To be honest, I find it frustrating when people trot out the old "sillicon valley was created by central planning" meme. If it were that easy to create a sillicon valley, there would be dozens of them by now. Believe me, Chinese bureacurats have tried. There are whole "ghost cities" in China that the government ordered built, but that people never moved into. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/07/20/what-will-b...
The great entrepreneurs who built Sillicon Valley-- Shockley, Ellison, Jobs, and the rest-- were people who were driven to find funding wherever they could get it. If the government had said no, they would have gone (and often did go) to someone else. Similarly, the academics who are getting funding from DARPA or the DOD now would gladly accept funding from private sources as well. The money is just as green.
The military certainly jump-started many technologies by putting money into the hands of engineers and scientists-- in some cases, possibly even by years or decades. But those technologies would have been invented anyway, just on a slower timescale.
It wasn't inventing the technologies that gave the West an edge-- it was commercializing them. And for that you need businessmen, not bureaucrats. If the USSR could have produced a competitive semiconductor industry, the 1980s and 1990s would have looked much different. Instead, they couldn't even keep loaves of bread on the shelves.
The great entrepreneurs who built Sillicon Valley-- Shockley, Ellison, Jobs, and the rest-- were people who were driven to find funding wherever they could get it. If the government had said no, they would have gone (and often did go) to someone else. Similarly, the academics who are getting funding from DARPA or the DOD now would gladly accept funding from private sources as well. The money is just as green.
The military certainly jump-started many technologies by putting money into the hands of engineers and scientists-- in some cases, possibly even by years or decades. But those technologies would have been invented anyway, just on a slower timescale.
It wasn't inventing the technologies that gave the West an edge-- it was commercializing them. And for that you need businessmen, not bureaucrats. If the USSR could have produced a competitive semiconductor industry, the 1980s and 1990s would have looked much different. Instead, they couldn't even keep loaves of bread on the shelves.