Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

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> Picking Nokia as an example of innovation?

She used Apple as an example too, which around here is uncontroversial. If you want to learn more, she wrote an entire book explaining the article's statement: "And every technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone owes its vision and funding to the state: the Internet, GPS, touch-screen displays, and even the voice-activated smartphone assistant Siri all received state cash. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency bankrolled the Internet, and the CIA and the military funded GPS."

Furthermore, she clarifies in her TEDx talk [1], that Nokia's problems are its own executives' misjudgements, as is clear. (Just as the US isn't responsible for every failed US tech firm.) Nokia obviously did quite well from state subsidies, just as US firms do. (I recommend this TEDx talk, which goes deeper into the context than the brief Slate article.)

I find Mazzucato quite reserved in her critique of religious economic ideology, despite people willfully reading "madness" into a brief Slate essay, rather than carefully investigating her work. Not only did she explain in a book, but she even made a Youtube channel investigating this theme with other economic/political figures. [2] Her work came from an INET grant [3], not an insignificant institution. [4]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyp3Bw5H0VA

[2] http://www.youtube.com/user/RethinkingTheState

[3] http://ineteconomics.org/blog/institute/ha-joon-chang-and-ma...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_New_Economic_Thin...

Having written a book and created a YouTube channel isn't any sort of evidence for the validity of much more than the creators ability to create a book and YouTube channel.

Because a government offers funding at a low rate and an entrepreneur takes advantage of such a rate doesn't mean the government "innovated".

I think NASA and the moon are a good example of innovation in the relm of war. The space race was about international posturing and displays of technological capability as a deterrent to engaging in nuclear war. Of course we lost most of the "events" of the space race save putting someone on the Moon.

It seems plausible governments could be innovative as they are comprise of humans and humans can create things regardless of context.

Long scale planning certainly is a strength of a government, because in theory in means funding can be coerced from citizens and invested into projects that they wouldn't normally choose of their free will via the marketplace -- but they often simply don't invest in good long term projects.

Perhaps I'm wrong.. the promise of wealth seems to be a primary motivator, and since governments amass large sums of money through coercive taxation, I suppose they can be a motivational source for inventors and entrepreneurs, but I'm just not comfortable with saying governments are more innovative than individuals.

Having written a book and created a YouTube channel isn't any sort of evidence for the validity of much more than the creators ability to create a book and YouTube channel.

The ability to make a book in service of own's argument is evidence of a great deal many things: at the very least, dedication and conviction to one's argument.

The space race was about international posturing and displays of technological capability as a deterrent to engaging in nuclear war.

This is 100% valid, and yet it resulted in us putting a man on the moon, so you haven't really detracted from the argument.

>The ability to make a book in service of own's argument is evidence of a great deal many things: at the very least, dedication and conviction to one's argument.

Or confidence in one's ability to fool the market.

The space race was about international posturing and displays of technological capability as a deterrent to engaging in nuclear war.

As a side effect we got positioning, communications and earth observing satellites, all the sciences have had massive benefits and the extra research into stuff like photovoltaics hasn't hurt either.

"Long scale planning certainly is a strength of a government, because in theory in means funding can be coerced from citizens and invested into projects that they wouldn't normally choose of their free will via the marketplace -- but they often simply don't invest in good long term projects."

As we human beings live in a complex system such as country. The old fashioned "long term planning and executing accordingly" in the long run actually does way more harm. Misallocating resources, killing the possibilities each individual could bring to the system, killing the necessary environment for more diversified individuals to grow up from infants... If taking the similarity to animals' as a spectrum (no offense). A low level trait means things like food needs, shelter to live. A high level trait means the things people created such as art, tech... What I believe may be wrong, but I think as humans, the high level traits are the ultimate things we are looking for. Bringing in more possibilities and catalyze some of them might be a good way.

It's not about "governments are more innovative than individuals." False dichotomy on many levels:

* More accurate to say "governments are more innovative than corporations."

* Governments employ workers for wages, like corporations. For example, innovative mathematician Terence Tao is employed at UCLA, a public university. (Which paid him $433,599.99 in 2012. http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/)

* Corporations are artificial creations of the state. Feel free to look at their history. Government and corporate interests are the same, to a first approximation. They're both part of the same (state-capitalist) system.

BTW, the point is obviously her book contains relevant evidence.

More accurate to say "governments are more innovative than corporations."

Nonsense. If that were true, then government wouldn't contract so much of their "innovation" out to corporations. I used to work for a corporation that did a lot of this "government innovation", and the primary role of government was to figure out which corporation would do the innovating, make sure it got done, and then to pay them.

Our biggest competitors were other corporations. Yes, we had some competition from government labs, but not much. We and our corporate competitors could create whole new staffed divisions in a half-dozen promising areas in the time it took a government lab to argue over whether to use this year's budget on a new framatron or a pizza oven.

We also had some competition from research universities, but even there, the public universities were hardly more "innovative" than MIT, Caltech, Stanford...the private corporations.

Some of the things we came up with at taxpayer expense were worthless. What could taxpayers have come up with if their money hadn't been confiscated and given to us? Some of the things were valuable (I think), but nothing that we couldn't have produced if paid by companies (as we often were) instead of a government agency.

And all this stuff about how we owe the Internet to government is hooey. It's as if packet switching could only have been invented by someone paid with confiscated tax dollars. People who were paid by non-coerced customer revenues could never have thought of it, and if the government hadn't invented it, it wouldn't exist today.

Just because the government had its fingers in something doesn't mean it played a necessary role. It tends to stick its fingers into nearly everything, but that doesn't mean it plays a useful role in more than a few of them. Most of those innovations where the government was first to do something would have been done just as well not long after by someone else if the demand for it were real (people voluntarily spending their own money) and not just political.

You seem to ignore the extremely important point that the government contracts its innovation out to corporations as a means to keep the economy going. That's what keeps the machine turning, friend.

The Wizard of Oz keeps a big machine turning, but that machine isn't really running the kingdom, despite all that smoke and noise and imperial pomp. The imperial palace is merely the largest and possibly least productive participant. The real economy is the unfathomably complex interaction of billions of parties deciding what to make for whom, what to spend on what, what to study, where to live.... The big, clumsy oaf that often takes their money by force without trading anything for it, offers them others' money in exchange for votes, sometimes creates useful infrastructure that helps the real economy be more productive then comes up with new ways to impede their productivity (hiring people who are unfit to produce, telling them to regulate producers, and pointing at the newly hired regulators as a "jobs creation success story")..., that oaf is not keeping the economy going. It's just a big, clumsy participant, but people who can't fathom complex adaptive systems assume the biggest node must be in charge. Yours is a child's view of an economy, friend.

What nonsense. You've way overcooked your metaphor.

Way to read your own ideologies into my simple statement. It's unnecessarily arrogant to think you can glean so much from a two-sentence remark on your attempt to belittle state-based innovation and oversimplification of reasons behind contracting corporations for state needs. Nothing in my simple statement precluded recognition of economic complexities or suggested the state was in charge.

We can disagree all day long, and you can go about your business suggesting the state is a monstrous oaf stealing money from people with jack-booted thugs, giving it away to get votes, and the persons from whom they stole the cash got absolutely nothing out of the 'theft'--but piss off with this patronizing bullshit of calling a different view that of a child.

You've heavily laden a ridiculously partisan view of economy with a ridiculously partisan view of the state, and ultimately say nothing helpful or enlightening.

For someone who allegedly sits so high above, fathoming complex adaptive systems, you sure relegate the state to a role of simplicity and hand-waving, touting garbage as incontrovertible truths.

The state takes everyone's money by force without trading anything for it? What a useless view that shows no comprehension of political theory and the complex adaptive systems we establish in social and political institutions as actors who engage and transact.

"Long scale planning certainly is a strength of a government, because in theory in means funding can be coerced from citizens and invested into projects that they wouldn't normally choose of their free will via the marketplace -- but they often simply don't invest in good long term projects."

You're right about funding being coerced from citizens. There is also nothing theoretical about it, as anyone who has dealt with the IRS can probably tell you.

As to long scale planning certainly being a strength of a government, I offer you the national debt of the United States of America as evidence. The long scale planning done by politicians has the national debt, including unfunded liabilities, at something like 80 trillion dollars or more.

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