thing I didn't claim, given the tone of this exchange), and it's interesting and comes up all the time because it points to limitations of various simplistic models of what should work and what should not (like, say, the notion of government direction of technological development being categorically a bad idea). How has Japan done since 1990? What, is your argument that government-driven technological direction in the 60s and 70s is a key factor in the later malaise, rather than its being mostly irrelevant to that phase? Even if it was, my point was never that "this approach cannot possibly go wrong"! This is a narrow piece of the puzzle. You're not engaging with the substance, you're just casting about for gotchas. So what?
> So it's the sarcasm you object to? I guess that's all you've got.
Look, I'm done. You're not reading or posting in good faith, if that's what you've taken away from this.
or https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-f...
I don't know what "space shuttle for the Moon" means. Can you explain?