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Monday, Dec. 31, 2012 | 2 a.m.
Can government play a positive role in economic development? To understand who built what in the construction of the American economy from its pre-industrial origins, a look at one of the drivers of U.S. innovation — venture capital — is instructive. For more than three decades, American venture capitalists have concentrated their activities and earned their returns in a very small number of industrial domains. In booms and in slumps, in bull markets and in bear markets, the information and communications technology and biomedical sectors together have consistently accounted for 80 percent of venture capital investment. Why has it been ...
William H. Janeway is a managing director and senior adviser of a leading private equity firm and a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
The columnist makes an excellent argument for government partnering with the private sector/industry to advance technology and progress. There is no doubt that is the case. Sadly, government has shirked this responsibility in recent years, lead by partisan polticians, and reverted to bailouts, free loans, and bad investments, to further political ends rather than progress.
CarmineD