'Does the Government Stifle Innovation? I Don’t See It (To the Contrary…)'

Jared Bernstein responds to the Robert Shiller article I linked to yesterday:

Does the Government Stifle Innovation? I Don’t See It (To the Contrary…): I usually find economist Robert Shiller’s commentaries resonant and insightful, but this one seemed more confusing than enlightening. The thrust of the piece is the concern that government activities to promote innovation can just as easily stifle it.

The piece introduces the notion of corporatism, from a new book by Ed Phelps. What means “corporatism”? It’s:

…a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society…people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while…but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.

... I don’t get it. While “entrepreneurial culture” will always be essential, many innovations that turned out to be economically important in the US have government fingerprints all over them. From machine tools, to railroads, transistors, radar, lasers, computing, the internet, GPS, fracking, biotech, nanotech—from the days of the Revolutionary War to today—the federal government has supported innovation often well before private capital would risk the investment (read about it here).

Shiller’s critical, for example, of the manufacturing innovation institutes that the White House has been both touting and setting up. He’s certainly right to ask what it is these new creations do and why we need them... But most manufacturers I’ve spoken to about them tells me they fill an important niche, essentially building a path through the Death Valley between the university lab and the factory floor. If so, that’s a classic coordination failure in which markets have been known to underinvest. ...

To be clear, my argument is not at all that government efforts in this area are all successful or are somehow always free of the corruption that is too common when politics enters the fray. My points are that a) many important innovations have involved government support somewhere along the way, and b) while one could and should worry about waste in this area, I’ve not seen evidence, nor does Shiller provide any, of stifling. ...

So I’d suggest we be more careful in where we point the corporatist finger.