Most of the 20th century's defining technologies started that way, from microchips and the internet to biotech. You don't need to get everything to say that the model can support a few misses.
The jet engine case seems especially hard to claim as an exception since early development was predicated on military sales and, for example, a quick trip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_jet_engine shows the origins of both the British and German programs being a RAF officer's patent-worthy idea.
Remember, I'm not saying that the government invents everything but that basic reasearch and major long-term development is hard to do when you need to show profits right now. The history of your example shows many examples of that process where the government funding allowed things to reach the point where they could be successfully commercialized for other purposes.
The financing of Whittle's and Ohain's jet engines did not come from the government, nor did government finance their incorporation into working, flying aircraft. Whittle's idea he had on his own, not as part of a government research project.
The US military even ordered Lockheed to stop working on a jet engine, and concentrate on piston engines. This changed after being faced with the ME-262.
The transistor, too. Airplanes. Liquid fueled rockets. Communications satellites (Arthur Clarke). Radio. TV. Einstein. C. C++. Java. C#.
And the glaring absense of defining technologies coming from communist economies, where it was 100% government doing the research.
The US government spends megabucks on R+D. It would be astonishing if that produced no results. But it is an error to thereby conclude that new technologies could not otherwise exist.
Google ~14B, Amazon ~14B MS ~10B Apple ~10B and FB ~6B for about 50B all together.
So, concretely, we should expect just the big five to produce roughly 1/3 as much as publicly funded science, assuming they're of equal quality. More like 2/3's if we exclude military research. Although you don't come out and say it, you're implying private is more efficient.
I dunno. I think the feds get a big discount by using grad student labor. Fundamentally, the perform different roles. Doctoral research is foundational stuff that corporations take and refine. Sure, i can quibble over each one of your examples. But that's not really the point.
I don't think any corporation was going to go looking for gravity waves, or Proxima B.
So many problems are a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Broadly, public funding tends to fill the role of exploration. Private funding tends to fill the role of exploitation. There's no crisp line. Corporations surely explore, and universities surely exploit. But again, broadly, i think the public exploration/private exploitation split is a good one, and i think it's how the 20th century worked pretty much worked.
My argument is with the notion that if government didn't fund X, X never would have happened. The existence of the internet is the epitome of this kind of thinking. It's like saying if someone paid by the government had an idea to connect two towns with a road, therefore nobody would have ever had such an idea otherwise.
This fallacious reason is obviously false, as FidoNET proves, but that doesn't deter the notion.
The cherry-picked examples are classic confirmation bias, and are non-falsifiable because nobody can go back in time and defund a government project.
There's plenty of non-government money being plowed into basic research - just look at the endowments of top universities like MIT. There would likely be much more if the government did not fund it, just like I'd not be willing to fund a road between A and B if there's a way I can get the government to do it for me.
It's not a claim that things would never happen but that it'd take much longer. Yes, private investment exists but it's so much smaller — MIT is legendary, one of the top schools in the world, has a full-time development office getting donations, etc. but the bulk of their research is federal by a large margin.
I note that you dismiss the foundational technologies of the last century as cherry-picking but fail to present any data to support claims which are well outside the mainstream. Do you have any sources to back those assertions up?
The jet engine case seems especially hard to claim as an exception since early development was predicated on military sales and, for example, a quick trip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_jet_engine shows the origins of both the British and German programs being a RAF officer's patent-worthy idea.
Remember, I'm not saying that the government invents everything but that basic reasearch and major long-term development is hard to do when you need to show profits right now. The history of your example shows many examples of that process where the government funding allowed things to reach the point where they could be successfully commercialized for other purposes.