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Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research?
thesandbender writes "The recent post about GM opening its own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise ... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions are two of the pinnacles of 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the '70s and that's when the US started its slow decline. To be true to the 'Ask Slashdot' theme, what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?"
The US government is funding research. A lot of it. So much that a giant company like GM opening a *single* research lab is big news. Either directly (through grants and contracts) or indirectly (through tax incentives) the government is funding much of the industrial research that is done anyway.
Why has science stalled since the 70s? That's when the number of physicists being trained exceeded the demand. The job market for physicists tanked and has never recovered (due to an excess of government funding for training). Physics became very competitive (rather than collaborative), and focused on making very small incremental changes in niche areas so that you could keep your job (big risks are bad, now). We've make tremendous scientific progress, but the system isn't designed for rock-star leaders and breakthroughs any more. More industrial labs will only change that until growth saturates again.
We need to either stop training too many physicists (and make sure we're not doing the same with other fields), or live with what we have (which does work well, for anyone who is not a physicist). To encourage risk (and thus greater... or at least flashier scientific rewards), we need more long term grants and contracts (long term being >10 years). If I know a several year project can fail, but I'll still be able to pay the rent, I'm more likely to try something new. To actually answer the question, I would put those grants in solar fuel research.
Exactly. The US is spending 2.6% of GDP on R & D. It is number two in the G7. Obama has said he wants to bring the spending up to 3.0%.
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From the Brookings Institution.
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/0423_canada_nivola.aspx
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 1999 basically overturned Glass Steagall. Take a look at any housing bubble chart you'd like. When did the spike start? About the same time the deregulation fantasy took effect, and corporations knowingly created bad mortgages and passed off the bad debt as good debt because no one had their eye on them. In summary, they knowingly created huge leveraged risks in order to pocket huge comissions and leave someone else holding the assets. If you can come up with a more plausible explanation, please go ahead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
The highest tax bracket was 80% in 1939. Today it's 35%.
I pray to God that you get what you just wished for.
Sorry in advance for the long response, as a plant biologist I run into a lot of these questions again and again. Hopefully some of this is of interest to you.
I'm something of a libertarian myself, and yeah Monsanto has way too large a share of the seed market for my comfort. Competition is always a good thing and the seed market could use more of it.
That said, let me see if I can do anything to reduce the scariness of Monsanto. First thing you need to realize is that they do have significant competition. Pioneer Hi-bred and Syngenta, the number two and number three companies in the seed business (and to a lesser extent Dow and Bayer) are spending heavily on research to match Monsanto's genetic resources. Beyond those companies, there are still a number of significant companies focused on traditional plant breeding techniques. In critical crops such as grains Monsanto controls less than half of seed sales in the US, and a fraction of that worldwide.
The crops monsanto has the largest share of the market in are vegetables where total seed sales aren't enough to support much competition. Even for these crops, checks and balances exist, in the form of public university crop breeders, and the National Plant Germplasm System that preserves diverse crop lines from pretty much every crop species you could think of, so seeds are available from both these sources.
As for terminator technology (sterile crops), that's the one thing I don't get people worrying about. Sure Monsanto could deploy this technology, there are still going to be plenty for fertile crops around from their competitors, universities, and seed blanks, and by definition, sterile plants can't cross contaminate other plants. That'd be like inheriting sterility from your father. If your father were truly sterile you'd never have been born. (Recessive alleles make the picture a little more complicated, but the bottom line remains, sterile plants are always going to quickly and simply selected against by either natural or artificial selection.)
So in summary, while Monsanto has more control over the seed market than should ever be concentrated in a single company, this doesn't give them the power to take over the world/cut off our food supply. Other sources of crop seeds would simple expand into their market share. It gives them the power to charge too much for their products, treat farmers poorly, and keep technologies that could be live-savers out of the hands of the third world farmers than need them the most.
the war between the US and Britain was a stalemate
It always amuses me to hear Americans talk about the war of 1812, as if there was only one of any import. And there was; the French invasion of Russia, which was the beginning of the end of Napoleon's empire and changed the political landscape for Europe and the colonies. By 1812, Britain had been at war with France for 9 years, and would continue to be for another 3 years. 1812 came right in the middle of the Peninsula War, where the Spanish, Portuguese, and British, were repelling the French invasion.
With this background, it's hardly surprising that the British navy didn't devote much by way of resources to a sideshow. The point of the war - to stop the Americans supporting an aggressive empire-building regime in Europe - became irrelevant with Waterloo, and the war ended.
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The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake [...]
I guess you never heard of the Space Race.
The current space program could be, more accurately, described as "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Compare NASA's funding level now, to when we had a more concrete goal.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
This effect is why you see so many exciting scientific reports, like "Scientists cure 10 kinds of cancer in mice with white blood cell treatment!" or whatever, that never even go into human studies or trials, much less make it to the drugstore.
you could not be more wrong. The reason that you have these kinds of reports is that the scientists doing the research are not the ones writing the press releases, never mind the actual articles that get published. Most employees in the press and in corporate/university press offices are not scientists. They are Humanities majors, and don't know shit about how science actually works. Terms like Goodness of Fit, Extrapolation, and the difference between conclusions and implications are lost on these people. Their job is to make headlines, not report the facts accurately.
2) Potential medicines or treatments that may be extremely useful but cannot be patented and so never get funding for research, because the company who spent 15 million to do the research would immediately get outcompeted by other companies who wouldn't have to recoup the research investment. Hundreds of these exist. For example, scientists discovered decades ago that the hormone progesterone dramatically increases the speed of wound healing (first noticed when it was observed that pregnant mice heal faster than other mice). It has never been studied as a potential treatment for wounds, however, because progesterone can't be patented.
Progesterone is a steroid hormone, and as a result has anti-inflamatory properties. The reason that it aids in wound healing is that it suppresses certain components of the immune system. Fine if there is no contamination of the wound because it prevents inflamation from causing the wound to get worse before it gets better. However, if there is bacteria already present then this is a bad idea, becase the infection will do even more damage that the attenuated immune response will take longer to control. There is no need to look at progesterone within the scope you describe because we already understand how it does this, why, and why we shouldn't use it in most cases. In cases where we do want to suppress an overactive immune response, there are other drugs (many not under patent) that physicians prefer to use.
I'm not knocking the idea of government funded health research, but I can assure you that they already do that. Most biomedical research in this country is funded directly by federal agencies to the tune of several hundred billion (if it's not now up into the trillions collectively) dollars a year.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Also if you're only counting Wars, then you haven't really been paying attention.
...
... they will twist and turn words for hours before ever finally admitting its what they really think, yet they prove it throughout their actions not their words).
Governments compete for resources in more ways than simply wars.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War#Application_outside_the_military
Which is why this thinking from the title info is flawed (when applied to Governments)
"You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free."
Governments compete for resources and use (and work with) businesses to compete for resources. Therefore they are more likely to want to protect what they give to a business by making it closed information that prevents competitor (countries as well as) businesses just taking and using it to compete against them. Governments are playing effectively giant chess games with their resources trying to out smart their opponents at every turn.
Its a nice sharing world idea to just give the information away and then everyone benefits from it but the current world doesn't work that way.
Governments are exceptionally competitive in their outlook as they are filled with very competitive people all trying to climb up to ever greater levels of political power. Its no wonder then that they apply that same competitive thinking to everything they do. The same is true of high up corporate people in big businesses so its no wonder they want to work with politicians. Money and power used to make more money and power.
Our world throughout history has been composed of people holding one of two Utopian views which are ironically mutually exclusive. What some people want other people don't want and so we get two opposing groups each wanting something the other doesn't want.
Therefore if you want a sharing world, you will not get that by appointing competitive political suits to the role of managing the world as they don't want a world where everything is shared out. They don't even want to compete. They simply want to be in control and won't let others have a chance to compete if they can at all avoid it. (Meanwhile they will happily use divide on concur on all they wish to control). The rules they use to maintain control vary around the world, but ultimately they are still in control. So their thinking centers around means of maintaining control. Concepts of sharing are wrong as far as they are concerned, as they could then inadvertently be helping their competitors. Its therefore no wonder they so often bias towards seeking means of control.
Its for this reason I find our current time of witnessing the earliest moments of the growth of the Internet is utterly fascinating The Internet is growing out of the concepts of sharing knowledge. Its mutually exclusive to the concepts of control and yet its clear the majority of people around the world want to be able to sharing knowledge. (Exactly what they appointed politicians (and big business) doesn't want, but try ever getting that straight answer out politicians
Its fascinating that we are watching the world trying to come to terms with the concepts of sharing knowledge. Open source is another one of these battle ground areas where some think it should be closed and so they can maintain control over it (and want to maintain control over it).
I think we really are at a turning point in human history. Which way it goes who knows, but I can't help thinking the people in power don't want the Internet the way it is and would sooner use it to find new ways to control.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.