As the authors lay out, in 1938, before America entered WW II, the portion of state and federal income dedicated to scientific research was a pittance, at a mere 0.076%. As the country ramped up its efforts to catch up with its European allies and the Germans in military and defense technology, that investment ballooned to nearly 0.5% in 1944, and federal investment in R&D eventually reached its peak of almost 2% of U.S. GDP in 1964, at the crest of the Apollo program. (The Manhattan Project alone benefited from what would be the equivalent of roughly $80 billion between 1942 and 1946, peaking at 0.4%of GDP.) The steady rise of investment in these programs was commensurate with the rise of the American middle class. Contrast that with today, when U.S. government spending on publicly supported science accounts for just 0.7% of GDP. President Trump didn’t appoint a science adviser until 18 months into his administration, and Kelvin Droegemeier wasn’t confirmed by the Senate until January 2019. (Khanna’s plan would eventually boost federal investment in R&D to roughly 1% of GDP.)

As a consequence of this dip in federal funding for R&D, private industry is the last resort. And the major issue with this dynamic is that a private company will only invest in innovation insofar as it benefits its bottom line and does not incentivize the company to share breakthrough knowledge with competitors. “When you have that situation, we call it a classic example of a market failure in economics,” Gruber explained. “That suggests you need government intervention to really get you to where you need to be.”

Gruber and Johnson highlight the Human Genome Project as an example of how potent this kind of government intervention can be. In lieu of private sector interest in funding DNA-sequencing research, Congress agreed to fund the project in 1988, at a total estimated cost of $3 billion. Today the National institutes of Health estimates that the Human Genome Project resulted in economic growth equivalent to almost $1 trillion.

Companies also tend to invest where there are already existing technology centers and talent pools. This has led to the concentration of technology jobs on the coasts and in big cities like San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, New York, and Boston. A perfect example of this is Amazon’s recent competition to determine the location of its second headquarters. While 238 cities applied, the company ultimately picked New York and what is ostensibly Washington, D.C.—two cities already at superstar status. And even after the corporate conglomerate canceled its plans to build its headquarters in Queens, following a push led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, unions, and activists, Amazon announced at the end of last year that it is expanding its footprint in New York City. “The problem is the private sector will only go to where the talent is already,” Johnson explained. “The federal government has this ability to think bigger and think more broadly.”

In September of last year, Republican governor of Iowa Kim Reynolds and Khanna attended the opening of the Forge, an Accenture-backed initiative to bring technology jobs to the rural community of Jefferson, Iowa. With the help of Khanna and his Silicon Valley ties and Reynolds’s support, the 6,000-square-foot space will house an academy that—through partnerships with local community colleges and the financial backing of companies like Facebook and Corteva—will both employ as many as 30 full-time workers and provide a four-month, tuition-free commercial software development training program for Jefferson-area students to prepare them for high-paying tech jobs.

“I would say the future of the country is riding on this, [not] rural America and urban America preaching back and forth at each other about whether you should use gendered pronouns or how many guns you should be able to own. Those are arguments that are going to continue to divide,” Douglas Burns, co-owner of Iowa’s Carroll Times Herald newspaper, said in an interview about the Forge. “What we’re doing is literally potentially preventing a civil war, because this wealth inequality just can’t stand and it just won’t stay up. We can’t have only a select number of winners in a select number of places where people are just sort of succeeding by geographic accident like that. That’s just not going to hold the country together.