> More generally, a standard critique for "reproducing a golden age" narratives are that the golden age existed within a vastly different ecosystem and indeed - stopped working due to systemic reasons, many of which still apply.
The lack of money to fund research isn't god given, it's a feature of capitalism. You get literally trillions of dollars worth of pension funds sloshing around in need for returns - but fundamental research isn't going to directly and imminently make billions of dollars, the timescale for ROI in basic research is usually measured in decades. So all that money went towards social networks, cryptocurrencies, AI or whatever else is promising the greatest ROI - and that can be argued to all be not to the betterment of society, but actually to its detriment.
It used to be the case that the government, mostly via the proxy "military-industrial complex" provided that money - out of that we got GPS, radar, microwaves, lasers, even the Internet itself - to counteract this. Unfortunately, Republican (or in other countries their respective Conservative equivalents) governments have only cut and cut public R&D spending. And now, here we are, with the entirety of the Western economy seeking to become rent-seekers with as little effort as possible...
And billionaires aren't the rescue either. Some of them prefer to spend their money on compensating for ED by engaging in a rat's race of "who has the bigger yacht/sports team", some of them (like Musk) invest on R&D (SpaceX, Tesla) but with a clear focus on personal goals and not necessarily society as a whole, some of them just love to hoard money like dragons in LoTR, and some try to make up for government cuts in social services and foreign development aid (Gates, Soros), but when was the last time you heard a billionaire just devoting even a small sliver of their wealth to basic R&D that doesn't come with expectations attached (like the ones described in TFA's "patronage" section)?
The lack of money to fund research isn't god given, it's a feature of capitalism. You get literally trillions of dollars worth of pension funds sloshing around in need for returns - but fundamental research isn't going to directly and imminently make billions of dollars, the timescale for ROI in basic research is usually measured in decades. So all that money went towards social networks, cryptocurrencies, AI or whatever else is promising the greatest ROI - and that can be argued to all be not to the betterment of society, but actually to its detriment.
It used to be the case that the government, mostly via the proxy "military-industrial complex" provided that money - out of that we got GPS, radar, microwaves, lasers, even the Internet itself - to counteract this. Unfortunately, Republican (or in other countries their respective Conservative equivalents) governments have only cut and cut public R&D spending. And now, here we are, with the entirety of the Western economy seeking to become rent-seekers with as little effort as possible...
And billionaires aren't the rescue either. Some of them prefer to spend their money on compensating for ED by engaging in a rat's race of "who has the bigger yacht/sports team", some of them (like Musk) invest on R&D (SpaceX, Tesla) but with a clear focus on personal goals and not necessarily society as a whole, some of them just love to hoard money like dragons in LoTR, and some try to make up for government cuts in social services and foreign development aid (Gates, Soros), but when was the last time you heard a billionaire just devoting even a small sliver of their wealth to basic R&D that doesn't come with expectations attached (like the ones described in TFA's "patronage" section)?