America Inc.?: Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)

Thanks.

Very informative. Spin-around, that's the way of going beyond the dichotomy of public vs private relationship.

would really like to talk to this author on a long walk.

A deep and original analysis of an institution whose existence economists, and social scientists in general, did not know about : the US developmental state. It's alive and well!

So many countries around the world seek to emulate the success of Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Qualcomm (you name it) – companies which magically sprang to life from the “Silicon Valley model”, but what really is this model? This study provides a systematic empirical investigation of the sources of the United States’s unrivalled transformative capacity from the period of the Cold War to the present. The answer lies in the emergence of a “National Security State” – the outcome of geopolitical imperatives and an anti-statist domestic political environment – not a developmental state. Weiss musters a dazzling array of case studies, probing the roles of public agencies, private entrepreneurs, and most interestingly, quasi-governmental or “hybrid” entities in bringing about the world’s most significant technological breakthroughs. This is an important study not least of all because it provides a “reality check” on the fairytale about the role of the free market in the American setting. Weiss also calls into serious question the value of theoretical labels such as “liberal market economies” (LME) used so pervasively in the social sciences to box-in the United States. This book is a must-read for any serious student of the United States political economy and Comparative/ International Political Economy.