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>Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?

Because ambitious technological progress requires coordination between state, business and large scale entities. The cultural shift from the late 70s onward pushed consumer-led economic growth and withdrawal of the government from economic activity.

If you look at inventions like the internet or satellite tech, much of it was military/government-led R&D with all the consumer stuff essentially being a byproduct that fell out of it. Federal r&d budget in the US constituted 12% in 1965 and just about 4% today.

so at the end of the day you have the death of the research lab, fundamental science, large state-led programs and so on in favour of people building smartphone apps because they're cheap to make, you can spread them across the globe a few people get very rich, they build themselves a huge HQ in Silicon Valley and you get the illusion of having 'tech progress' while your scientific and physical infrastructure rots away. It's worse in the US than it is in Europe or Japan because Europe/Japan have at least kept part of their manufacturing culture. China is if anything the only country that looks sort of optimistic on that front, although it also has countless of problems as society gets more affluent.

Out of curiosity, what technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?

I ask because the way I see it there are some pretty fundamental differences between now and the 1970s.

The way I see it, progress is made not so much by companies or government but by those individuals with the intellect and gumption to invent the future. All that matters is that there exist organizations, be it corporations or the government, willing to invest money on big bold bets that attract such ambitious individuals and create conditions for them to collaborate.

At times in history, private industry achieved it (Bell Labs, Ford, Google, Facebook, Tesla) at other times the government/military achieved it (Manhattan Project, NASA, DARPA, etc.)

If government got heavily involved it would contribute just by putting more money in the ring, but I don't see how it would achieve more than corporations putting more money in the ring. End of the day, it's the money being put in the ring that matters most, not who is putting the money in the ring.

Not saying, I'm against more money chasing ambitious ideas, I just fail to see the argument that government is any better than private industry here. The one advantage I do see of government is that they'll generally allow money to be spent far more recklessly for longer than private industry and if that's not your money, then that is something that is more likely to produce an occasional great technological outcome.

Government lays out the foundation upon which innovation can take place. They build out shared infrastructure and provide research funding to universities, which private corporations get to use to create profitable things in the real world.

Using your examples, Ford wouldn't have been successful without the massive government investments in our roads, and the internet companies wouldn't have been successful without all the publicly funded computer science research over the past half century.

We're probably overdue for some wide-scale government investments in renewable tech, and I'd personally love to see a substantial government initiative to not only modernize our digital infrastructure (the average household internet connection in the U.S. is ~7 Mbps), but really push it into the future, whether it's via fiber, public wifi blankets over dense urban areas, cell towers, satellites, or some combination thereof.

>what technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?

maybe nuclear fission, make it the goal to create cheap, clean and abundant energy, maybe a model city with new modes of transport, Gigabit internet everywhere, a space elevator, an arcology, much more interest in alternative new ways of agricultural production, a DARPA for construction and infrastructure.

There are so many things that essentially work the same way they did 50 years ago. I can't remember who said it but someone said, take the screens out of a room and you can't tell if you're in 1970 or 2020.

Private business tries to tackle some of the things on that list but without backing by a state it never goes anywhere, and they do it more out of vanity or because they have eccentric founders rather than any economic sense, these are societal tasks.

Also foster a culture that admires scientific excellence and inquiry over getting rich and being a celebrity by making science again the focus of the education system. There's also a cultural component to this everything else aside.

What technological investments do you think the government could be making today that would have the impact that satellites and the internet could have?

* Vaccines for addiction. A vaccine against cocaine addiction was developed in 2009 but was not effective enough.[1]

* Preventing aging. Aging is mostly a timeout, not a wear-out.

* Average US East Asian IQ 105. Average white IQ 99. Average black IQ 85-90. Why? Fixable?

* Automated education which actually works.

* Wireless power transmission that works. Not much power, but enough to eliminate the need for small batteries in everything.

* Ways to force a decision in a guerilla war.

* A way to make building roofs that last a century.

* A way to make roads that last a century.

That's a start.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/cocaine...

The US has a tax system that discourages production and stimulates financial investments. That's why it is so easy to create bubbles on companies that have no solid business future. As long as the stock goes up, people think everything is ok, and many will make money. The losses will be left in the hands of later investors and the government (through bail outs).

What does Germany do differently? Germany has a strong manufacturing base.

Family owned businesses? It is not rare to see a not too big factory outside a small village ( same for Switzerland ).

If you’re interested in this subject, I’d highly recommend reading: “Reprogramming the American Dream“ by Kevin Scott.

In Germany the economy is geared towards production. Companies that do something real have benefits. Purely investment activities (financial industry) have to pay higher taxes. This makes the country more productive. In the US, the first thing everyone does is to move production out of the country and put their money on financial investments. It is great for investors because of the higher profit margins, but terrible for the economy in general.

A big cohort of economists would argue that the recent[1] German success comes in big parts because of the Eurozone, and how Germany is draining the Italian[2] industry because the Euro is too strong of a currency for Italy (because of cultural reasons, regarding saving behavior along others, Italy has been used to a way higher level of inflation than what Germans could withstand).

[1]yes recent, the situation was way different in the early 80s

[2] this applies to France too, but to a lesser extent.

Maybe those other things needs much larger initial investments. Meanwhile investors see software startups that scale from two people up to thousands as the concept it proven.

> Why is it taking so long to get electric cars going? Laws of physics haven't changed the way entrepreneurs would like them to change.

Theoretical energy density of an electric battery is low. Practical energy density of electric batteries today is even lower that that. There is no specific known approach to make better batteries, everyone experiments, and tests, and experiments, and tests over and over again hoping to discover a magical combination that keeps lithium stable.

Unless someone discovers a completely new physical effect (I wouldn't bet on that), electric cars are never going to be versatile. And if there is a discovery like that, I doubt they are going to rush to implement new technology in, essentially, rich consumers' toys. There are more important areas.

I feel like electric cars suffer more from infrastructure problems than physics. If there were widely available chargers at both workplaces and homes (including the parking garages of apartment complexes, etc.), I think you'd see much more widespread adoption. It's not hard to imagine widespread fast-charge stations off the interstates, or even battery-swap stations either.

ICE cars have basically a hundred years of infrastructure to lean on, and they'll continue to have a massive one-up on electric cars in terms of versatility until an equivalent electric infrastructure is built out.

Too much concentration of wealth and assets and way too much indebtedness. Consumer spending is maxed out in the US. A thought experiment: If you own the world, what would you want to do? Solar energy for those who have nothing to give you in return or space exploration or something else you fancy? This had happened before in the US around 1929. There are some old federal reserve documents that describe exactly this situation. War, inflation, devaluation, and redistribution was the way out.

This is definitely a bigger problem in EU. Greece and Italy are top of the list with this problem and could benefit from a devaluation.

The foundation for solid returns on investment is a large population with the disposable income to buy products that they did not previously purchase.

Since the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s, disposable income for the median person has stagnated or fallen, to varying extents, in the anglosphere. While nominal compensation has risen, these gains have been consumed by inflation and massive increases in unavoidable expenses. In most Anglosphere countries, cost increases for housing, food, transportation, and communications have consumed most wage gains. In the US, the situation has been made far worse by explosive growth in the costs of education and healthcare. In addition, government policies to support the reformation of extractive monopolies for products and monopsonies for labor have further reduced wages and buying power.

The net result is that the bulk of the population is too financially strained to expand their spending to provide a return on investment for companies that create new products and new markets. The median person lives in a stagnating, or even shrinking, economy and all spending is zero sum. Buying the next Shiny Widget means doing without something else, and that's a choice most people can't afford to make.

If capital wants greater returns on investment it needs to redistribute some of its gains to the public in the form of wages and other compensation. Capital, however, has refused to do this and has instead opted for rentier economic strategies that seek to seize a greater percentage of the economic pie for monopolists instead of growing the pie for everyone.

The solution is policies that lower income inequality and reverse re-monopolization, but that's a political third rail that no politician can afford to touch on pain of losing support from the donor class. For an example of how well these ideas fare in American politics, look at the fate of Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign bid.

> Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?

Because the economy isn't growing much? And this may be because productivity kind of plateaued due to lack of automation: most growth we've ever had came from automation, windmills, steam machines, robotized factories, etc. But now that the biggest part of Western economies is services, we're kind of stuck because automation in services is way less efficient than what we got in agriculture and manufacturing.

People are often afraid that IA would cause too much automation and destroy jobs, but in fact I believe that we (and Capitalism) are now suffering from too little automation (and I don't expect things to change soon unfortunately because AI is far from advancing fast enough for what's needed).

> Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?

The piece argues the post WW2 period was exceptional, hard to disagree with that.

> Second, why are profitable opportunities for investment lacking?

I'd say that it is because we've picked a lot of the low hanging fruit and picking the rest of the fruit requires greater effort.

I don't think it's reasonable to think we're going to pick the rest of the fruit without some fundamental breakthroughs, likely in fields like AI.