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1) Well, the COVID vaccine was built by private sector. The government contribution of Warp Speed was getting FDA out of the way. Early in the pandemic FDA’s contribution was mainly slowing down testing by denying Emergency Use Authorizations till the Seattle Flu Study literally did civil disobedience.[1] 2) The Human Genome Project was moving at snail’s pace till competition from Celera. But I agree that the genome project was in a transitional era, before *all* state capacity had withered away. 3) One model is that the centralized US state could ship things by themselves from roughly 1933-1969, a period that covered Hoover Dam, Manhattan Project, and Apollo. It declines before and after that peak period. 4) Because before and after that time period, science and engineering was done in an increasingly decentralized way. No NSF funding for the Wright Brothers. Or Satoshi, to our knowledge. 5) Yes, it’s true that academia was captured and centralized by the state since Vannevar Bush’s memo, so quite a lot of research still has at least an indirect dependency on DC — but it’s less so every day. Open source and tech startups are taking ever more share — SpaceX paces NASA, rather than vice versa. 6) It’s also less prestigious to be a professor with a 100k budget than a founder with a 100M company, and that has led to an exodus of the top professors from academia, starting with Stanford but extending far beyond that. Harvard’s recent faceplant just accelerates this. [1]: https://t.co/6Fn6HeQNS0
