So you're saying, for example, that after plowing how many billions into fusion research, when they finally crack it and can produce continents-worth of power from pennies worth of sea water, they won't actually start giving electricity away for free? Even though we've all collectively 'invested' in it through our taxes for decades?
Interestingly, Newton was "Master of the Mint" at the Royal Mint, which supplies all the nation's coinage.
> Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.
It’s also the worst investment ever - if the same money was invested in solar farms and research, we could have actual world changing energy sources right now.
It doesn't work like a game of Civilization. Allocating resources to a research problem means you increase the social and material rewards for a certain type of person to work on a certain type of project. There is no guarantee of success or one to one allocation of resources. It's also not a zero-sum game when the money to one source of energy took away from another.
Also unlike a video game, the tech-tree dependencies are not obvious. We don't know in advance whether a tech will be a productive avenue of R&D, or if it depends on other unrelated advances in theory, material science, or computer modeling, or was actually completely unfeasible in the first place. I find wind power [1] as a case study representative, and we see similar stories for e.g. fusion, cancer research, AI
More money doesn't make the wind blow more often. And there's only.so much capital that can be spent on material science before you hit a limit on the rate of improvement per unit time
