Why does so much government tech investment deliver so little?
airstreet.com
airstreet.com
It's also like he doesn't know what investments are: a gamble that you think the proposed company/solution/whatever is going to succeed, and that the few successes will be far more valuable than what was spent on all the investments, successes and failures combined.
This is like if I wrote an unhinged rant about how Y Combinator wastes money and is stupid because most of the picks have turned out to be shit choices, and ignoring the fact that the few that survived, found their market fit, and succeed were highly profitable and helped fund future rounds to continue the process.
Hmm ... nah. The internet would have happened anyway. Also, we owe its growth to plenty of ISPs everywhere and quite possibly ... piracy and porn.
Even if it was true and the government single handedly created the whole www, that shouldn't be a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way.
Also your bit about YC, YC is private money, they could throw all of it into the ocean and I wouldn't bat an eye. The government, however, takes almost half of what I make, for sure I'd like to know, with unprecedented detail, where and why my money is going to.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried to, lol.
> that's not a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way.
What are some of the better ways to approach investment by the government today, compared to what we have?
> the most charismatic person with the most well-produced video.
Ability to actually communicate your idea and justification for being funded, effectively and in a professional manner, is something notably missing from many academic projects. It's not exactly zero signal.
and then the people will be asking for faster horses.
Absolutely, zero doubt about it!
>You have any idea of the value that was created by having it happen many years earlier?
There's no early or late, it happened when it happened.
Also www means "world wide web" which, by definition, implies a collaborative effort of the whole ... world? Sure, props to the US for lighting the first spark, but after that everyone did their part, even us, its users.
edit: replied to the wrong comment, but it's still relevant to the assertion that the internet would have been invented without public funding
I'd estimate the "GDP" and traffic related to public institutions as a single-digit percentage of the whole web.
It’s like saying Pythagoras created all of modern math, including calculus.
Had he waited a couple of months we would have essentially the exact same thing with a different name.
TCP/IP and lower level protocols that connected everything together is really the boon. The protocols for how we exchange data on top were inevitable.
Private sector delivered the Internet. Academia researched and established standards. What the US government did was having the foresight to understand this need and grant research funds and contracts to the sectors able to deliver.
It's not a negligible contribution by any means but it's pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
The burden of proof always seems to fall on people who live in reality.
Maybe "mega-AOL" might've happened, but an open network of networks where there's no parasitic mega-corp acting as gatekeeper and tollbooth operator? Citation needed.
There is a constant pull between open and closed systems. Nothing the government did ensured networks would be connected together. TCP/IP is such a low level building block it’s easy to create closed networks with it.
People with two or more computers were always finding ways to connect them before the internet. Networking protocols were a dime a dozen in the 70s and 80s. The idea that people would never hit on the idea of a protocol over telephone wires is not particularly compelling.
It's like saying if the Wrights had not invented controlled, powered flight in 1903 we'd still not have airplanes. (It would probably have been accomplished by other people by 1908 or so, 1910 at the latest.)
The internet was just one step in a long line of digital telecommunications networks, starting with telegraphy. See "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage
https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
A good read on the topic is "The Entrepreneurial State" by M. Mazzucato.
Google was just one of many search engines when it was created, arguably the best of its time, but still not the inventors of the search engine.
Same thing with Apple and the iPhone.
I think the article is focusing on the former, but the title is admittedly vague.
Conflating the two is just disingebuous, and provides cover for all sort of unaccountable boondoggles like healthcare.gov (initial launch, not the hastily rebuilt version) and California EDD’s latest redesign apparently costing a shiny $1.2 bln https://calmatters.org/economy/2023/11/california-unemployme...
Don't forget about microchips.
> Don't forget about microchips.
The Romans are all bastards, they have bled us 'till we're white, they've taken everything we've got as if it was their right, and we've got nothing in return though they make so much fuss, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Investments from the 90s onward have been more public-private partnerships, but things like the human genome project or a number of cancer treatments and pharmaceuticals have been developed in this manner.
Third, I’m not sure I would regularly expect something as big as the internet to be invented every decade.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you because I feel similar to your comment, but I wanted to dig in a little to see if it’s more truthful or more biased.
I also suspect the push by the uS right wing have impacted the number of great government innovations. The federal role nowadays seems to be to do the core research that is not directly profitable, then transfer control to companies to reap the rewards. (Because of the often incorrect “the government can’t do anything right” narrative pushed in the states)
There are indeed newer examples such as GPS, RF-CMOS, Lidar, Siri, mRNA vaccines that DARPA invested in one way or another. Not saying they are as spectacular as the internet.
The newer tech might just not be as impactful as the yester-decade's, because those impact is already felt, and creating more impact in the face of today is getting harder and harder. Exponential growth is not possible to achieve in practise.
You can find recent examples too. Also take into account the survivor bias.
The latest technology that got appreciated on HN I could think of it the Mistral LLM, trained on a government funded EuroHPC. It’s a few weeks old.
Also: Google (pageRank, data centers), Nvidia (CUDA), VMware (virtualization), Qualcomm (CDMA) - many tech companies have leveraged research (and people) funded by NSF.
On the NIH funded/medical side we can look at things like mRNA vaccines, which may be transformative in fighting many diseases.
On the DOE-funded side we seem to be seeing major advancements in nuclear fusion.
On the DARPA side modern self-driving cars (and associated businesses) seem to derive from DARPA's grand challenge in the 2000s.
It is an interesting question as to why the US defense institutions are so consistently effective at producing advanced R&D when that is not the outcome of almost any government program in the world, including most other parts of the US government. Even most modern trauma medicine was pioneered by the US military. These programs usually manufacture sinecures in most countries. The US has somehow, in this one narrow area, largely avoided that trap. It would be interesting to know if it is cultural and/or an artifact of how the programs are structured.
For all its faults the US government is still the greatest producer of scientific research and advancements as far as we know in the history of the universe and that includes far more than just military related projects
[1] https://appel.nasa.gov/2020/07/23/the-big-dig-learning-from-...
The main advantage the US has had historically is just a much larger budget. If you can throw ten times as many darts, you'll hit the bulls eye ten times as often.
Military R&D is done with a specific, achievable goal in mind. It's not blue sky, it's more like "we need a better missile, how do we do that". Most of the real impactful innovations out there came as a side effect of trying to achieve some other goal, with only rare exceptions (ChatGPT?).
As for why other countries don't, their military spending is too small to catch up and then exceed the state of the art. All the money gets spent on buying stuff the US developed.
But given the nature of research, it is kind of unpredictable. One trick is to propose research that you've already completed or at least gotten into a prototype phase.
I wonder if they went well because there was a clear path forward in each case. When the local town puts up a site, they are probably not as inspired by a clear vision.
Such an incredibly American thing to say, with a healthy portion of recency bias sprinkled on top.
This is only beaten by that one time someone online referred to the HMS Titanic as USS Titanic. Because it was groundbreaking for its time, it must have been US American, of course.
In the US I'm sure many AOL users didn't think they needed the web. Apple even collaborated with AOL to create their own online service, eWorld, just as the web was taking off (they shut it down after a couple of years and migrated users to AOL.)
There is an interesting effect where early technology adopters get left behind once a replacement technology takes off and goes mainstream.
I'm sure many people who had Blackberry, Palm or i-mode devices didn't think they needed the iPhone.
And wasn't the web (which is how people commonly experience the internet) invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN?
Poorly paid graduate students are the secret of US research productivity, and they also graduate and work in companies to produce all kinds of technology.
they never talk to users. Seriously it’s crazy - you think it’s bad in industry - govt is wild. A bunch of folks 10 levels away decide on things. They will literally never even do one click in a demo - it’s all paperwork based - so when in 10 seconds users can tell it’s hot garbage (ultra slow, ancient Java version required and all) it’s too late.
Sane developers are smart enough not to contract with the government. McBride principles compliance? Virgin redwood compliance? Race info on all staff. Ethnicity for all staff? I once escalated to city attorney a compliance requirement that we hand out an IRS form for a program that no longer existed (advance earned tax credits I think) and they said form still had to be handed out (because some political body had required it be) but we could tell employees who filled out the form it was for a program that was no longer in operation and we would not process the form. Multiply by 20. So you get compliance and other middlemen who exacerbate the first issue - the folks developing are super removed from users.
When you are literally the one who makes the rules by which the game is played, it's insane for others to expect you to make a genuine effort. Apart from the (infrequent) elections, which provide at best a very weak control mechanism, governments are free to do as they please, with almost zero external pressures, while also being able to tell all other players what to do. The results are completely predictable, and indeed unavoidable unless the framework were altered radically.
a lot of government action happens in the context of competition between nation states with stakes that can be much more intense than in the private market. That's how you got the Meiji Restoration, The Prussian education system that's now everywhere, lots of fancy tech during the Cold War, and much of China's gains during the last 30 years.
Much off the innovation in the US is government driven, military technological superiority. The Silicon Valley far from being some sort of private market Mecca has its roots in the defense sector.
Turns out they do most development in-house. Most other use consultants, both for project planning, management and development. Go figure.
There are many bright people in government but they spin their wheels waiting in line for purely seniority based promotions and pay raises. Then they eventually report to an idiot who doesn’t want them rocking the boat and they die inside or leave.
* Internet, as many people pointed out already.
* Nuclear energy & commitments to nuclear projects e.g. nuclear medicine, nuclear chemistry, medical research, particle physics & major instrumentation grants
* Space technology. Ability to understand the cosmos, origins and the unanswered questions about the eventual fate of our world & mankind. Including some flattering moments such as Apollo program.
* Meteorology & mapping: This is usually the underdog. We owe a lot to meteorological studies and USGS. Humanity (not just the US) has managed to stave off famines, several natural disasters or be prepared to face the next simply because how well we have mapped earth and it's resources by remote sensing technologies, many of which are government developed or sponsored in large.
I think what is rather true is government projects are endurance races. They aren't as flashy as SpaceX or ChatGPT, but without them the next glitzy tech will be arduous to get. As with all races, one can't win everything & the slow nature of it makes us question its worth sometimes.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/faucis-agency-admits-it-funded...
Once we had general computing, there was going to be something to fill the void if DARPA didn’t fund TCP/IP. We would probably be dealing with AT&T addressing schemes instead…
It's how the US government paid for decades for the R&D to create the Internet. Just like how the Air Force paid Fairchild to make semiconductors. Or the CIA paid Oracle to create relational databases.
Technology was created in the US via the funding of the YS taxpayer, sent to the Pentagon and then sloshing around. Years or decades later it is ready to be a product and given over to private profit.
The joys of socket programming.
Think about it this way: if you have a true strategic research objective as a company, would your approach be 'I am going to share this idea with in a not public but not private either research proposal after I have built out a an international consortium and parcelled out different workitems for the realization of this idea to a host of 'partners' whos stratgic innovation ideas allign with my own, the hope for a 5% chance of receiving approval and a partial funding grant 2 years after I got the idea appoved internall, that imposes an extremely heavy reporting and management process on me to monitor and report on a series of prenegotiated 'deliverables' and evaluations over the next 3 years after which we can maybe exploit this resulting shared IP?
The unfortunate reality is that as a result most research departments, both industry and academic, spent nearly all their effort on grant aquisition and grant management, and only what is left goes to producing contractual agreements and passing reviews with no further leeway for actual research
There are exceptions. I would fully support a strategic EU tech 'decollonization' effort as it is badly needed, but the current programs are never going to succeed in that as they are not set up for this, and getting a true successful effort of the ground would probably meet with substatial political detraction.
P.S. Despite the above I have loved working in the EU research space. The International work environment is truely enriching, and most people working in this arena are realy bright and at the top of their game.
Most gov offices have individuals who run processes with no concept of why they are getting what they are getting, why they are changing it, and where it is going
Compartmentalization is great for blame management, but terrible for efficiency
> Europe has incredible potential, considering its political stability, world-leading universities, and existing talent. But it cannot and should not throw centuries-old economic truths out of the window to conjure up a simulacrum of technological sovereignty. Superpower status will not come via death by a thousand grants or attempting to recreate Silicon Valley in Strasbourg. It will come from what markets do best: discipline, picking battles wisely, and allowing bad projects to fail.
Good examples are quantum computing and fusion. Both were purely government funded, now that the fields approach usability we see private companies enter.
[1] I avoid using the term private sector because lots of big companies have similar attitude.
If a tech company (especially a small one) sucks, it will disappear rather quickly. So you only see the ones that made it work.
If the government IT sucks, it won't disappear.
The government should stick to enabling fair play in the private sector and stay away with gambling taxpayer dollars.
I recall reading about a big flush just a couple weeks ago.
"Convoy, valuing it at $3.8 billion just 18 months ago."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/19/bezos-backed-freight-firm-co...