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Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?
theodp writes "Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years, challenges BusinessWeek. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem. So what's the answer? Basic research can repair the broken US business model, argues BW, saying it's the key to new, high-quality job creation. Scientific research legends like Bell Labs, Sarnoff Corp, and Xerox PARC are essentially gone, or shadows of their former selves. And while IBM, Microsoft, and HP collectively spend $17B a year on R&D, only 3%-5% of that is for basic science. In a post-9/11 world, DARPA's mission has shifted from science to tactical projects with short-term military applications. Cutting back on investment in basic science research may make great sense in the short term, but as corporations and government make the same decision to free-ride off the investments of others, society suffers the 'tragedy of the commons,' wherein multiple actors operating in their self-interest do harm to the overall public good. We've reached that point, says BW, and we're just beginning to see the consequences. The cycle needs to be reversed, and it needs to be done quickly."
We've invested in basic research here in Ireland, and the government is being criticised for it (link to Irish Times opinion piece).
Certainly there is a problem here in Ireland that there are a lack of opportunities for those who've acheived a PhD qualification through basic research. Already a lot of even ordinary degree graduates in science and technology have emigrated from Ireland, and the number of entrants into such undergraduate courses is dropping year by year.
However, possibly there's nothing inherently wrong with investing so much in basic research and the issues arise merely from the ineptitude of those running this country and the blind voting that such a section of the populance do for the current ruling party - who've throughout Ireland's history acheived lots of public support but attempted to ruin the country at various stages (starting with the Civil War, continuing with the economic war with the UK in the 1930s, going crazy in the 1970s even abolishing car tax to win votes as the country went bankrupt, deliberately facilitating a property bubble after the dot-com crash, attempting to have the taxpayers continue to pay into the Ponzi scheme with a unique Irish version of the bad bank - i.e. pay speculative amounts to banks for bad loans and attempt to keep prices up until a new bubble is created).
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NASA used to have research labs, too-- Ames and Lewis and Langley-- but years of cuts to the research budget and redirection has pretty much eliminated most of the work that doesn't have a near-term engineering payoff for a funded project. There's just no real constituancy to funding research.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually, Social Security is the biggest chunk of the national budget at 21.05%. The Department of Defense is 16.85%. Actually if you add SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services you get 49.72% for social programs. Also, interest on the National Debt is budgeted at 8.5%. That leaves 25% left for things like Education, NASA, DOE, DHS, DOJ, EPA, NSF, Federal LE, etc.
mmmmm pie
If you want the literal answer to this question, they're part of Alcatel-Lucent now, after being part of Lucent Technologies since AT&T spun them off in the 90s.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Bell Labs was a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone company. Since the telephone company was a regulated utility, and a monopoly, the US government did not allow it to commercialize many of its discoveries and inventions. UNIX for instance was "given away" with a license to universities (e.g. UC Berekely), companies, and the government.
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
According to Apple's 3rd quarter results (that is, for the quarter that ended June 27th), Apple spent $341M out of $1351M total operating expenses on research and development. The subtitle of the report was "Best Non-Holiday Quarter Revenue and Earnings in Apple History". So Apple's business model certainly isn't broken, despite decent-sized expenditures on R&D.
It's not all funny ads. Apple's earning their success.
Isn't comparing the number against tax receipts a bit misleading because total budget is going to be >100% of tax receipts when you're running a deficit.
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I object to Intellect without Discipline.
They're looking for talented engineers and scientists with LOTS of imagination to take important projects from concept to reality! Check out their website and apply if you want to turn this trend around!
Back when I was doing my undergrad, Disney send some recruiters over to try to get people to sign up for summer internships. They sent fliers around that included that "free access to disney parks" crap and said they were giving a presentation to explain the details. I thought, "summer internship at disney. Could be kind of cool." I convinced my roommate to go with me to check it out.
Well, I'll say one thing for them: they're not liars. I listened to their presentation while they gave everyone there every reason not to apply. The most important one being, "we don't really pay you enough to make any money. You probably can break even, but you'll most likely end up spending more money on rent and food than you'll get paid." Then they told us all how awesome it was because it was Disney! And you had free admission to theme parks and discounts on merch! And all you need to do to apply is fill up this form!
My roommate and I both essentially said, "fuck that," but it was a lesson on the advantages of being a huge and famous company, especially one in the entertainment business. There were no lack of other people filling up those forms and disney gets some seriously cheap labor.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
But the "R&D" Apple is talking about is the Silicon Valley jargon for "Product Development." This is not even close to the Basic Research of the OP.