The lesson, which the US seems to have forgotten in the last few decades, is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress. In 1941, penicillin was a stalled science project, languishing in the resource-starved labs of warring Europe. It became a lifesaving product only thanks to hundreds of American scientists and engineers. Almost every technology is like this. “Most major inventions initially don’t work very well,” the economic historian Joel Mokyr said. “They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have
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