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20 years ago nobody spent any money on smartphones. Now, the money spent on them has created billions of processors with magnitudes more power than the spacecraft we're being wistful about. Consumerism rerouted itself to forwarding science.

And that's just a device for watching cat videos. The carry-over between rockets and modern technology like hypersonic missiles is even greater - which is why we invented the space race to begin with.

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Carry over is still not as efficient as directly spending on what you want.

If you know what you want.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

I sure never anticipated cosmetic surgeons twerking on Instagram in their scrubs to advertise themselves between the videos of a chick jumping into a confused Labrador's mouth and that one of the kid on a bike being shocked by the existence of brown chalk when they see a Pokémon drawn on a sidewalk.

Yes. Direct spending is more efficient, but it's not magic.

But that doesn't mean that indirect spending and praying for spillover works better.

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