Once upon a time very wealthy individuals used their largess to endow libraries, concert halls and museums. Not so anymore.
It seems now that rich old men don't want to leave our world to itself. George Soros is suspected of being behind the massive immigration of Syrians into Europe ... see: Breitbart Story ... and Warren Buffet believes that that our supreme liar Hillary Clinton (or even Bernie Sanders) would make a crackerjack president ... see: Business Insider Story. And, of course there are Harry Reid's bugbears, the Koch brothers ... who want conservative principles to prevail once again in this country. Of course, there are many other people of wealth who believe that this money gives them license to run things politically.
And even our younger plutocrats are fighting the existing social order. Bill Gates strangely now believes that the only solution to our world's problems is Socialism ... see: The U.K. Independent ... and everyone knows how multi-billionaire Donald Trump is grabbing the headlines with his thoughts for national change.
How come amassing vast piles of money in business suggests to these folks that all their ideas deserve to be worshiped?.
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Note that the Bill Gates article in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/) does not use the words "socialism", "socialist", or even "social"! And does not use the word "captitalism"... just that pure short-view capitalism cannot rationalize investing in anything that has a long term payoff, societal or otherwise.
As to your other rich old men, the supreme court allows them to go "all in" on whoever will carry their banner. You do not have to worship them. They'll just get the best spinmeisters to make you want what they want.
No matter what The Atlantic says, the opposite of Capitalism is Socialism (or worse). And the Supreme Court allowed both Soros and the Koch's to vent. May the best ideas win.
In the actual interview -- not how the UK Independent spun and Drudge further simpified it -- Bill referred specifically to energy: "...for energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products—where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns—almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage. So if you go back to various energy innovators, actually, they didn’t do that well financially. The rewards to society of these energy advances—not much of that is captured by the individual innovator, because it’s a very conservative market. So the R&D amount in energy is surprisingly low compared with medicine or digital stuff, where both the government spending and the private-sector spending is huge."
Capitalism and Socialism co-exist well. Some things like space exploration, and new forms of energy are societal goals while general health, education, and transportation are for the common good. Venture capitalists cannot rationalize the ROI.
And we do have socialism in America already in a very big way in our military, both active and retired.
Consider two youths that want to be welders. One signs up with the Army and gets housing, food, and training at no cost. The other pays for his housing, food, and training while earning enough money to pay for these things less the taxes that go toward his peer's free ride getting the same skill.
"The R&D amount in energy is surprisingly lowi" except in Solendra where Obama can piss away a half a billion dollars of taxpayer money and not blink twice.
The failures of Solyndra were a reasonable bet on American manufacturing that went very awry. But 0.5 billion dollars is pocket money compared to the 5,000 billion wasted in the Middle East to preserve our oil interests.
Every VC expects a few losers. War requires "all in" yet accomplishes so little.
We bailed out banks that were deemed too big to fail. The quest to get reliable low non-polluting renewable energy is to big to not succeed. But IMHO this is like getting a man on the moon or building the A-Bomb: We need to step away from short-term investor mentality and go "all in."
But didn't Bill Gates say that energy investment don't pay off ... so why crony capitalism in this area? It is clearly sloppy capitalism. (By the lbye, I think the total loss on green energy by this administration runs into the many billions ... all down a rat hole.)
He said that they don't off quickly: On the centrality of government to progress on energy, historically:
Everyone likes to argue about how much the shale-gas boom was driven by the private sector versus government; there was some of both. Nuclear: huge amount of government. Hydropower: mind-blowingly government—because permitting those things, those big reservoirs and everything, you can’t be a private-sector guy betting that you’re going to get permitted. People think energy is more of a private-sector thing than it is. If you go back to Edison’s time, there wasn’t much government funding. There were rich people funding him. Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area.
I’m optimistic about climate change because of innovation.
But energy moves really slowly. There’s this thing Vaclav Smil says: If Edison were reborn today, he would find our batteries completely understandable, because it’s just chemistry. He would say, “Oh, cool, you found lithium, that was nice.” Nuclear-power plants, he would go, “What the hell is that?” That, he would be impressed with. And chips, which we can use for managing data and stuff, he’d be impressed with. But he could visit a coal plant and say, “Okay, you scaled it up.” He would visit a natural-gas plant and that would look pretty normal to him; he would look at an internal-combustion engine and he wouldn’t be that surprised.
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The subsidies to oil-gas-coal are many times the green energy gambles. That's an industry with nearly $100 billion in net profits.
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The real takeaways from Bill's article are (1) several countries are making strides in green energy where we used to be can-do leaders, (2) there's a balance where green energy has downtime (calm, night) while fossil fuels and hydro can go 24/7, (3) the fossil fuel companies have little interest in investing in tech that erodes their core revenue stream.
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