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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?"
From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise... but has an amazing record for driving innovation during war-time.
obviously we need to get on the ball and invade china.
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
We ran out of German scientists =/
Raw research properly conducted on unexplored issues always discovers something. Either the experiment worked or it did not, and either way, something was learned. It always pays dividends - if not in new products and methods, in the avoidance of the repetition of failed experiments. This doesn't help the profits of the corporations that fund the election of political tools. That's progress. Progress is not the government's goal. The purposes of government are to ensure its persistence and toward that goal to deplete the surplus productivity so as to eliminate a surfeit of leisure. An excess of leisure is an invitation to insurrection.
TFS is correct that the US government forgot these things for a while, but they've remembered them since.
But... to answer the question: the big and the small. The fast and the slow. The literal, the virtual and the speculative. Most importantly, how to get offsite backup on the human genome. If we don't do that then nothing else matters.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient
Of course you're right. Government research is always so wasteful and inefficient. Remember that DARPAnet thing? What a dumb idea! Fortunately, it sank like every inefficient government research program inevtably will, and we can now discuss the glories of the Invisible Hand here on free-market forums such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The National Institutes of Health annual budget: $29 billion. That money funds most of the university biomedical research in the US http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm Current NIH funded projects include among other things the human genome, the human microbiome, almost all cancer research in the US, obesity, diabetes, communicable diseases.. The National Science Foundation has an extramural grant budget of $6 billion. The Department of Energy has an extramural research grant budget of $24 billion Among other things they fund alternative energy research, genomic research, You might say the US federal government should be funding more, but you cannot say it is not funding anything at all. The space race and the Manhattan project were both driven by wars: WWII and the Cold War. Maybe that is what it takes for a government to fund major research: fear of losing power and primacy to an opponent.
End of transmission...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I blame the baby-boomers, they were raised on idea of continual gain of benefits. Whether it was from capitalism, increased government benefits, or lower taxes. They continually have driven everything out of total self interest an screw society.
You say I am crazy? It was not my generation that,
I may be generalizing about baby boomers as a whole, but the leadership from my generation has not become CEOs, congressmen or senators, the baby boomers have.
It was the 80's. reagan and the neo-cons PURPOSELY cut the RD in science that we had back then. MASSIVE CUTS. The idea was that the large number of RD labs that we had would do the work. Bell Labs, Watson Labs, Ge Labs and nearly all major labs were killed, cut, or moved to other nations. Basically, the RD labs that we had were tied to the gov's huge budgets as well as our education, which was THE TOPS. Now, they are simply moved elsewhere and we have been witness to the largest 30 year dismantling of one of the few historical superpower nations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Why does the government exists to pave roads? Or pick up "trash" and maintain parks?
If you're happy to run road builders and private street cleaners out of business then why not battery research firms? Why is that tiny sector more deserving of protection than a large landowner who wants to build a dam, lay pipe and sell the water?
Bring a bit of consistency to your ideals for goodness sake, you say the government exists to do x,y,z someone else says that it exists to do a,b and z and someone else says they exist to do a-z. The truth is the government exists to do whatever the people consent to them doing. If that means researching batteries then that is the choice of the people. Whether it's a good or bad choice is another story.
- I await the people trying to figure out which political stripe they can flame me as.
There is surely a market for long lasting batteries, and as in the case of GM, companies have been investing heavily in new technologies. How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient, because we all know that government departments are the model of efficiency?
You've answered your own question. For profit corporations are not good research vehicles, because they are too efficient at raising profits. This means they will efficiently allocate resources to researching technology with obvious (near) immediate commercial returns. So yes, you'll get research on longer lasting batteries (if only so that they can be patented and kept off the market as long as possible), and GM, etc. However the areas of science which might be today's equivalent to the physics of electricity or of genetics will not be discovered by this kind of effcient R&D.
Corporate research is excellent at delivering technological improvements, less so at fostering scientific innovation.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
In basic, the "Guvmint" exists to keep us safe and provide basic infrastructure. I would add in water, police, firemen... Oh, and the EPA, FDA, etc. we need those kinds of watchdog agencies.
Does the government own GM now? ... No. No it does not. It's just a big shareholder.
You seem to place great store in the ability of the "market" to innovate. You bash the government for being inefficient. Have you ever worked for a large company? Man.... Trust me, the government doesn't have a monopoly on being stupid and slow.
And so freaking what if government did open source a battery and undermined a companies research dollars? Really... so what? Who gave companies some kind of right? No one is guaranteed the right to profit.
I'm rather tired of this magic land where companies would do what's best for all of us due to the power of the "free market". You know what? The first thing most successful and large companies do is strangle the free market to death so they can retard innovation and competition. It's happened over and over again in pretty much every single industry I can think of. Don't go crying Commie on me... I love the theory of capitalism. It turns human greed into technological progress. It's awesome... but there has to be limits and consequences to the behaviour of large companies. And man, they do NOT need any protections!
Think of this... Big business pays almost no taxes. They create something, sometimes with government subsidies or loans. They sell it to us at a profit. Then they dump their waste into the public rivers. We pay for them to make stuff. We pay to get the stuff. Then we pay to clean up the waste from the process. W.T.F!
Oops... calm down... no ranting... It's ok..... Phew!
I love it when the government does research and puts the results out there. Everyone benefits and we all pay so very little for such a big gain. That's the magic of government. It doesn't have to be driven by the almighty Profit. It can do the right thing at a loss, just because it needs to be done. We all benefit, and our slice of the payment is so very tiny.
People whine about the inefficiency of the government, then they drive on the roads, enjoy the protections of police and firemen, use the public school systems, buy homes that aren't death traps thanks to building codes, reap the benefits of cheap shipping due to interstate highways..... etc etc etc.
ah, ah... calm... yes....
For my two cents, I would love to see the government do basic research in:
batteries and capacitors. We need this very badly.
infrastructure... build high speed rails so we can ship a house across the country for a nickel.
Power savings... Why isn't there an open source home design for builders to use? Seriously, something so simple....
I could go on, but those would be a nice start.
-Tony
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.
Because the immediate problem is the recession.
GM can't build an electric car if the company goes into liquidation. GM can't sell an electric car if its dealers go into liquidation.
Mechanics can't service an electric car if they go bankrupt with their suppliers.
Infrastructure once damaged is very difficult and expensive to rebuild.
You have to stop the bleeding first.
Research isn't a panacea.
It would be easy to aquander $10 billion on projects that have no realistic prospect of success within a reasonable time frame.
The geek isn't an unbiased observer here.
It should be obvious that a very generous cut of that $10 billion he wants the government to spend will be headed his way - and not to the auto worker on the line in Detroit.
Frankly ,looking over the constitutional powers allotted to the federal government they have no f**king business buying businesses, funding research, baling businesses out, or a large host of other "responsibilities" they have taken on illegally. They're supposed to protect our borders and manage to screw that up. Run a post office, they do a lousy job of that. Supposed to regulate interstate commerce which they interpret to mean "involve themselves in anything they want to" rather than just making sure trade amongst the several states is fair. They are supposed to collect tariffs on imports rather than tax the citizenry. They seem to screw up just about everything. What's worse is the population of complete morons who continually vote for Democrats and/or Republicans and expect things to change for the better rather than staying the same. Even worse the population is made up of liberal sissy wymynists who would rather cower than do anything about it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
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%.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Private companies don't do basic research because basic research might or might not be profitable and if it might be profitable, then only in very long term. Private companies don't think in long term.
Also, stop bullshitting yourself in thinking that free market puts research dollars where they will be most beneficial. Free market researches everything what might bring a short term profit. It doesn't have to be beneficial at all and often it isn't.
Putting research dollars where they will buy the most votes, on the other hand, is doing research on what the public wants. And in many cases the public wants beneficial things.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
All Hail and Worship the Invisible Hand!
A lot of people just don't get it.
Governments are not inherently less efficient than corporations. Just go look at various private companies (big and small) they're not all lean mean super efficient entities. Far from it.
And it's not a matter of size. It's a matter of quality.
You can have good or bad quality government (whether big or small).
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
And guess what, the Invisible Hand only does what the people want to do.
If only the bad guys want to be politicians, the voters will have to pick the least crappy.
If the voters keep voting for more crappy instead of less crappy, it doesn't help...
If only the lazy inefficient people want to work in the civil service, that doesn't help either.
It's like all the cells in your body doing all that hard work just for your body to not fall apart overnight. A poor good:bad cell ratio, and the body falls apart sooner.
I read an interesting opinion piece the other day, it said that American government is inefficient because Americans expect it to be inefficient. It lives up to our expectations. What competent person wants to be a civil servant when they expect that it will be a waste of their time and effort? Why would they do that when people are just going to complain about them, no matter WHAT they do? If you're going to go through all that pain, you might as well work for yourself. On the other hand, government social nets in some places work out pretty well. Check out flexicurity in Denmark, it's pretty cool.
The purpose of government is to execute the collective will of society. We as a people decided to get together and made a contract to create this organization to take care of certain things for us. If the collective will is only to pave roads and protect the borders, then that's what it will result in. If the collective will includes things like, making sure people don't starve to death in the streets or die of easily curable diseases, then that's what will happen. As it is, most people in the US are interested in some sort of health care system, which is why all the major candidates had a health plan. If the will of the people includes funding science or landing on the moon, or enslaving blacks, then it tends to happen, for better or for worse.
Agreed on the Camaro.
Qxe4
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.
This one's really obvious to me: biomedical research, particularly where there is not a profit motive. There are two main classes of potential medicines that never make it to the shelf for stupid reasons.
1) Discoveries made in a lab that are never moved forward into a practical technology, often because there are only so many drug companies who only have so much time, and they have out competed smaller companies that might otherwise do additional research. 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.
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.
Many examples fit both categories 1 and 2. The easy solution, especially in case #2, is for the government to fund the research for the public good, and let all companies manufacture any successful resulting products it as low-cost generics.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.