In my youngster years I got deeply into art and the stories around the “Bella Epoque” and the “Roaring twenties” were enthralling to me. These weren’t just times of great artists; there were great artists because the times allowed for outstanding people to be able to use art (and science) to achieve positions of social prominence.
I would strongly argue that there must be “social” benefits for a society to achieve anything big. In these old eras, young men signed up to be in wars because if they returned alive, they knew they would hold a position of never-ending respect in their society. They were literally willing to die for “social respect” and it was no different in the 2000’s when I was in the military, guys still expected this “respect” benefit from their service, but the big difference was that the society was much less giving of respect.
Nikola Tesla, the famous scientist, was renowned for his lack of caring if he received much money for his work and he supposedly died penniless. This is a bit of a distortion though, because he did care a lot about the social benefits of being a world-renowned scientist. He was delighted in being able to call a press conference and have many journalists show up to be wowed by his demonstrations. He lived in free hotel rooms for the last 43 years of his life because the owners of the hotels were fans of his work.
I started down this line of thinking because I started learning about the methods of creating aluminum metal from bauxite ore. We might not have access to aluminum like we do today if it wasn’t for Emperor Napoleon III making it a personal priority of his to push aluminum research forward in the 1850’s. He did put money into research, but, more importantly, anything the emperor did also became a social issue and the entire population knew about it. Napoleon III’s social focus on aluminum refining led to the price dropping by 4X within a decade, and within 3 decades the refining process was created that we still use in the current day.
In summary, social benefits are much more enticing to draw young people into making something big happen than any other thing. LL (and any other up-and-coming country) can use social benefits to become the new “boom-town” if the right environment can be created, but it won’t happen accidentally.