First, I remember the Electric Car, it was a Department of Energy project dating back to the 1960s, yes the 1960s. There was always a group of folks who tinkered with electric motors and batteries and tried to stuff them in cars.
Second, there was and is the Air Traffic Control System. In the early 1970s I spent time developing a new digitized system. Any change, not really, we still use WW II systems to track aircraft.
Third, then there is GPS. I remember GPS well, I taught the first course on GPS at GWU in the mid 70s as it was being developed. Yes the mid 70s. What made GPS a consumer product, Trimble, the Gulf War and mothers who sent their sons low cost GPS units so they did not get lost! What held GPS back, well I argued at Sen Kennedy's staff in the mid 70s since they saw it as a strategic threat at the time. I saw it as a commercial opportunity.
Thus what does the above tell you? Government is not really good at commercializing anything!
Now comes the Guardian and some Brit Academic which states:
Mazzucato points out the state played a role in financing nearly every key technology in an iPhone, from GPS to the touch screen. She says that, even now, the lion’s share of funding for climate change technologies comes from state investment banks and public utilities, with just 6% coming from private capital. The problem is, the modern state sees this as accidental and residual. It avoids major projects, and their associated risks, seeing its role as mainly to act where the market “fails” – as with the near evaporation of venture capital funding for technology startups in the UK. Mazzucato, in a paper with LSE professor Carlota Perez, points out the danger of leaving tech to the private sector. In an economy bloated with printed money and cheap credit, if capital can’t find real-world, high-growth, high-profit opportunities to invest in, it will pool into the finance system, creating one bubble after another.
You have to be kidding us! The opposite is true, leaving anything to the Government will stifle the economy! GPS would never have prospered had it been left to the Government, and as for the authors claim on the iPhone, perhaps they are looking at a different universe!
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