This includes all nobility and royalty titles.

Historically and traditionally, nobles are/were the owners of the land. Shoddy job they've done at taking care of the environment. Overpowered by the industrialists, the new ruling hegemonic class (since the aftermath of WWII); who have been clever to stay out of the public view, unlike these historical noble and royal icons.

how else would all those billions in R&D would be worthwhile for investment institutions?

as I see it (and stretching my reasoning), the lag is also part of what maintains the prestige of many academic and research organizations.

the billions in R&D are not all about the outcomes, a lot of them are spent making sure it's really damn hard for any rivals to catch up. how exactly? I cannot know but I can infer it's got a lot to do with having nobody able to see the whole picture, anybody can only know either how to design the chips, xor how to build them.

if everybody is as good as MIT, then MIT is no longer MIT. somebody has got to make sure some of those 3rd party (and far away) institutions stay there, in the back.

if everybody could do "2nm" process (whatever that means), then TSMC wouldn't be ahead of Intel, and so on...

This is contingent on the capacity of a society to weather any bad outcomes from the new things. which given as they new, their outcomes are unknown.

I'm trying to get to how freedom is related to some kind of background wealth.

If people are (or feel?) wealthy, they're willing to accept risky behavior. Using a example:

"oh, there they go the village idiots burning down a barn..."

--"oh well, at least there's still enough of everything for winter, no problem."

In contrast with: "[...] now we're fucked. time to ration our provisions".

Enter global warming; and with it the rise of autocracies, tyrannies, and so on.

the relation is ideological, cultural (in the sense of being close to the intention of); not direct, causal, material (in the sense of relating to the actual implementation).

paving the way (or building a wall) such that few can understand how people came up with that stuff. this is intended. this literally constructs knowledge as power.

The ways of thinking used to come up with the techniques are hidden, restricted. The academics who know the whole story (who know the ending -- which is what is taught, as well as how mathematicians of old came up with such ideas) hold this kind of power.

This gets even more interesting when the academics who know the histories, cannot really use the techniques. then the only people who knew both are historical figures (who get bathed in myth).

I cannot forgive them for this, given as they are still actively doing this. e.g. finding out how they make shredded wheat cereal is not possible [1]; and this must be technology from the early 20th or late 19th centuries... anything more recent is just hopeless.

[1] https://youtu.be/Qx8ovCJ9XPw?t=132

now add in asset forfeiture driven by legally mandated black markets and the picture is ever so slightly more complete.

Yes, they're not as terrible as some more autocratic and despotic regimes. But it is naive to think that they're not an imperial force who would never commit any attrocities.

Just a remider, the USA government runs guantanamo.

if the government can print money, what's the point of collecting money through taxes?