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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

> And it is America’s private sector, not industrial planners in Washington, which is chiefly responsible for the ai boom. The ongoing success of free markets is obscuring the damage protectionism is doing.

The AI boom is also largely being funded by defense spending on both sides of the Pacific. Without state investment this technological boom would also suffer.

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Also — what industrial plan? As far as I can tell, we just have tariffs without a complementary plan to encourage investment, build infrastructure, train workers, reduce labor costs, etc.

Public funding of STEM in universities too. Foundational research is underprovisioned by the market because it's a non-rivalrous and non-excludable public good. It's a market failure that is best addressed by governments fulfilling their role as providers of positive sum public goods.

Solar went through a similar cycle with German and US funding for foundational R&D in the 1970s, which was eventually picked up by China's industry when it was mature enough.

SpaceX too.

There's a yin and yang to public and private that populists on all sides are ideologically incapable of appreciating.

One could argue we wouldn't even have EUV without state research funds, which I'd say could be seen as a necessary precursor to the AI boom.

Is it?

So another Apollo project? Didn’t that turn out well for us even though it was expensive?

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