I’m delighted that the U.S. Congress is on the brink of approving a $250 billion techology and manufacturing bill. The fact that Democrats and Republicans can overcome their bitter partisan divide to do this reflects a broadening consensus that the U.S. must counter China’s efforts to dominate the world technologically.
But the devil will be in the details of how it is implemented. Will there be smooth cooperation among different government and private sector entities? Will money be diverted and wasted? And perhaps the most important question of all: what will be the balance in decision-making? Government can make some important technological decisions but the private sector is best at knowing what can become commercial viable.
That is the ultimate objective of all this–getting technology out of our labs and into full-fledged commercial development. This is where the Chinese have been absolutely creaming us–we develop a hot idea but it takes four or five years to go through the raising of venture capital and all the other steps necessary to realize the commercial payoff from a technology. The Chinese party-state has been able to buy or steal those ideas and use massive amounts of government money to develop the ideas more rapidly than we have been able to do.
So bravo to Congress and the Biden Administration. But pay heed to the details.
