Science, the Endless Frontier (1945) [pdf]

It seems pretty clear to me that post WWII, the USA poured significant investment into R&D through the umbrella of defense but it's not clear to me that there weren't other major contributing factors. The American education system used to be famously egalitarian, where many Nobel laureates came out of it. Copyright, intellectual property, patents, regulatory freedom, employment freedom, to name a few, might all be significant contributing factors for the science and technology success. Not to mention that the USA was the only major industrialized nation still standing after the war.

I can believe the basic thesis is correct, that focus on defense leads to more funding for practical science and technology and that the practically minded approach of the military helps guide R&D into widespread adoption, but, to me, it smacks of a sort of self serving nationalistic narrative. Not to get too into vibes territory, but it does seem like Thiel's philosophy is lurking in the background, being hawkish about defense spending and guiding arguments towards monopolistic moat building.

There's a large portion of science that can only be done with top-down spending because of the extreme capital resources involved but, from my perspective, some of the most ubiquitous science has come from humble beginnings, often starting out as grass roots efforts and eventually finding commercial adoption. Its not clear at all to me that the USAs success in R&D wasn't in spite of its military roots, not because of it. More importantly, its not clear that the same recipe for R&D success of the last century will work in this one.

- Big domestic policy mistakes cause bad outcomes, like the Great Depression.

- Big foreign policy mistakes cause extremely bad outcomes, like WWI and WWII.

- Big command mistakes in the military get people killed.

This led to a mindset that the people picked to be in charge had to be very competent. Or else. Almost all Cabinet members passed the competence filter until the Greatest Generation died off.