When the Guy at the Post Office Directs Innovation

I am against the Government's involvement in things that embrace technologies or try to direct innovation by subsidies:

• Wind Power
• Digital TV Broadcast Standards (now delayed)
• Hybrid Cars
• Fuel Cells
• Gassification Plants
• Ethanol Production
• Most alternative energy foolishness going on

I want the research and development to go on, I just don't want the government involved making those decisions. If wind power is successful, let it win on a level playing field.

This goes equally for phony technologies that Government tries to control because of a bias for or against:

• Nuclear Energy
• Global Warming, cooling or anything
• Wetland preservation leading to phony offsets

This story about how developers of the Transistor which changed our lives 60 years ago were shunned by people in governments because they didn't think we needed it. What great inventions and innovations would exist if government got out of the way, allowed creative people and the market to do the promotion or shunning. Yet in the world today innovation is driven by people that have the same pay grade as your average postal worker. From that article:

Unfortunately, it appears that many individuals in leadership positions fail to grasp the importance of decentralization and individual entrepreneurship–especially in government and especially in Europe. See this rather depressing document called Creating an Innovative Europe (referenced in Michael Mandel’s post here) which contains language like:

Large scale strategic actions are called for in key sectors to provide an environment in which supply-side measures for research investment can be combined with the process of creating a demand and a market.

The Group identifies several examples: e-Health, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Environment, Transport and Logistics, Security, and Digital Content.

They call for an independent High Level Coordinator to be appointed to orchestrate European action in each area across Member States, different parts of government and the Commission, business, academia and other stakeholders.

Would such a document, written in 1950, have identified “semiconductor electronics’ as a “key sector?” It seems unlikely, based on the experience of Matare and Welker. And, even if the planners had had the vision to understand the importance of the transistor, would a top-down process involving “stakeholders” (like incumbent vacuum-tube manufacturers) have ever permitted it to leave the lab for the production floor?

When government comes up with how to invent anything you end up with this.

When governments become involved in technology choices, they tend to pursue that which is fashionable at the moment…and in France in the early 1950s, that was nuclear power, not semiconductor electronics. Corporations, too, often pursue that which is fashionable or that which has short-term payoff.