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| Kevin Lamarque / Courtesy Reuters |
A visão convencional sobre o que o Estado deve fazer para promover a inovação é simples: basta sair do caminho. Na melhor das hipóteses, os governos apenas facilitam o dinamismo econômico do setor privado; na pior das hipóteses, as suas instituições pesadas, pesadas e burocráticas inibem-no ativamente. O setor privado, rápido, amante do risco e pioneiro, pelo contrário, é o que realmente impulsiona o tipo de inovação que cria o crescimento econômico. De acordo com esta visão, o segredo por trás de Silicon Valley reside nos seus empresários e capitalistas de risco. O Estado pode intervir na economia - mas apenas para corrigir falhas de mercado ou nivelar as condições de concorrência. Pode regular o setor privado para ter em conta os custos externos que as empresas podem impor ao público, como a poluição, e pode investir em bens públicos, como a investigação científica básica ou o desenvolvimento de medicamentos com pouco potencial de mercado. Contudo, não deverá tentar criar e moldar diretamente mercados. Um artigo da Economist de 2012 sobre o futuro da indústria transformadora resumiu esta concepção comum. "Os governos sempre foram péssimos na escolha de vencedores, e é provável que o sejam ainda mais, à medida que legiões de empreendedores e criadores trocam designs online, transformam-nos em produtos em casa e comercializam-nos globalmente a partir de uma garagem", afirma o artigo. "À medida que a revolução avança, os governos devem limitar-se ao básico: melhores escolas para uma força de trabalho qualificada, regras claras e condições de concorrência equitativas para empresas de todos os tipos. Deixe o resto para os revolucionários."
Essa visão é tão errada quanto generalizada. Na verdade, em países que devem o seu crescimento à inovação, o Estado tem servido historicamente não como um intrometido no setor privado, mas como um parceiro-chave deste - e muitas vezes mais ousado, disposto a assumir os riscos que as empresas não aceitarão. Ao longo de toda a cadeia de inovação, desde a investigação básica até à comercialização, os governos intensificaram os investimentos necessários que o setor privado teve medo demais de fornecer. Estas despesas revelaram-se transformadoras, criando mercados e sectores inteiramente novos, incluindo a Internet, a nanotecnologia, a biotecnologia e a energia limpa.
Hoje, porém, tornou-se cada vez mais difícil para os governos pensar grande. Cada vez mais, o seu papel tem se limitado a simplesmente facilitar o setor privado e, talvez, empurrá-lo na direção certa. Quando os governos ultrapassam esse papel, são imediatamente acusados de excluir o investimento privado e de tentar, ineptamente, escolher vencedores. A noção do Estado como mero facilitador, administrador e regulador começou a ganhar ampla aceitação na década de 1970, mas adquiriu nova popularidade na sequência da crise financeira global. Em todo o mundo, os decisores políticos têm como alvo a dívida pública (não importa que tenha sido a dívida privada que levou ao colapso), argumentando que o corte da despesa pública estimulará o investimento privado. Como resultado, as próprias agências estatais que foram responsáveis pelas revoluções tecnológicas do passado viram os seus orçamentos encolherem. Nos Estados Unidos, o processo de "sequestro" orçamental resultou em cortes no valor de 95 bilhões de dólares nas despesas federais em I&D entre 2013 e 2021. Na Europa, o "pacto fiscal" da UE, que exige que os estados reduzam os seus défices fiscais para três por cento do PIB, está comprimindo as despesas com a educação e a I&D.
Além disso, graças, em parte, à sabedoria convencional sobre o seu dinamismo e à lentidão do Estado, o setor privado conseguiu exercer pressão sobre os governos para enfraquecer as regulamentações e reduzir os impostos sobre ganhos de capital. Só entre 1976 e 1981, após um forte lobby da National Venture Capital Association, a taxa de imposto sobre ganhos de capital nos Estados Unidos caiu de 40% para 20%. E em nome de trazer o dinamismo de Silicon Valley para o Reino Unido, em 2002, o governo do primeiro-ministro britânico Tony Blair reduziu o tempo que os fundos de private equity têm de ser investidos para serem elegíveis para reduções fiscais de dez para dois anos. Estas políticas aumentam a desigualdade e não o investimento, e ao recompensarem os investimentos de curto prazo em detrimento dos de longo prazo, prejudicam a inovação.
Fazer com que os governos pensem grande sobre a inovação não significa apenas investir mais dinheiro dos contribuintes em mais atividades. Requer reconsiderar fundamentalmente o papel tradicional do Estado na economia. Especificamente, isso significa capacitar os governos para vislumbrarem uma direção para a mudança tecnológica e investirem nessa direção. Significa abandonar a forma míope como a despesa pública é normalmente avaliada. Significa acabar com a prática de isolar o setor privado do setor público. E significa descobrir formas de os governos e os contribuintes colherem algumas das recompensas do investimento público, em vez de apenas os riscos. Só quando os decisores políticos ultrapassarem os mitos sobre o papel do Estado na inovação é que deixarão de ser, como disse John Maynard Keynes em outra era, "escravos de algum economista já falecido".
A FALHA DA FALHA DO MERCADO
In addressing societal challenges such as climate change, youth unemployment, obesity, aging, and inequality, states must lead—not by simply fixing market failures but by actively creating markets. They must direct the economy toward new “techno-economic paradigms,” in the words of the technology and innovation scholar Carlota Perez. These directions are not generated spontaneously from market forces; they are largely the result of deliberate state decisions. In the mass-production revolution, for example, the state invested in both the underlying technologies and their diffusion across the economy. On the supply side, the U.S. military-industrial complex, beginning in World War II, invested in improvements in aerospace, electronics, and materials. On the demand side, the U.S. government’s postwar subsidization of suburban living—building roads, backing mortgages, and guaranteeing incomes through the welfare state—enabled workers to own homes, buy cars, and consume other mass-produced goods.
As Michael Shellenberger and his colleagues at the progressive think tank the Breakthrough Institute have documented, despite the mythmaking about how the shale gas boom is being driven by wildcatting entrepreneurs operating independently from the state, the U.S. federal government invested heavily in the technologies that unleashed it. In 1976, the Morgantown Energy Research Center and the Bureau of Mines launched the Eastern Gas Shales Project, which demonstrated how natural gas could be recovered from shale formations. That same year, the federal government opened the Gas Research Institute, which was funded through a tax on natural gas production and spent billions of dollars on research into shale gas. And the Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, developed the 3-D geologic mapping technology used for fracking operations.
Likewise, as the physician Marcia Angell has shown, many of the most promising new drugs trace their origins to research done by the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health, which has an annual budget of some $30 billion. Private pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, tend to focus more on the D than the R part of R & D, plus slight variations of existing drugs and marketing.
Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarians might be surprised to find out that Uncle Sam funded many of the innovations behind the information technology revolution, too. Consider the iPhone. It is often heralded as the quintessential example of what happens when a hands-off government allows genius entrepreneurs to flourish, and yet the development of the features that make the iPhone a smartphone rather than a stupid phone was publicly funded. The progenitor of the Internet was ARPANET, a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part of the Defense Department, in the 1960s. Gps began as a 1970s U.S. military program called Navstar. The iPhone’s touchscreen technology was created by the company FingerWorks, which was founded by a professor at the publicly funded University of Delaware and one of his doctoral candidates, who received grants from the National Science Foundation and the CIA. Even Siri, the iPhone’s cheery, voice-recognizing personal assistant, can trace its lineage to the U.S. government: it is a spinoff of a darpa artificial-intelligence project. None of this is to suggest that Steve Jobs and his team at Apple were not brilliant in how they put together existing technologies. The problem, however, is that failing to admit the public side of the story puts future government-funded research at risk.
For policymakers, then, the question should not be whether to pick particular directions when it comes to innovation, since some governments are already doing that, and with good results. Rather, the question should be how to do so in a way that is democratically accountable and that solves the most pressing social and technological challenges.
A SMARTER STATE
State spending on innovation tends to be assessed in exactly the wrong way. Under the prevailing economic framework, market failures are identified and particular government investments are proposed. Their value is then appraised through a narrow calculation that involves heavy guesswork: Will the benefits of a particular intervention exceed the costs associated with both the offending market failure and the implementation of the fix? Such a method is far too static to evaluate something as dynamic as innovation. By failing to account for the possibility that the state can create economic landscapes that never existed before, it gives short shrift to governments’ efforts in this area. No wonder economists often characterize the public sector as nothing more than an inefficient version of the private sector.
This incomplete way of measuring public investment leads to accusations that by entering certain sectors, governments are crowding out private investment. That charge is often false, because government investment often has the effect of “crowding in,” meaning that it stimulates private investment and expands the overall pie of national output, which benefits both private and public investors. But more important, public investments should aim not only to kick-start the economy but also, as Keynes wrote, “to do those things which at present are not done at all.” No private companies were trying to put a man on the moon when NASA undertook the Apollo project.
Without the right tools for evaluating investments, governments have a hard time knowing when they are merely operating in existing spaces and when they are making things happen that would not have happened otherwise. The result: investments that are too narrow, constrained by the prevailing techno-economic paradigm. A better way of evaluating a given investment would be to consider whether it taught workers new skills and whether it led to the creation of new technologies, sectors, or markets. When it comes to government spending on pharmaceutical research, for example, it might make sense to move past the private sector’s fixation on drugs and fund more work on diagnostics, surgical treatments, and lifestyle changes.
Governments suffer from another, related problem when it comes to contemplating investments: as a result of the dominant view that they should stick to fixing market failures, they are often ill equipped to do much more than that. To avoid such problems as a regulatory agency getting captured by business, the thinking goes, the state must insulate itself from the private sector. That’s why governments have increasingly outsourced key jobs to the private sector. But that trend often rids them of the knowledge necessary for devising a smart strategy for investing in innovation and makes it harder to attract top talent. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: the less big thinking a government does, the less expertise it is able to attract, the worse it performs, and the less big thinking it is allowed to do. Had there been more information technology capacity within the U.S. government, the Obama administration would probably not have had such difficulty rolling out HealthCare.gov, and that failure will likely lead to only more outsourcing.
In order to create and shape technologies, sectors, and markets, the state must be armed with the intelligence necessary to envision and enact bold policies. This does not mean that the state will always succeed; indeed, the uncertainty inherent in the innovation process means that it will often fail. But it needs to learn from failed investments and continuously improve its structures and practices. As the economist Albert Hirschman emphasized, the policymaking process is by its nature messy, so it is important for public institutions to welcome the process of trial and error. Governments should pay as much attention to the business school topics of strategic management and organizational behavior as private companies do. The status quo approach, however, is to focus not on making the government more competent but on downsizing it.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Since governments often undertake courageous spending during the riskiest parts of the innovation process, it is key that they figure out how they can socialize not just the risks of their investments but also the rewards. The U.S. government’s Small Business Innovation Research program, for example, offers high-risk financing to companies at much earlier stages than most private venture capital firms do; it funded Compaq and Intel when they were start-ups. Similarly, the Small Business Investment Company program, an initiative under the auspices of the U.S. Small Business Administration, has provided crucial loans and grants to early stage companies, including Apple in 1978. In fact, the need for such long-term investments has only increased over time as venture capital firms have become more short term in their outlook, emphasizing finding an “exit” for each of their investments (usually through a public offering or a sale to another company) within three years. Real innovation can take decades.
As is the nature of early stage investing in technologies with uncertain prospects, some investments are winners, but many are losers. For every Internet (a success story of U.S. government financing), there are many Concordes (a white elephant funded by the British and French governments). Consider the twin tales of Solyndra and Tesla Motors. In 2009, Solyndra, a solar-power-panel start-up, received a $535 million guaranteed loan from the U.S. Department of Energy; that same year, Tesla, the electric-car manufacturer, got approval for a similar loan, for $465 million. In the years afterward, Tesla was wildly successful, and the firm repaid its loan in 2013. Solyndra, by contrast, filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and, among fiscal conservatives, became a byword for the government’s sorry track record when it comes to picking winners. Of course, if the government is to act like a venture capitalist, it will necessarily encounter many failures. The problem, however, is that governments, unlike venture capital firms, are often saddled with the costs of the failures while earning next to nothing from the successes. Taxpayers footed the bill for Solyndra’s losses yet got hardly any of Tesla’s profits.
Economists may argue that the state already receives a return on its investments by taxing the resulting profits. The truth is more complicated. For one thing, large corporations are masters of tax evasion. Google — whose game-changing search algorithm, it should be noted, was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation—has lowered its U.S. tax bill by funneling some of its profits through Ireland. Apple does the same by taking advantage of a race to the bottom among U.S. states: in 2006, the company, which is based in Cupertino, California, set up an investment subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, to save money.
Fixing the problem is not just a matter of plugging the loopholes. Tax rates in the United States and other Western countries have been falling over the past several decades precisely due to a false narrative about how the private sector serves as the sole wealth creator. Government revenues have also shrunk due to tax incentives aimed at promoting innovation, few of which have been shown to produce any R & D that would not have happened otherwise. What’s more, given how mobile capital is these days, a particular government that has funded a given company might not be able to tax it since it may have moved abroad. And although taxes are effective at paying for the basics, such as education, health care, and research, they don’t begin to cover the cost of making direct investments in companies or specific technologies. If the state is being asked to make such investments—as will increasingly be the case as financial markets become even more focused on the short term—then it will have to recover the inevitable losses that arise from this process.
There are various ways to do so. One is to attach strings to the loans and guarantees that governments hand out to businesses. For example, just as graduates who receive income-contingent student loans get their repayments adjusted based on their salaries, the recipients of state investments could have their repayments adjusted based on their profits.
Another way for states to reap greater returns involves reforming the way they partner with businesses. Public-private partnerships should be symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationships. In 1925, the U.S. government allowed AT&T to retain its monopoly over the phone system but required the company to reinvest its profits in research, a deal that led to the formation of Bell Labs. Today, however, instead of reinvesting their profits, large companies hoard them or spend them on share buybacks, stock options, and executive pay. Research by the economist William Lazonick has borne this out: “The 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012 . . . used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock.”
An even bolder plan would allow the state to retain equity in the companies it supports, just as private venture capital firms do. Indeed, some countries adopted this model long ago. Israel’s Yozma Group, which manages public venture capital funds, has backed—and retained equity in—early stage companies since 1993. The Finnish Innovation Fund, or Sitra, which is operated under the Finnish parliament, has done the same since 1967, and it was an early investor in Nokia’s transformation from a rubber company into a cell-phone giant. Had the U.S. government had a stake in Tesla, it would have been able to more than cover its losses from Solyndra. The year Tesla received its government loan, the company went public at an opening price of $17 a share; that figure had risen to $93 by the time the loan was repaid. Today, shares in Tesla trade above $200.
The prospect of the state owning a stake in a private corporation may be anathema to many parts of the capitalist world, but given that governments are already investing in the private sector, they may as well earn a return on those investments (something even fiscal conservatives might find attractive). The state need not hold a controlling stake, but it could hold equity in the form of preferred stocks that get priority in receiving dividends. The returns could be used to fund future innovation. Politicians and the media have been too quick to criticize public investments when things go wrong and too slow to reward them when things go right.
A PRÓXIMA REVOLUÇÃO
As revoluções tecnológicas do passado - das ferrovias ao automóvel, do programa espacial à tecnologia da informação - não surgiram como resultado de pequenos ajustes no sistema econômico. Ocorreram porque os estados empreenderam missões ousadas que se centraram não na minimização do fracasso governamental, mas na maximização da inovação. Quando se aceita este propósito estatal mais pró-ativo, as questões-chave da política econômica são reformuladas. As questões sobre a exclusão do investimento privado e a escolha imprudente de vencedores caem no esquecimento à medida que questões mais dinâmicas - sobre a criação dos tipos de interações público-privadas que podem produzir novos cenários industriais - chegam ao topo.
Hoje, muitos países, da China à Dinamarca e à Alemanha, definiram a sua próxima missão: a energia verde. Dados os potenciais benefícios e a quantidade de dinheiro em jogo, é crucial que os governos apoiem esta missão da forma correta. Para começar, devem não só escolher diversas tecnologias ou setores nos quais investir, mas também perguntar o que pretendem desses setores. Por exemplo, se o que os governos pretendem do setor energético é um fornecimento estável de energia, então o gás de xisto servirá, mas se a missão for mitigar as alterações climáticas, então não o fará. Na verdade, as políticas orientadas para missões precisam de promover interações entre múltiplos domínios. A missão da NASA à lua exigiu a interação de muitos setores diferentes, desde foguetes até telecomunicações e têxteis. Da mesma forma, a revolução da energia verde exigirá investimento não apenas na energia eólica, na energia solar e nos biocombustíveis, mas também em novos motores, novas formas de manter as infra-estruturas de forma mais eficiente e novas formas de fazer com que os produtos durem mais. Assim, o Estado deve inspirar-se no mundo do capital de risco e diversificar a sua carteira, distribuindo o capital por muitas tecnologias e empresas diferentes.
Ao fazer investimentos verdes, os governos devem financiar as tecnologias que o setor privado tem ignorado e fornecer uma direção forte e clara para a mudança, permitindo que vários empresários experimentem as especificidades. Os governos devem estabelecer metas ambiciosas, não no antigo estilo de comando e controle, mas através de uma combinação de cenouras e castigos. O governo alemão seguiu esta abordagem na sua iniciativa de transição energética, ou Energiewende, que visa eliminar gradualmente a energia nuclear e substituí-la por energias renováveis; está fazendo estabelecendo metas elevadas para a redução das emissões de carbono e subsidiando o desenvolvimento tecnológico da energia eólica e solar.
De um modo mais geral, os governos devem celebrar acordos que lhes permitam partilhar os lucros dos seus investimentos bem-sucedidos. E, acima de tudo, deveriam construir os órgãos públicos do futuro, transformando-os em focos de criatividade, adaptação e exploração. Isso exigirá o abandono da atual obsessão de limitar a intervenção do Estado à resolução dos problemas depois de estes terem acontecido - e a destruição do mito popular de que o Estado não pode inovar.
MARIANA MAZZUCATO é professora de Economia da Inovação na Unidade de Pesquisa em Política Científica da Universidade de Sussex. Ela é autora de The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths.
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