If you love control and have control, why would you want to create fertile ground for startups?

(This was meant as devil's advocate, not my personal point of view).

I'm not seeing how you get from share buybacks to a shift in priorities in corporate research. If there's a fundamental reason why it can't be done now how it was before the 80's it's not that.

I agree with a lot in this post, but I think it's also worth mentioning how this is a two-way street. Practical considerations often drive theory research as much as the other way around.

The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately.

It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades. Switching a non functioning system off does at least allow it to be replaced by something that risks doing things when something comes back.

Of course many pure scientists will, legitimately, argue that innovation isn't the point in the first place, and that is a far more solid point, but real academic diversity has been so destroyed by the global consensus making peer review process that much of their progress has effectively stalled.

In the last 80 or so years, this has been the case, but I don't think it's historically the norm. It just so happens that through whatever accident of scientific history, we were set up perfectly for a series of discoveries in basic theory that lent themselves well to immediate implementation and productization. We had a "science cycle" to match the business cycle that looked like this: Come up with a theory -> works? (yes: proceed, no: start again) -> publicize result -> collect huge sums of money -> plow that into new experiments -> find a problem with current theory -> start again. I don't think there is much disagreement that this cycle has slowed down considerably over the last 30-40 years.

Science by its nature is descriptive. As a discipline, it isn't actually geared towards discovering maxima in a space of design possibilities. No scientist invented the automobile or the airplane or the steam engine. A more typical mode is that engineers demonstrate that something is possible, and scientists recapitulate/integrate it into theory.

> The Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected failure to convert science into sustained innovation, during the same time that U.S. universities, startups and venture capital created Silicon Valley. Long-term military and economic advantage (nuclear weapons, GPS, AI) trace back to scientific research ecosystems.

The US has an extremely entrepreneurial culture, which is why Americans are so good at building innovative businesses. In the UK, money is seen as grubby and the class system has consistently placed barriers between those with ideas and those with money. Similarly, the Soviet Union struggled to make use of its innovators due to the strictures of central planning. Australia punches well above its weight in scientific research but is unwilling to engage in any economic activity other than digging rocks out of the ground and selling them to China.

So the idea that scientific research is a limiting factor in economic growth is not general; it's specific to the US and countries with that same entrepreneurial culture.

Let's talk about the other $49B.

I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields, as the history department or psychology professors are unlikely to require huge investments in new buildings, specialized equipment, etc., yet they pay the same tuition fees as STEM majors. Families/students paying full freight at a private university are looking at undergraduate degrees that cost $250k-$400k all in.

That can't be the whole picture, as money also flows from rich donors, corporate partnerships of various types, and at some schools such as MIT licensing fees.

It doesn't seem like tuition can keep growing at the rates that it has to make up the shortfall from government research cuts, but what about the other areas?

Bringing it to market requires money and management and luck. Many/most of the promising candidates fall out along the way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decre...

edit: to clarify I am arguing against putting in the effort on my own expense which benefits the company because I need to foot the bill which the company should have, so I am not arguing against such self-improvement which obviously benefits me

There is also a tendency to overlook the fact that pursuing a PhD is a form of professional work, comparable in commitment and responsibility to other careers. Sometimes 699, sometimes 700. Academia can indeed be a challenging environment, and not everyone contributes in the same way—some may prioritize credentials over substance, and cases of research misconduct do exist. However, these examples definitely do not represent the academic community as a whole.

Regarding the venture-capital approach, in applied sciences, researchers are increasingly expected to present their ideas in short, pitch-style formats. At some point, this process itself becomes the goal of the work. I can imagine this encouraging concise communication. Still, it also shifts part of the management responsibilities—such as market analysis and outreach—onto scientists, which does not align with their core expertise or professional goals.

1.The government should periodically review how many funded research projects are successfully completed and lead to tangible outcomes.

2. The government should ensure that research funding is properly utilized for the intended purposes, so that resources are used effectively and efficiently.

3. It is necessary to study how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to reduce the cost and duration of research while accelerating scientific experimentation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield

If you know; you know. #ARPA

is that i’m sure even the CEOs would rather live in a world with anesthesia, MRIs, wifi, gps, etc

yet they greedily prefer to personally gain money because they cannot see that they would be richer in a world with { what would be discovered if we had science }

it’s just that you cannot miss what you already don’t have, if they could only see what would be possible, what we could achieve, the would go nuts about how slow we are moving

You can't stop innovation across the planet, you will lose control over time as adversaries continue to innovate and subsume antiquated control structures.

Prior to this, if a corporation wanted to have exclusive rights to basic patents, they'd have to run their own private research labs to generate those patents. Prior to Bayh-Dole, university inventions were patented but there were no exclusive licensing deals. This means no competitive advantage; anyone can use license the patents (I believe any US citizen) before Bayh-Dole.

So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships; on the academic side we saw the rise of the shady enterpreneurial researcher whose business plan was to use government funds to generate patents (not uncommonly based on fraudulent research) which formed the basis of a start-up which was sold to a major corporation.

The fix is simple: patents generated with taxpayer dollars at American universities should be available to any American citizen for a small licensing fee; if people want exclusive rights to patents, they need to put up the capital for the research institution themselves, as was the case with Bell Labs. Practically, this starts with a repeal of Bayh-Dole.

The biggest reason why companies don't seek to emulate "Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE", is probably that it reads like a list of textbox examples of "companies that failed to execute on their research findings", so clearly there was something wrong with this approach.

Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. Wall Street did not approve of this position, but Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter. Most CEOs are not going to take such a strong position when they, the stockholders, and every other executive can be guaranteed a financial reward through a buyback.

This could start to change if present US hostility towards all things foreign results in a shift in investment and migration.

The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat.

Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.

Diploma mill universities in my state are consolidating the smaller STEM universities and trade schools to build football and sports programs, gyms, and "lifestyle" amenities.

This university in particular [1] mints basket weaving degrees and has used consolidation to build sports programs [2] and lavish facilities for sports.

It's also been a revolving door of politician to high-ranking, high-compensation executive staff positions.

This university [3] has used funding to acquire properties from the state, such as the 1996 Olympic Stadium [4].

Neither of these universities does real, impactful research. The latter is ranked as an R1, but everyone at the "real" R1s in our state will tell you this is a fabrication. They're diploma mills and extract six figures from their student body. They turn this money into sports facilities and upper level faculty pay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_University

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_Owls_football

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_State_University

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium

And this is just mentioning a sample of admin bloat, never mind the other areas.

When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.

This is not true at my state flagship R1 institution. Tuition and fees make up a little over 10% of the institution's total revenue. General funding provided in our state budget provides a larger percentage of the total revenue to the university and federal research funding provides an even larger percentage than the state.

The essential takeaway here is that our state taxes subsidize the actual cost of providing education to in-state students. In-state students are mandated to be at least 80%-ish of students.

The professors in the STEM fields are required to raise a significant percentage of their salary via research grants ("soft" money), teaching, and service work. The non-STEM professors are more often funded via "hard" money - eg, the institution has committed to pay the salary of history professors.

I googled and apparently a little more than 70% of undergraduate students in the US attend public schools. I don't know much about how funding works at the private universities that have the other 30% of undergraduate students.

I'm very skeptical of this claim.

In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants. If you invent something, the school will take 70% of the revenue from the innovation. Much like VC, some big wins can power the school for years.

Actually, most highly productive research universities use the research as a prestige magnet and marketing tool to help grow endowments and keep up in the US News college rankings.

I would be great if the funding weren't so opaque. We may be able to find accounting info for the public univeristies. I would bet money that, Liberal arts tuition likely goes into administration, endowments, and campus improvements for student life (better food in the dining halls...)

There's a chance that it didn't actually happen that way, though.

edit: I also heard that Louis Pasteur did work for breweries, answering the question "Why do some batches come out nasty while most are fine, given the same inputs?"

Military spending is largely economic dead weight, roughly the equivalent of handouts. And the end result is deterrence in a game of prisoners dilemma. Yet it is sacrosanct, and subject to ever increasing budgets for no gain.

That, combined with stock buybacks and the general take over of Friedman-economics resulted in a far more focused short term thinking and outsourcing research as much as possible due to uncertain horizon risks.

If they had evaluated 1993 the discovery would be called useless and a waste of money.

As basic research transitions to engineering, things built from the current knowledge base, if suitably updated, should be useful. And work within the training set should go well.

Outpaced? What does that even mean? The whole point is they have different roles and goals. And you need them all, if you cut basic research all the downstream stuff will suffer.

What you’re describing is at least partly engineering and product design, not pure science

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262731423/the-idea-factory/

- the current system works for the benefit of US industry, military, and the economy

- the current system has delivered real results over many decades

- nobody has proposed how an alternate solution would work ("use AI" is not an answer)

- much less an alternate that has been tested at all

- even much less an alternate that has shown any results

A sensible approach would be to do trials of other approaches before making changes that will ensure Americans are poorer for decades than they otherwise would be.

There is no Ozempic without federal funds for basic research to identify GLP-1. (Nordisk started their research downstream of the US taxpayer's contributions.)

GPT-4, as its builders would certainly admit, is a descendant of early work in the field. This work involves a significant amount of work funded by DoD.

None of this is to detract from these products. But there is no point in pretending that e.g. rocket research is not generally funded by militaries (governments), on which SpaceX built.

In general, if you a citing something with a brand name and a trademark, you are talking about something that is not basic research. Basic research in the US is overwhelmingly government-funded for the simple reason that companies do not invest on the time horizons required and in general cannot take on the amount of risk entailed.

It's not perfect but if you replace the system you're gonna find the same sorts or errors since it's impossible to accurately guess future value of uncertain engineering projects.

Yes, there was a Mansfield amendment and a would-be 'nother Mansfield amendment. It had some (waves hands) ever-unarticulated effect on defense funding of research. Motivations of Mansfield are never articulated. Seems so self-defeating to not describe.

Which should only tell us what a cancer HR departments are. Filtering someone from talking to the hiring department, for the crime of doing a PhD, and telling others about it - to me this sounds more likely like someone getting a kick out of wielding the bit of power they have over others than a useful contribution to society.