你预见了Facebook吗？

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李兰特科克勒•执行编辑
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On Twitter@ dw_leeteschler.

Back in the dark days around the end of the year 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped 78% from its peak, and the country was in the middle of a recession. Many early dot-com companies had run out of capital and gone bankrupt. Supporting industries such as advertising were hurting as well because demand for their services had fallen drastically.

我仍然可以回想起我回忆的电梯对话，然后我回来了我工作的一位高管。“互联网没有回来，”他说缺乏。“我们谈论的所有分析师都说的地平线上没有任何东西，这将使在线商务成为曾经是什么。”

A few months after this prediction of doom-and-gloom, a Harvard University student put together a website he called Facemash.

2002年没有人在预见公司的崛起，十年后，每月有955万活跃用户和收入为78亿美元。一般为社交媒体的同意多，尽管从20世纪90年代中期以来，我的早期社交媒体平台都在周围。

That brings us to the current call by U.S. policy makers for an industrial policy to fix perceived market failures and counter China’s growing economic prowess. A principle part of this idea is subsidies for U.S. producers of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and other goods, as well as legislation to subsidize American industrial R&D.

呼吁美国工业政策只有一件事政治家试图在过去识别关键技术失败，因为政府官僚不太可能相当于预见下一个Facebook。

History is rife with examples of federal industrial programs that contributed little in the way of technological advances but endured long after the technical handwriting was on the wall. Examples include synthetic fuel from coal, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, and the Supersonic Transport in the 1960s. But a more recent example concerns supercomputers made by Cray Research Inc.

在20世纪90年代，政客决定超级计算机是一种战略技术。美国政府对日本有相当大的压力购买Cray机器。担心的是，超级计算机的日本制造商将主导行业。美国官员似乎认为，在美国铰接下铰接在美国保持运作的超级计算机行业。

The U.S. eventually did arm-twist Japan into buying a few Cray boxes. Meanwhile, competitors such as the Thinking Machines Corp. and Intel claimed the government was singling out Cray for special treatment. They complained that Cray lagged in developing massively parallel supercomputer technology that signaled where the industry was headed.

Cray Research eventually was bought out by what is now the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. On the currentlist of top-ten supercomputers在世界上，来自日本的一台机器占据了顶峰。但是，另外十台的其他机器由IBM制作，两个是戴尔电脑，两个是NVIDIA，一个是中国人，一个是法国人。

不是每一项工业政策努力都会导致灾难。但大多数过去促进“关键”行业的努力都有昂贵，强大的结果。因此，如果政治家预言技术未来，那么只有工作的政策持怀疑态度。DW.