I don’t think fear is a good motivator. Actually I know it is a terrible motivator otherwise dictatorships would have been doing very well.

The great inventors and scientists that I have read about has made their discoveries in relatively peaceful and comfortable times. Not under stress. Theory of relativity, evolution and gravity did not happen during war time. Nor the invention of the car, steam engine, airplane. In fact the first programmable computer was being developed in Germany before the war but the war really halted progress and set back the inventor a lot.

Germany was a scientific powerhouse before WW2. They dominated nearly every field but collapsed after the war.

Social democracies are in fact doing very well in science and engineering if you look at per capita. The image of US innovation gets greatly amplified in an artificial manner because the US in terms of population is just enormous.

One also has to consider cultural differences. There was no social democracy in the 1800s. Yet the US at the time was still more entrepreneurial. Americans have long cared a lot more about making money than Europeans. But it would be wrong to assume that profits is what drives true innovation. Most science is not profit driven. Lots of important inventions like the internet, the Web, GSM did not happen in a profit driven manner.

Places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs while part of profit driven companies worked more like big playgrounds for science and engineering.

I have a positive view of humanity. I think we are curious and creative people who want to create and discover to satisfy our own curiosity. I don’t believe the bleak conservative view of humanity as mostly selfish and lazy people who need to be motivated by money, fear of poverty or punishment.