Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
I don't think that's true. If you look at the computing industry, virtually all basic research is done by companies or academics who are grant funded by companies.
AI? Basically all funded by the private sector and has been for a decade. Universities try to keep up but complain they can't.
Chip design? When was the last time academia contributed much to that? Probably RISC in the 80s? There have been tons of breakthroughs in basic research in silicon throughout my entire lifetime, all of them privately funded. For example look at the recent Optane DIMM tech (based on new chalcogenide chemistry).
Compilers? No, the most advanced compiler in the world is Graal, which is more or less funded by grants from Oracle. The second most is LLVM, which was originally written by Chris Lattner as his master's thesis i.e. he paid for it with his own student debt. Apple pretty quickly saw that it was good work and took over the funding of it.
PL design? Here, academia has indeed done a lot of basic research into various ML derived languages like Haskell. But this has largely been reviewed carefully and then ignored by the languages people actually use - it was basic research into ideas that didn't work well and not many people really care about. All new languages that have got popular for real-world usage in the past 10 years are imperative languages that trace their heritage all the way back to C i.e. Bell Labs (Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Go, etc).
The reality is, the computer industry demonstrates that you don't need government funding of basic research. Industries will certainly accept such research if it happens to be useful because they were taxed to pay for it regardless, but they don't need it.
Companies do plenty of research, just not basic, since they don’t need to: the government funds it instead. With money taxed from said companies, so...
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.