Nice to see this posted here. With the changing world order, I have been studying what happened in and after WWII to learn how science helped shift the center of power from Europe to the US. We Europeans have very little knowledge of exactly how to take the big bets that has served the US militarily and economically since then. Here’s some of my (slightly rambling) notes from reading the Endless Frontier with this ai…
It seems pretty clear to me that post WWII, the USA poured significant investment into R&D through the umbrella of defense but it's not clear to me that there weren't other major contributing factors. The American education system used to be famously egalitarian, where many Nobel laureates came out of it. Copyright, intellectual property, patents, regulatory freedom, employment freedom, to name a few, might all be significant contributing factors for the science and technology success. Not to mention that the USA was the only major industrialized nation still standing after the war.
I can believe the basic thesis is correct, that focus on defense leads to more funding for practical science and technology and that the practically minded approach of the military helps guide R&D into widespread adoption, but, to me, it smacks of a sort of self serving nationalistic narrative. Not to get too into vibes territory, but it does seem like Thiel's philosophy is lurking in the background, being hawkish about defense spending and guiding arguments towards monopolistic moat building.
There's a large portion of science that can only be done with top-down spending because of the extreme capital resources involved but, from my perspective, some of the most ubiquitous science has come from humble beginnings, often starting out as grass roots efforts and eventually finding commercial adoption. Its not clear at all to me that the USAs success in R&D wasn't in spite of its military roots, not because of it. More importantly, its not clear that the same recipe for R&D success of the last century will work in this one.