[hxa7241]

> That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization..

No, the article does not overgeneralise, your comment does.

The proposition is that a substantial proportion of particular quite well-defined 'innovation' was created through state systems as opposed to private commerce.

If, in order to argue against that, you have to generalise so much that one can almost no longer say anything causes anything, because everything causes everything, you end up saying nothing. You have not refuted something, you have just made up a more meaningless way of measuring anything.