Just not in public investment
Maybe it was all the cowboy movies. Or before that, Horatio Alger’s sermonizing about a “can do” spirit and the power of hard work and perseverence. And after both, Ayn Rand’s Übermenschen. Why stand on the shoulders of giants when you can be one? Alone. Resolute. Unbending. “Oh marvelous me,” said Yertle, the Dr. Seuss stand-in for Hitler.
We’ve been sold the “great man” (it’s always a man) theory for well over a century. Romanticizing ourselves as great sells books, comics, and movies. Political movements allow us to vicariously identify with great men who often are better salesmen than great ones.
That soft-focused view of history tends to brush away ways in which we collectively accomplish things through our government that we could not do ourselves. Like win wars, build highways, explore space, and fuse atoms. The last took decades of public investment on top of all that hard work and perseverence that seems to have paid off, at least in a lab, only last week at Lawrence Livermore Labs:
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This first-of-its-kind feat will provide unprecedented capability to support NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and will provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy, which would be a game-changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy.
“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting our world-class scientists — like the team at NIF — whose work will help us solve humanity’s most complex and pressing problems, like providing clean power to combat climate change and maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.”
“This is only possible due to the long-term commitment of public investment in fusion science,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Dr. Kim Budil told a press conference Tuesday.
“The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering, and most of all, people,” LLNL Director Dr. Kim Budil said. “Crossing this threshold is the vision that has driven 60 years of dedicated pursuit — a continual process of learning, building, expanding knowledge and capability, and then finding ways to overcome the new challenges that emerged. These are the problems that the U.S. national laboratories were created to solve.”
Basic research is not profitable. Not in the short term. Those who view the world through quarterly profit statements have eschewed basic research for decades and sought profit through rent seeking. But they’ll gladly exploit the products of public investment for private gain.
Our myths about the winning of the West gloss over that the first transcontinental railroad that made industrialists of the first Gilded Age rich was financed and subsidized by federal and state governments. We forget that westward expansion was made possible (to indigenous people’s detriment) by the Homestead Act (1862). Rural electrification, the Central Valley Project, etc. Sorry, Randians, sorry Republicans, it was public investment. When America sets its mind to something, as Joe Biden likes to remind us, we can accomplish anything together. Like splitting the atom. Or fusing it.
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