<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@shriramk" class="u-url mention">@<span>shriramk</span></a></span> it does my economist heart good to see other computer science folks reading in that domain! </p><p>Governments get stuff done no private capital could. Even by accident. Think of the side effects of massive US spending on defence research or the much smaller investment in NASA.</p><p>We could look also to CERN, whose practical applications are still to materialise in a way that is meaningful to the average tax payer, but which generated the WWW as mere piece of chaos at its periphery.</p>