Will Government Programs Spur the Next Breakthrough? Economy-Changing Technologies Often Originated in Government Research. Are Today's Federal Programs Sufficiently Ambitious to Catalyze the Next Big Thing‪?‬

The future health of the U.S. economy depends on faith: the faith that a new general-purpose technology will emerge that will enable the tech-savvy United States to maintain its pace of rapid productivity growth. In the 20th century, these technological breakthroughs--jet aircraft, satellite communications, computers--always seemed to emerge magically when they were needed. Why should we not continue to believe in the magic of human ingenuity? Although human ingenuity is indeed a wonder, a closer look at the history of the emergence of new technologies reveals that government R & D spending played an important role in the development of almost every general-purpose technology in which the United States was internationally competitive. In particular, defense-related research, development, and procurement played a pervasive role in the development of a number of industries--aircraft, nuclear power, computer, semiconductor, Internet and satellite communication, and Earth-observing systems--that account for a substantial share of U.S. industrial production.