Terence Tao: the Role of Small Organizations in Society Has Shrunk Significantly

The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.

You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.

Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point

> Private companies are accountable to no one

clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.

Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.

The cold war. Putting a man on the moon was meant to demonstrate how easily we could put a nuke on Moscow.

You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.

> Malaria

Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.

> Social safety nets

Not a science breakthrough

> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch

I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.

Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.

This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.

Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.

That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.

[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!

[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.

Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.

You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events.

Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries.

Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.

>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids

If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.

Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.

People want to have their cake and eat it, too. And that obviously doesn't work.

right here is the problem

See page 3 on https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/goldin-lecture-sl... for an illustration.

> Surely you're not suggesting...

Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.

Stability in that you had jobs that lasted a lifetime and paid a pension once you retired, not layoffs every couple years. Dignity in that anyone could get a real, important, meaningful (and very rough, once you take off said rose-tinted glasses) job as a factory worker, farmer, coal miner, whatever, instead of what, working at Walmart or 7-11?

I do agree with you though, especially your last paragraph.