Reinvent Risk and Reward for the Federal Government

Would the federal government invest in more long-term R&D if it shared in the rewards?
America needs more public investment in the research and development of new technologies. Individual companies typically don’t have the resources to fund the basic research needed to build new technologies, which by their very nature are speculative and risky. The U.S. government funded this kind of early stage research in the 20th century, and it led to many of the fundamentally new technologies, like the computer chip and the Internet, that huge private sector industries are now structured around. Today the federal government is fiscally constrained and taking on mounting debt, and the political environment makes it extremely difficult to even talk about raising new tax revenues. Mariana Mazzucato has a brilliant idea about how America could resuscitate large investments in next-generation technologies and help cultivate future industries. The idea would require no new taxes, but would require a mental shift in how we distribute the risks and rewards between private sector entrepreneurs and the U.S. government.