Reddit mentions of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I will address your last question (the other one is too big for right now, and this is my last answer! For now anyway)

It takes a long, long time. Most folks outside of science and engineering don't have a good feel for this, so I am glad you asked. For reference, I suggest reading The Idea Factory, by Gertner, about Bell Labs (http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/dp/1594203288).

To go from an idea for something physically new, to implementation commercially, it usually takes a low number of decades. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions are exceptions, but in my view there are two variables: time and effort (effort = money + person-years). In these cases, the Effort variable was WAY larger in the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions than for typical science and technology projects.

The reason we fool ourselves into thinking it only takes a short time is because of the rapid evolution of technology once the basis is there. An example is the advance in personal computing (up to and including smart phones) through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. But, it took decades to understand and perfect the microchip before this series of rapid advances. (Remember, all integrated circuits are silicon, so advances have been incrementally based on this one material.) In batteries, we are trying to go to a completely different set of materials. We incorporate industry in our research to try to compress this long time scale.

A great read about Bell Labs is The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Okay your first two links are to blogs that only publish work by Austrian economists. Hardly objective analyses. Even if SO did drop the cost of gas, that says nothing of who bore the brunt of the cost. It says nothing of the enivronmental costs of their business practices. It says nothing of how they treated their workers. And still sidesteps the point of how the monopoly was formed by business practices that are anti-competitive and would completely overcome any advantages of a strictly free-market system. As I mentioned before, costs aren't the only metric we should use in judging a civilization.

> This is how high profits counter-intuitively accelerate the trend towards lower price and higher quality (witness computer and cellphone progression).

It isn't the fact that profits were high that drove this trend. It's the incredible volume of demand that drove prices down. Again, see the history of Bell Labs for this as far as computers and cell phones go. It was a government-sanctioned monopoloy that made these possible.

Your DC link was unfortunate, but was just a case of idiots in government. This isn't something inherent in governments. There are more than enough idiots in management. Luckily we live in a democracy that can be changed with an informed electorate.

> Insurance companies profit only because of the fact that it costs MORE to have health insurance for most people than it costs to NOT have it. It's risky to not have health insurance, but if you are of normal health, you come out ahead financially by not having it. Also, [5] many hospitals, doctors give discount for paying cash

I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make. This is all obvious. The point is that you never know your future health states. The fact that doctors give discounts for paying cash is analogous to people not paying interest rates when they pay off their credit cards on time. But in the real world, most people can't afford to do this. As I mentioned before, the number one cause of individual bankruptcy in the US is due to medical bills.

> Consumer Reports is a private regulatory agency. Amazon ratings are a consumer-driven regulatory agency. Yelp too. Ebay feedback, etc. Your social network is a regulatory agency.

Okay so you never actually meant regulatory agency. Consumer Reports is a consumer advocacy magazine. Amazon, Yelp, and Ebay are a sort of word-of-mouth that only exist due to technology developed by the government and public-private parternships. And Yelp has recently been accused of removing negative reviews if the businesses pay up. None of these can do anything about abuse of workers or pollution or anything else industry has a history of doing.

>We can take risks for discounts, or be conservative and pay a premium for a trusted brand, and when that trusted brand starts overcharging, people like me step in and offer a new solution at a better price.

This really depends on what you're talking about. We shouldn't have to risk that discounted item being unsafe or dangerous or snake oil. Not everyone can afford items that are too expensive. And sometimes the profits just don't exist for goods and services at the price point that people can afford them at.

>Let's say there's a mafia. They steal from everyone, but they use the money to fund research projects. They steal half of what everyone earns (total cost of govt taxation over what things would cost without it, includes regulatory costs), but they take credit for everything that is done by the researchers they pay with the stolen money. Some people defend it, and say "without the mafia stealing from everyone and paying some of the people to research things, it would be impossible to get humans to create amazing things!" That is absurd, that human society requires guns to our heads to make us innovate.

Or let's say there's a charity that everyone chips into. They build roads so we can transport goods. They organize police forces so thieves don't rob us. They have fire departments so our homes don't burn down. They fund a military to protect us from foreign threats. They fund scientific research so that our children don't die of diseases that we suffer from or so that energy costs go down in the future from new and cheaper sources of energy.

Do you think ideas just pop into people's heads? You really really need to read up on some science history. I really hate to repeat myself, but you are incredibly ignorant and should educate yourself if you really want to argue that your magical free market could have built the world we live in. Private industry has no financial incentive to fund basic science research. Without basic science research, there can't be future applied science research. Without applied science research, there can't be future engineering in that field. Humans don't need guns to their heads to innovate. That's why we got together and use our tax dollars to fund basic science. But private industry sure as hell needs a gun to its head or else they risk pissing of their shareholders for throwing away profit on research they won't see an ROI for decades or centuries.

> Venture capitalists are the exact opposite of govt research, and they have funded every major advance in the past 20 years.

Buuuulllllllsssshhhiiiiiiiittt. Holy crap don't even try to act like you know what you're talking about. Are you gonna tell me that it was a VC who funded the Human Genome Project? It was a VC who funded CERN? It was a VC who put Rovers on Mars? You are completely divorced from reality.

NASA ended shuttle launches because America doesn't give a damn anymore. And those private enterprises you claim have no government funding . . . they get their grant money through NASA. It's called contracting. And in case you were unaware, contracting is done using tax dollars. Those engineering firms don't do it out of charity. They have to get paid like anyone else.

Learn some fucking history.

Don't know if it's what your looking for, but the Idea Factory is about Bell Labs, which (apart from being an amazing laboratory) had a major WWII effort.

Not exactly manufacturing, but The Tizard mission, talks about the magnetron and radar development in WWII.