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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.
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.
Lobbyists and insurance companies are what got us into this mess.
Doctors and medical establishments learned that they had insurance companies by the balls at one point. Approved procedure could cost whatever they wanted, and insurance would pay it. Then they got all butthurt because real people couldn't afford to pay that much at all. Then insurance companies got revenge when everyone decided that doctors were a blank check in terms of lawsuit money. Insurance companies then offered insurance against lawsuits to the doctors, for a very high price.
So now what we have is a system where it costs two weeks worth of pay for the average American to get a single fucking X-ray that department stores were doing for free in the 60s. Of course I expect the expert opinion of the doctor to cost some money, but its ridiculous. And one of the reasons is because of this never ending war between doctors, lawsuits, and insurance companies.
I say we research some way to break the cycle. Like maybe making doctors and medical establishments explain why that aspirin costs a patient $100, when the entire bottle of 500 costs them 5% of that if they were to buy it themselves at a wholesale pharmacy.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
End of transmission...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
America has a hard time being at peace in the present world because, as the top dog and de facto world policeman, we inevitably get drawn into everyone's little spats.
We flirted with colonialism circa 1900, decided we didn't really like it too much, then got involved in WWI. Managed to hide from war for 22 years, got violently drawn into WWII. Since then I think it comes down to, we've decided it's better to intervene in those little spats before they turn into world wars. Because world wars suck.
And I'll come down tentatively on the side of our involvement being good... If we don't want to play World Policeman I'm sure China would be happy to step in.
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.
I'd suspect that China's refusal to support intervention has less less to do with wanting to leave everyone alone and more with just opposing it because it's the West.
Remember, China (or at least its government) is still a Leninist state. They may have opened up trade and dabbled in the free market, but that's just because they realized a complete command economy just doesn't work. China's like a drug dealer, in a way--we're both quite happy to do business, because it makes him rich and gets us high... but he certainly doesn't have our best interests at heart. They've been laughing all the way to the bank for a couple decades now.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
I'm starting to see this more and more. People seem to think that party politics has civil war as some kind of eventuality, and merrily throw out the idea that it's time for a revolution. Of course, every single person who does it seems to think a violent uprising is somehow easier to establish than it is to disestablish our current political parties from their currently entrenched positions.
I mean, really. You think a country of 300 million people would fight itself before reorganizing a political party structure? Really?
Every single person, including the both of you two, seem to like the idea of tossing out a phrase like "me too, I'm in for the revolution", as if your token resistance to power structure is accomplishing anything. I hate to tell you this, but it isn't, because the only thing it does is engender similar sentiment, rather than do anything even remotely productive.
Anyone who shares an earnest similar sentiment is completely out of touch with reality and does not, it seems, understand the political structures that have made great this country function so well for almost a quarter of a millennium.
The American Revolution wasn't a bunch of people saying "me too, I hate those faggots" about the British. It was a mostly educated populace subjected to various transgressions which escalated to the point where self-governance was the only option. Without the clear thinking and intelligence of the majority of the people who fought as rebels to form a new government, it would have been an almost comically bad failure, and only almost comical because of the number of deaths it surely would have produced for no real benefit.
You two, and everyone like you, keep on writing your "me too, this sux", if you wish. But please don't delude yourself into thinking you are in any way similar to the founding fathers of the USA. You are children in school, who dislike their somewhat strict teacher, writing on your desks about how much he sucks, and will accomplish just as much.
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.
As the Taliban advance through Pakistan the President of the United States of America Barack Obama requested for increased presence from NATO allies. He did not get it
One only has to look at the funding the US spends on their military to see who is doing the bulk of the heavy lifting in ensuring the safety of the West. The West being Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand, Japan, Israel, South Korea and what is becoming of India. And let us not forget that it was the US playing world police who saved Europe in WWII, changed Japan from a militaristic empire to the Western democracy that they are now, brought South Korea from poverty to wealth and has been a staunch ally of the only truly western country in the middle east.
I get tired of (in particular European) psuedo-intellectuals who proclaim a general distain for US foreign policy while they sit in the luxury provided by the protection of the US defense forces. I get tired of the people who believe that the US should never intervene themselves in foreign conflict, or alternatively believe that the US should involve itself in every foreign conflict. The US won the cold war not by physically conquering the Russian state but by ensuring that enough countries around the world remained free so as to be able to destroy communism through economy instead of bombs.
Iraq is a touchstone issue that divides right and left around the world. It symbolises US interventionist tactics in a way that Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea and WWII could not. The US is no longer engaged in the cold war. It no longer has a great evil to overcome. But the US realises as a nation that if they allow small evils to grow that they become great evils. The US realises that the funding that Iraq was providing to terrorists probably would not reach US shores, but would be focussed on Lebanon and Israel and eventually would cross into European and asian countries.
The real lessons that the US learned, but that Europe seems to have missed out of WWI and WWII is that ideology is the most dangerous weapon and the most likely to bring destruction down on us all. Muslim extremism (-1 troll mod points right there) has already turned the prosperous jewel of the middle east - Lebanon - into a wartorn and unstable country who have no real, credible hope of being stable in the near future. It was being financially supported largely from oil money from Iraq and Iran, and though the two countries hated each other more than they hated the West, we were still caught in its clutches.
The US can do no right in the eyes of those who are wilfully blind. If she turns away from intervention then the world calls her crass, rude and evil for not addressing the injustice. If she goes to war against the evil and does everything in her power to minimise the loss of life on both sides she is accused of being warmongerers and extremists. The US cannot win such an argument and making it is only endangering the whole of western civilisation - the civilisation that has largely managed to feed, clothe and house its citizens and provided medical care and prosperity to the people as a whole.
Communism is largely dead now and we have the US to blame. When the US conquers the power behind religious extremism the US will again be the cause. Isn't that a country worth giving the benefit of the doubt? Isn't that a country worth cutting a little slack?