• jimbo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Capitalism itself rarely invents new things

    I don’t know that it even makes sense to say that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) invented something, but it seems fair to say that most of inventing we’ve seen in the modern world was done in a capitalistic system.

    • Ignotum@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Sure, it’s not really the economic model itself doing the inventing, but people like to say that there couldn’t be any innovation under any economic model but capitalism.

      But more often than not, new technologies come from universities since investing in potential technologies is risky, it’s much safer to invest in refining an existing one. Meanwhile universities are more willing to spend money on research for researchs sake

      Take the language models that are all the rage these days, the underlying technology was created at a university, then once it existed, companies took it and pretty much just made them bigger and more easily available

      Computers, screens, modern encryption, lithium batteries, the internet, touchscreens, wifi, i could go on. Your phone is pretty much just a pile of parts that were invented at an university, then made smaller, cheaper and assembled together by a company

      And while some of those university projects were also externally funded, it was usually state funded, usually for their military applications