On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 5:54 PM, James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote:
But while the government may be capable of sustaining losses incurred by > programs like The Shuttle, The Tokamak, etc. since it can always turn to > the private sector for taxes, but had better have that power because it has > a lousy track record of appropriately managing risk in technology > development so its losses are enormous. Worse, it builds up bureaucracies > that find competence threatening and it is precisely because > those bureaucracies can sustain losses that they are so destructive. The bureaucracy problem in the US and elsewhere is a real one. There are many examples of that in everyday life to point to, and they take different forms. One form is a government organization that has no real accountability; it is given a charge of some kind, and its members basically do as they please. I interact on a periodic basis with one such organization and its subcontractors. So the problem of unaccountable bureaucracy is a real one, and one could argue with some persuasiveness that this is what has been seen with government intervention in the alternative energy sector and in its funding of basic research. Personally, I think that while there is validity to this line of reasoning, it simultaneously misses the point when we're looking at the question of how best to spur innovation in a field like LENR, or how to best manage the accumulation of capital so that everyone has an opportunity to live in prosperity. My own sense is that we've let the theorists go wild, and they're running all over the place making good work of turning fairly straightforward empirical problems into a mess of theoretical and ideological confusion. The two examples I mentioned are ultimately empirical problems -- (a) spurring innovation in LENR and (b) moving society in a direction in which a rising tide lifts all boats (it does no such thing at the present time; quite the opposite, in fact). With these problems we've thought ourselves into knots. We've come up with explanations, on one hand, that go something to the effect that any government intervention will inevitably lead to overweening bureaucracy of the aforementioned kind; and, worse, to fascism and black helicopters and so on. On the other side we've retreated back into theories that pay no attention to such concerns, and we've essentially said that more taxes will fix everything (this summary, in my opinion, simplifies and mischaracterizes a much more nuanced set of positions, but I'm trying to draw a contrast). What both sides to this debate seem to fail to see is that it these things are largely American problems, created by American hands on American soil, and which go back to inadequacies in American ways of doing things. Some of these inadequacies include a system of checks and balances that make effective government nigh impossible; deep connections between financial patronage and political power that are at best unseemly; and a twenty-four hour news cycle that is draws to the wrongdoings of Lance Armstrong of all things; a pervasive mode of binary thinking that latches onto easy explanations and fails to really penetrate far into nuanced issues; and so on. To the extent that other countries are influenced by American dysfunction, they too fall into a situation in which there is a kind of governmental deadlock that allows in the absence of effective governance a kind of chronic and institutionalized predation by large corporations on consumers and on employees. What is lacking is a humble recognition on the part of people that many of these problems are being worked through and increasingly addressed elsewhere in the world, through trial and error, in small ways, here and there, across a range of areas. What is needed is commitment to an empirical, un-ideological learning process where small changes are tried out, and if they work, they are then further explored and expanded upon. If Denmark or Switzerland does health care really well, perhaps Americans have something to learn from them. If China is actively engaged in improving its primary education system and is starting to turn out some of the best scholars in fields such as physics and semiconductor research, perhaps there is something to be learned from them. What is required, then, is the consolidation of a learning attitude among the public at large and a will to try new things out. An attitude in which the ideological rhetoric is set aside entirely. One that is neither averse to well-conceived government intervention in specific areas nor naive about the consequences of letting a big bureaucracy consolidate itself. Either/or characterizations are wholly inadequate in such a context. Simple, empirical trial and error with modest amounts of investment. This is what Popper referred to as "piecemeal social engineering," in preference to utopian scale social engineering. Perhaps it could do some good. Eric
