Aleksa's Book Review: The Entrepreneurial State
Opening the book, you'll be greeted with pom-poms celebrating this author's government academic sponsors. It's written well, it has some OK policy prescriptions, it criticises what's wrong with modern corporate R&D practices. But by goodness does it take some liberties in pushing an agenda. I stayed with the book to the end just to see what kind of eldritch utterances pass for arguments in the pursuit of advocating for government-run scientific research.
Predictably, no attention is paid to the nature of patent law, intellectual property, regulatory capture (even though there's 2 whole chapters on "Big Pharma"), or the bribing and lobbying of legislators. It's all the free-rider problem, you see. It's the garage-based online cookery shop that profits from the inventions of the Internet and Teflon without paying its dues.
There were some interesting policies about a voluntary innovation fund near the end, but the book has so much naked bureaucratic apologism that one can barely stomach it. Call me a butthurt ancap all you want, but this book skates over hundreds of failed programs that cost untold billions, while concentrating on the success of private firms that use technology brought about by government programs, claiming the government is owed a dividend.
DARPA received tax revenue from 1994 to do inventing in 1994, and I'm pretty sure that's way more than they deserve. Speaking of, I'm giving this book a mark this high for being an exquisite sophistic treatise.
7/10
