Government Technology Policy

The core focus of our concern in the following discussion is in the relationship of government technology policy with the technical and commercial development of a high-technology industry, specifically the computer industry. In the course of exploring this relationship, however, we must go far afield of the narrow specifics of policymaking. Both technology policies and the technologies they are designed in response to do not take form in a vacuum. They are not the simple consequence of a purely objective decision-making process. Instead, they are shaped by the political and cultural environment in which they take form. Therefore, to understand "technology policy," we must look less at specific policies than at the social context in which policy is formed.

At the most basic level, culture is the primary determinant not only of the restraints placed upon governmental policy makers, but of the whole manner in which they perceive their task. This may be made much clearer by looking at the cultural environment in which technology policy is shaped in Japan. In Japan

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he wing root. The pod configuration of engines, now standard, had a highly specific origin: it was the configuration adopted by Boeing, just after the war, for the B-47 jet bomber. It was repeated in the B-52, another Boeing product, and then again in the Boeing Model 367-80, the plane that became the mutual prototype of the KC-135 jet tanker--and the 707 jetliner. The lesson of this brief digression into the history of jetliner design is simple but fundamental. Boeing built its enduring dominance of the jetliner industry upon the foundation of over three thousand large military jets it built between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. This was, in effect, industrial policy applied on the grandest scale. It was not intended primarily as industrial policy; the Air Force did not order bombers in order to secure American predominance in commercial jets. But it was the massive infusion of funds into the military programs that established the technology base and production experience that made that commercial predominance possible. In the early years of the jet age, Britain, not the United States, was the technology leader. If the Royal Air Force had ordered thousands of jet bombers, instead of a few dozen, DeHavilland mi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Meanwhile American, Silicon Valley, Mobley McKeown, United Japan, Subsequently IBM, Reagan Administration, Apple II, Fifth Generation, MITI Japanese, World War, industrial policy, computer industry, personal computers, personal computer, brock 1975, computer technology, technology policy, computing power, silicon valley, american computer, market personal computers, mobley mckeown 1989, fifth generation project, feigenbaum mccorduck 1983, american computer technology,
Approximate Word count = 5492
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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