Just yesterday, we generated energy with nuclear fusion.
We’ve gotten under $10b in funding for fusion. We spend closer to $300b in adjusted dollars to land on the moon.
We’ve reduced the price of solar cells by over 100x in a few decades.
Despite sparse funding, markets work. I definitely agree—but again, this isn’t an ambitious vision, it’s very late incrementalism, for something we should have pushed hard on pursuing when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof.
There are thousands of scientists pursuing cures for cancer and dementia.
NIH funding as a share of GDP in 2019 is still 12 percent below 2003 levels. That’s not ambition, it’s plodding along slowly when we have tons of scientists and researchers being turned away from academia for lack of funding.
But our government doesn’t have trillions of dollars and we have a ton of really important stuff to spend it on.
The US government spends multiple trillions of dollars each year. Much of that is on nondiscretionary spending, but we could afford to spend more on ambitious projects. We did in the past.
Every additional spend means something else has to be cut.
That’s not how government spending works—it does not need to be zero-sum, as our actual spending shows. But even if it was, we have cut taxes repeatedly, instead of doing more.
And if you’re hoping that it spurred more growth, private industry is pushing short term revenue increases, in most domains lowering investment in R&D.
We simply aren’t as ambitious as we were in the past. But we should be.
We’ve gotten under $10b in funding for fusion. We spend closer to $300b in adjusted dollars to land on the moon.
Despite sparse funding, markets work. I definitely agree—but again, this isn’t an ambitious vision, it’s very late incrementalism, for something we should have pushed hard on pursuing when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof.
NIH funding as a share of GDP in 2019 is still 12 percent below 2003 levels. That’s not ambition, it’s plodding along slowly when we have tons of scientists and researchers being turned away from academia for lack of funding.
The US government spends multiple trillions of dollars each year. Much of that is on nondiscretionary spending, but we could afford to spend more on ambitious projects. We did in the past.
That’s not how government spending works—it does not need to be zero-sum, as our actual spending shows. But even if it was, we have cut taxes repeatedly, instead of doing more.
And if you’re hoping that it spurred more growth, private industry is pushing short term revenue increases, in most domains lowering investment in R&D.
We simply aren’t as ambitious as we were in the past. But we should be.