Government Investment Necessary To Develop New General Purpose Technologies
In his book "Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?" Economics Professor Vernon W Ruttan of University of Minnesota argues that long term and large scale government investments are important in driving the development of general purpose technologies. Professor Ruttan analyzed the development of general purpose technologies in six areas and found that in all cases government financed projects had contributed to significantly speed up the development of new general purpose technologies, and in one case, nuclear power, the development had not been possible without large scale government funding.
The six areas analyzed and described by Professor Ruttan are:
- The US production system - Aviation technologies - Space technologies - Information technology - Internet technologies - Nuclear power
Read more about this topic: General Purpose Technology
Famous quotes containing the words government, investment, develop, general and/or purpose:
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“One of your biggest jobs as a parent of multiples is no bigger than simply talking to your children individually and requiring that they respond to you individually as well. The benefits of this kind of communication can be enormous, in terms of the relationship you develop with each child, in terms of their language development, and eventually in terms of their sense of individuality, too.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)
“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)