Reddit mentions of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

The jump from horses to moon landing falls borders closely to the "Ancient Aliens" hypothesis that aliens surely must have built the pyramids. We had the steam engine back in Roman times. It took another 1800 some odd years before the idea became commercially viable. Asia had printing presses, of a sort, centuries before Guttenberg. What held back these advances?

People to work on them and knowledge of what was done already. This book does a decent job at explaining the latter part. I'm sure now that I'm linking to it I'll be corrected with far better ones (I hope? Always looking for more books.)

The gist of what I mean.

Part of what was holding back tech development was around the time we were using horses and buggies it took ~19 people farming to feed 20 to use a crude estimate from memory. We now live in an age where ~1 person with modern advances can feed 20. That's a lot of people freed up to work and develop elsewhere. Someone who may have been pulled out of school before "middle school" even two generations ago to work on the farm can now get a PHD. That is the legacy (the good one, not the combustible rivers) of the Industrial Revolution. You can see this in real time. Look at what China has been doing the last few decades. They're going through their own version of the I.R. with more citizens leaving farming for cities.

With the internet we have another boom similar to the industrial revolution. The I.R. freed up the brain power. The information revolution that is/has culminated with the Internet makes getting the known information. So research is easier. Look at how fast home brewed aerial drones are taking off or home brewed near space photography.

So I wouldn't say our technology is progressing faster now than it has in the past. I'd argue that technically our advancement was held back in the past by the needs of survival. We've reached or reaching the point where those shackles are increasingly removed.

You underestimate what a bunch of motivated nerds with support from their friends and family can do. Science never has low hanging fruits, what's obvious to us now was the toughest thing for a person to imagine centuries ago. Further reading: Where Good Ideas Come From

SpaceX's first CTO used to design rocket engines as a teen. ISRO was started when India was way poorer than it is now. NASA had a motivated bunch of amateur hobbyists as the founding fathers of modern rocketry. As I said, general populace's interest leads to success and funding for innovation won't come until you capture the imagination of the people.

I'm sorry but China just copies, Japan has been forward looking for centuries and USA was founded by people who believed in doing things themselves and it still has that advantage today. Go back to history, they still had this deeply embedded in their respective societies before they were such behemoths.

As for R&D becomes valuable once a country has reached its peak, that's my point. The peak is only reachable once a lot of unsung heroes are given the freedom and helping hand by the society to work on making the country successful.

Currently reading Where Good Ideas Comes From by Steven Johnson. It's a book that discusses the mental process of idea generation, occasionally in abstract terms. It's pretty great.

Totally a hijack but Where good ideas come from by Stephen Johnson.

Most of his 'talks' are +- 100 years of industrial revolution.

Steven Johnson in Where good ideas come from says he did a rough study and found 50% of good ideas in the 20th century (I think) came from the public sector.

My own hypothesis: individuals create good ideas. Give individuals freedom (from economics, i.e. basic income) and technology will increase faster.

Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation