Totally sanitizes the role of military power and research in explaining why the U.S. is economically dominant. This is like looking at the British Empire and saying it happened because Britain had some smart, hardworking entrepreneurs.
Countries like China are emerging in part because they have strong governments that just take money from the public and put it into industry. It's more more direct than having to come up with some military justification for it like we do in the U.S., like we have to invent lasers to shoot down Russian missiles, and then maybe later we can find some health care applications. It's quite inefficient. But figuring out a more efficient way runs directly counter to the self-congratulatory mythology of the Silicon Valley private sector.
Sam pins it all on "an environment that encourages investment, welcomes immigrants, rewards risk-taking, hard work, and radical thinking, and minimizes impediments to doing new things." This is a very rose-colored, sanitized view of American power.
There's also the little matter of winning WWII while our chief competitors had their economies wrecked, then using that hegemony to maintain effective control of the primary energy reserves of the world, keeping major military competitors in check and keeping Third World nations from breaking out of their subservient role through massive applications of violence and political intervention.
Turning to Silicon Valley, our meritocracy of innovation, Sam completely omits the massive sustained and critical military subsidy of Silicon Valley and the startup sector via government research and procurement to the tune of many billions per year, which has been the genesis of everything from the Internet to GPS to Siri.[1] This is to be expected coming from the private sector which loves to congratulate itself and claim it's all because of smart, hardworking entrepreneurs -- and therefore entitled to the full profits of the commercialization of government-funded research.
But if we are to rethink how to keep America economically dominant, it should start with a sober and clear understanding that it has always come from massive state intervention in the economy, starting with the very nurturing, protectionist policies we forbid the Third World from adopting, and continuing today with high-tech taxpayer-funded research via agencies such as DARPA and government procurement of early-stage products.
"It's-all-because-of-smart-innovators-in-the-private-sector" is a tenant that investors must hold to justify taking all the profits without returning the lion's share to taxpayers -- and more generally to justify funneling taxpayer money to industry without taxpayer control of industry. That is the function that the military-industrial system has served for the past century or so: public investment without public control. Because if the public did more directory control funds we'd probably steer a bit more towards education, health, public welfare, etc.
Let's have more real talk about how our system works.
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/technology/report/20...