Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.
If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
This book
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...
tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.
Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...
You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
I really wonder what you're comparing with.
Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.
Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.
The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.
And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.
I don’t find this to be true
The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.
Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.
Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth.
Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII.
In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own.
1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world...
I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought it was a typo.
The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.
The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.
If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.
There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.
What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.
Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.
The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.
I think it's extremely early to try and call who the principal winner will be especially with all the global shifts happening.
Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.
I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
Militaries can side with the crowd, or more likely decide to keep the power for themselves.
there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody
I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid
Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
I am quite sure that people felt justified in their reasoning for their behavior. That just shows how effective the propaganda was, how easy it is to get people to fall in line. If it was a matter of voluntary self sacrifice of personal freedoms, I wouldn't have made this comment. People decided to demonize anyone who did not agree with the "medical authority", especially doctors or researchers that did not tow the party line. They ruined careers, made people feel awful, and online the behavior was worse because how easy it was to pile on. Over stuff that is still to this day not very clear cut what the optimal strategy is for dealing with infectious disease.
COVID restrictions were public health, an overriding concern listed in the US Constitution as general welfare as a reason for the US government to exist at all.
The Covid measures were also totally targeted at certain groups of people with immutable characteristics and not at people who actively wanted to spread disease.
How are people like you still making arguments like this in 2026? Were you also one of the people claiming we’d all be dead in a year from the vaccines?
But critiques like that ignore uncertainty, risk, and unavoidably getting it "wrong" (on any and all dimensions), no matter what anyone did.
With a new virus successfully circumnavigating the globe in a very short period of time, with billions of potential brand new hosts to infect and adapt within, and no way to know ahead of time how virulent and deadly it could quickly evolve to be, the only sane response is to treat it as extremely high risk.
There is no book for that. Nobody here or anywhere knows the "right" response to a rapidly spreading (and killing) virus, unresponsive to current remedies. Because it is impossible to know ahead of time.
If you actually have an answer for that, you need to write that book.
And take into account, that a lot of people involved in the last response, are very cognizant that we/they can learn from what worked, what didn't, etc. That is the valuable kind of 20-20 vision.
A lot of at-risk people made it to the vaccines before getting COVID. The ones I know are very happy about everything that reduced their risk. They are happy not to have died, despite those who wanted to let the disease to "take its natural course".
And those that died, including people I know, might argue we could have done more, acted as a better team. But they don't get to.
No un-nuanced view of the situation has merit.
The most significant thing we learned: a lot of humanity is preparing to be a problem if the next pandemic proves ultimately deadlier. A lot of humanity doesn't understand risk, and doesn't care, if doing so requires cooperative efforts from individuals.
They even indignantly mention the Ozone layer, insisting that "Look, liberals told you to care but its not a problem anymore", ignorant entirely of the immense global effort to fix that.
I think the sane version of this is that Gen Z didn't just lose its education, it lost its socialization. I know someone who works in administration of my Uni who tracks general well being of students who said they were expecting it to bounce back after the pandemic and they've found it hasn't. My son reports if you go to any kind of public event be it a sewing club or a music festival people 18-35 are completely absent. My wife didn't believe him but she went to a few events and found he was right.
You can blame screens or other trends that were going on before the pandemic, but the pandemic locked it in. At the rate we're going if Gen Z doesn't turn it around in 10 years there will not be a Gen Z+2.
So the argument that pandemic policy added a few years to elderly lives at the expensive of the young and the children that they might have had is salient in my book -- I had to block a friend of mine on Facebook who hasn't wanted to talk about anything but masks and long COVID since 2021.
I did try, I promise.
Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do not care about the externalities, either good or bad.
If somebody is using monetary resources to buy NFT‘s instead of handing out food to the homeless then you get less food for the homeless
All of the things listed are competitive task situations and you’re looking for some advantage that makes it easier for you
well if it makes it easier for you then it could make it easier for somebody else which means you’re crowding out other options in that action space
That is to say the pie is fixed for resources on this planet in terms of energy and resource utilization across the lifespan of a human
But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a lot of people too.
Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport -> faster transport, faster world
Arguably also a big increase in quality of life but it didn't scale that well and has also reduced the quality of life. If all that money had gone into public transport then that would likely have been a lot better.
Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a major driver behind inventions.
Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal).
Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of the bigger problems we are suffering from today.
The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot of people in the driving seats.
I used to hear about this with respect to how fun funding NASA would get us more inventions because they funded Velcro
No it’s simply that there was a positive temporary externality for some subset of groups but the primary long term benefit went to the controller of the capital
The people utilizing them were marginally involved because they were only given the options that capital produced for them