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:
“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”
—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)
“Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“There was not a tree as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general level of the upland being about the same everywhere. Even from the Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and saw to Manomet Point in Plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No further evidence is needed to show that “mental illness” is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)