Why Technological Innovation Relies on Government Support

[Commentary] Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died recently at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern Europe, a keen scientific thinker with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, an innovator who became CEO of Intel, and a bestselling management theorist. Yet the side of Grove’s success that has received scant notice—even though Grove himself repeatedly acknowledged it—is the huge debt that he and the industry he led owed to US public policy.

Grove came to the United States just as massive federal investments were transforming the nation into the world’s scientific superpower. He then flourished at two public institutions, City College of New York and the University of California Berkeley, that were part of a spectacular post-war expansion of higher education. These enormous public investments both promoted fundamental research and educated a new generation of innovators who could exploit that expanding knowledge. In the wake of Grove’s death, observes Wired, “The tech industry has come together to mourn the loss of Andy Grove,” as well it should. Yet in addition to celebrating Grove’s many achievements, the industry should also be celebrating the farsighted policies that helped make those achievements possible—policies that are now not just widely forgotten but under broad assault. Even more important, the industry and its allies should see in Grove’s remarkable life an inspiration for reviving the active government role in the knowledge economy on which future Andy Groves—and American prosperity more broadly—depend.

[Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University. Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley]