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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.

Watch some Asianometry. The guy explains how Japan's semiconductor industry was built on high-level planning and industry/academia collaboration with long-term planning and workshare division rather than competition between companies, to develop the necessary technologies for semiconductor manufacture. Same thing happened in the US.

R&D heavy industries cannot be bootstrapped without deep government pockets and expert oversight, and a risk tolerance that cannot be justified on balance sheets.

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Government planning and investment can certainly bootstrap and protect a nascent industry in its infancy, but once the industry becomes competitive it is to the Democracy's own advantage to remove the training wheels and back off.

This book review of How Asia Works[0] gives excellent examples of how South Korea applied this strategy to break out of from economic despair to become a leading economic power, and how other Asian countries failed to apply this formula when their governments were too heavy handed in their approach.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works

> Top down government planning is the only thing that has consistently worked in high technology sectors, especially things like semiconductors or spaceflight.

That's what gave us Intel processors? SpaceX? Google? ChatGPT?

I strongly disagree with your reading of events. (Yes, there was government involvement in the origins of the semiconductor industry, and in the origins of US spaceflight. No, top down government planning is not the only thing that has consistently worked. Having the government seed things and let private businesses run with it has worked pretty well.)

Intel (Fairchild) has the following in their biography:

> By the end of the 1970s they had few new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military

How was America's semiconductor industry built?

Yes, the megabucks put in by the government for Apollo and Military Programs were important, they created static demand - but the government neither planned nor built the technologies needed. It largely happened organically.

I think that just came down to capital requirement thresholds. Some circumstances required the collective funding because the payoff window was so long.

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