The State, Science, and Technology

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 A comment that I left here:

Mariana Mazzucato triggers the same ambivalence in me as does Modern Money Theory (MMT) in regard to the role of the state in fostering what proponents of the latter call "the public purpose".

There is no public purpose per se. It is rather a dynamic something that must be fought for, hopefully in a constructively pluralistic environment and by means of peaceful political competition.

Whether as promoter of technological progress, real or apparent, or more broadly as driver of economic and social advances, real or apparent, the state is an ambivalent creature, which may well use fiscal space to build up a war (which it surely would define as serving the public purpose) or abuse its ability to politicise science and industrial development as it does in contemporary Germany, where rational progress (say, in developing nuclear power) and open-minded discussions (debunking mendacious claims of health risks from diesel emissions disseminated to destroy the German automotive industry in a long term war on individual mobility) are systematically suppressed by an ardently biased, aggressively partial state.

In fact, in Germany, the state has become THE major obstacle to rational technological progress and the main supporter of the opposite as exemplified in the fantastically wasteful and ineffective, maniacally bumbling Energiewende (rush into "renewables").

I am perfectly sympathetic to Mazzucato's view of the state's genuinely progressive role (not only) in technological advancement. But a defense of this role of the state must be paralleled by an analysis of the potential, historical and contemporary harm the state has been/is inflicting in the same area.

In today's political climate of resurrected religiosity (led by the regressive left and green mythology), it is especially important to define very clearly the conditions of Mazzucatoean etatist progressiveness, not least by delineating and providing against the disasters that we are to face when her favoured train derails.