The US Government and Technological Innovation

Mariana Mazzucato gives a concise but insightful talk here about the role of the US government in driving technological development and the success of cutting-edge private sector businesses.

Mazzucato goes through numerous sectors – telecommunications, information technology, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, and so on – and shows how basic and applied research for many technologies eventually taken over by the private sector is done or funded by government, and in particular the US government.

A larger treatment of the subject can be found in Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (London, 2011). Without diminishing the importance of Mazzucato’s work, I would say that astute Post Keyensians are well aware of these facts.