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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."
There is a really simple idea on how to get more basic research... PAY MORE!!!
Seriously, in a world where artists, movie actors, athletes get completely outrageous salaries (let alone wall street and executives) the answer can be easily found.
It used to be in the old days that you should learn a profession before becoming a professional athlete, actor, etc. Now the payoff of these fields far outweigh learning a "real" field. Look at MTV and this weird chick who thinks that she has talent. In fact want to see what the youth has become look at MTV reality in general...
What do I do? I work in a hedge fund, even though I am a professional mechanical engineer who used to "build real things". I can actually build robots, and industrial production machinery. Because of my upbringing (German) it was ingrained to me to build "real things". I moved to finance because I am of the motto, "if you can't beat them, join them... Your life is too short..."
Researchers have been sounding this alarm for years, if not decades. But what makes this significant is hearing it from the likes of BusinessWeek. If the Wall Street Journal ever catches on, we might be close to some real change. On the other hand, they are sure to think the solution to tragedy of commons is stronger IP laws rather than more investment in commons.
The capitalist system IS the business model. There's no money to be made in basic research when you can sell shitty packaged "solutions" consisting mostly of off-the-shelf hardware.
An example: The Army uses mobile PCs with touchscreens that are given out to soldiers in the field. They're made by Toshiba, I believe. What do they run? Windows with some shitty full-screen GUI. Yes, they do crash. The defense budget takes the biggest chunk of the USA's budget. Even with all that money, they still get utter crap peddled to them by "system integrators". How can this be?
Business plan:
1. determine how to maximize profit no matter what
2. repeat indefinitely
Government spending on R&D? That's socialism! I thought everyone knew that taxes are bullshit. It's not like government funded basic research ever gave us anything useful like the transistor.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
All of you Genetisists with your fancy degrees start discovering stuff, but remember if you start playing god again we are going to complain to the governement...
All of you Nuclear Physists start making your reactors and glowey things, but not in my back yard! I don't want that nuclear waste making my McDonalds Double Cheesburger unhealthy!
The same for all of you green energy people with your wind turbines you need to start building this renewable energy! but not in my neighborhood you're destroying the value on my now worthless house!
Clearly this is everyone's fault except for mine, now if you'll excuse me I'm late for second job delivering pizza's I'm glad I never went to college otherwise I might be expected to do something about this! - The American Public
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years", challenges BusinessWeek. The obvious answer is Greentech. We need to scale wind and solar power production rapidly, for a whole host of reasons. Currently installed base took decades, and is still only 1% of the electric grid, so clearly there is lots of room to expand... and that's not even counting such opportunities as electric cars.
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
Actually, why pay money to do R&D when you can patent generic ideas and then later sue the people who actually do the R&D?
Sometime in the late 60's/early 70's, economists and politicians began to see honest growth based on adding value and fair trade as something that would slow the growth of the US economy, and leave the country unable to pay for the massive military and social programs that we are committed to. How many trillions of dollars were invested in ICBM silos? Strategic Air Command bombers and tankers that are still flying today by the grandchildren of the original pilots because they were never needed in the first place?
We made the switch from scientific and industrial powerhouse to empire. Instead of building factories, we build relationships with dictators. Instead of employing citizens in manufacturing, we exploit peasants in East Asia. I live in Albany, NY. Thanks to government, this area is pretty prosperous. But as you drive west through once-thriving cities like Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, you are a witness to economic devastation as the region declines to a shadow of its former self.
We live in an age of false prosperity, where our chief export is the wealth of the nation.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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!
Having met many IT people who worked for Disney, I assure you that they are some of the brightest people around.
You sometimes hear a remark like "it's a Mickey Mouse operation" intended to suggest that something is a crappy operation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Disney employs many many bright people to offer products & services that will separate you from your money.
Now, Disney could be doing something more productive, but they are very good at what they do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It kind of is.
Ok, fine. There are many collective action problems, and the Tragedy of the Commons is just one of them. If we're being picky, I suppose you should only use "Tragedy of the Commons" to refer to scenarios in which individual incentives cause a shared resource to be used unsustainably. I think the argument is that, metaphorically, there is a shared resource here (and indeed there is) -- scientific knowledge. Now, perhaps you can actually "use up" this resource by exploiting all the economic opportunities it affords. But I will agree that the metaphor of the commons breaks down here, because the problem is NOT that knowledge is being "overused" but that it is being "underproduced."
So the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" is used, maybe, a tiny bit out of place, when simple "Freeriding" would have been a better choice. But I'm ok with that. We can call it synecdoche: The writers are using one element (the Tragedy of the Commons) of the set of collective action problems to refer to the entire set. I can live with that.
This is not exactly true. The fact is that the drug industry is making handsome profit at the prices they sell in Canada, Mexico or Europe. They easily recoup their R&D costs. Besides, R&D expenditures in the pharma industry are relatively small part of their budget. For example marketing costs are about 3 times as much (can you turn on TV and not see an add for a prescription drug?) . Even manufacturing costs are higher. The reason for this is that all the basic research as well as some of the drug development is done by universities and payed by grants from the government (NIH, DoE, DoD, NSF) and non-for-profits. Creators and inventors see a hostile environment for profiting off their works, so they stop investing in creating and inventing.
Creators and inventors do what they do because they enjoy it. Making money is a second or third motivator. If it was the primary goal they would be in marketing selling you stuff from China that you don't need.
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense. Congress decided they wanted to tax high salaried people. Therefore companies found ways around those laws. In comes stock bonuses and stock options. The problem with that is that a highly paid employee (most likely a decision maker) will do what is best for them, which is kick up the stock price so that they get higher effective pay. Easy way to do that, kill long term R&D.
In a capitalistic society management (decision makers or highly paid employees) serves the interest of the stockholders... And most stockholders want money on a short term... Not long term risky investments...
I doubt higher taxes on high incomes has much to do with this...
The solution is not necessarily communism... - But government investments can be a part of the solution... subsidizing certain industries might be an idea too... In Denmark the government subsidized every watt produced using wind energy, thus driving research in this area... In Germany it was solar energy...
no its bureaucratic. "Ph.D level education" != holding a PhD.
A regulated market that prohibits companies from buying each other out when there are only a few players left, protection from lawyer attack and price undercutting for new players entering an established market and anti-monopoly/anti-cartel legislation to round it off.
That's too simple of an answer. Sure, there aren't a whole lot of science PhDs; but there's very little funding as well. Today most professors spend most of their time finding funding, indeed, that seems to be their main job. And there's another big problem. I have a degree. I'm more than employable, I get unsolicited job offers. But I decided to be a PhD student. I make, in the US, less as a PhD student than unemployment, and less than a PhD student in China. Never mind comparing to the 4-6x salary I could have in industry. Never mind that it's harder work and longer hours.
So if you really want more PhDs and more research, the answer is twofold. Pay better, and stop making people that should be doing research spend most of their time going around trying to get funding.
deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor
Call it anecdote, but I find that the people most likely to use the phrase "fruits of ... labor" tend to be the people least likely to have ever performed an hour of true hard labor in their lives.
Like the Rugged Individualist(TM) who goes on and on about how he shouldn't pay taxes and should be able to keep the "fruits of his labor" when it turns out he resets people's passwords and reboots servers for a living.
Pirate Bay is more about copyright. Not too many people go to Pirate Bay to find a torrent of the latest metallurgical advancements.
That depends upon what you mean by "recoup". Are you talking 1=1 where they make back the money they spent only on that project? Or 10x the money? or 100x the money? or where they can keep turning a profit on that research forever just because they were the first ones to get it filed?
No. The "hostile environment" for real research is from patent trolls.
The "hostile environment" for copyright is from one company that wants to keep turning a profit off of a cartoon of a mouse.
Just look at the salaries that are paid in those industries. And the multi-million dollar awards given them by the courts.
The Quote "Basic research can repair the broken US business model [...]" is completely wrong.
For example: Astronomy
Astronomy is basic research. There are alot of politicians and institutions that think "why wasting time and money in astronomy? They just watch stars and cost alot of money, while social problems are growing such as poverty or unemployement". So they cut the funds and or may invest it in another projects which seem to be lucrative in a short-term. That is the wrong way!
Basic research IS very important to the mankind. Another example: the experimental proof of the Bose-Einstein-Condensate. It's been postulated by Bose in 1920's and discovered in 1995. What is the practical use of it? Currently, there is none. But it's a proof to our theories which is very valuable.
Basic research is very important but it's not meant to repair an economy or broken business models. The economy can only be repaired by making right decisions in the politics, by investing money in R&D, investing ALOT of money in public and academic education and of course protecting the environment.
The author from BW took some popular examples but also take mine into consideration. What if your company/country/whatever spends billions of dollars to create a B-E-C and in the end there is no monetary profit from it? It's all about short-term profits, isn't it?
Actually if you add SS, Medicare, Medicaid,
Unemployment and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services
Uhhm No Unemployment is paid through unemployment insurance that employers pay to the government.
The higher your rate of claims against you the higher your rates will be.
Unemployment insurance is a TAX paid by employers, no different than any of the other taxes they pay. I'm not understanding your point in singling that out, as each of those other things in his list are also specific taxes that the government collects to fund those systems. When calculating the government's budget, the add all those sources together for a single statistic, even if the funds are separately collected, accounted and dispensed.
Unemployment in his list is exactly the same as everything else in his list. While medicaid/care are calculated against all costs/claims from beneficiaries, the rates (that we all pay, beneficiaries and otherwise) still rise as claims do.
__
ipsa scientia potestas est
"knowledge itself is power" - Francis Bacon
I submit that both are broken and for the same reason: They want to have their cakes and eat them too.
Business relies heavily on societal infrastructure for end profits, but thinks that contributing to the support and development of the infrastructure is a horrible injustice inflicted upon them: You'll never, ever find a business which factors in the infrastructure items they depend upon because they are assumed to be there to be used, much like mana from heaven. Someone else is expected to put all the various infrastructure elements in place and maintain them so business can reap profits, but what happens when business controls most of the wealth of the society? Who then plans, builds and maintains the infrastructure items necessary for business to function? No one.
America's wealth owners would re-read the children's classic "The Little Red Hen" and throw Ayn Rand in the trash if they're really interested in seeing the U.S. do well in the future.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Today, if a research organization creates something new and exciting, it can generally be duplicated in China in less than a year - often three weeks or so. This eliminates any possibility of the "innovator" reaping any sort of reward for their efforts. What company wants to spend money only to hand a gift over to someone in China?
Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced. The license fee per DVD player is $5, which would translate to around $50 at the retail level. There are plenty of $29.99 DVD players being brought into the US for which no license fee was ever paid. And this is just one example I personally know about. There are thousands more.
So while 50 years ago (or even 30) you could create something new and develop a product based on it. This product would be sold and the developer would get paid. Sometimes, for the right product, it might be "knocked off" in China but the cost differentials were not as they are today. So you could still sell the "original" product for a reasonable price.
Today, between the Internet making it all about lowest price, customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned and labor costs skyrocketing developing a product in the US or Western Europe is pointless - as is the R&D behind it. Why would anyone spend the money on R&D when the fruits of their labor is going to be taken by a foreign operator?
Short answer is, this isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. R&D is dead and buried. We will eventually have some R&D again, but not until the current globalization situation sorts itself out.
Absolute bullshit. The reason we're in the shitter is the extreme focus by business "leaders" on quarterly numbers. R&D of any stripe only detracts from those numbers and therefore gets reamed because of the completely misguided and braindead focus on "maximizing shareholder value".
Face it, the single biggest problem US business face is their own management.
... and the ugliest girl was the prettiest of them all. By definition, if they screwed up the most - or even quite a bit - then they are not the best and the brightest. I think you meant that the people whom many mistakenly considered to be the best and the brightest turned out not to be so great or bright after all.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yes, so many in business and politics don't see their role as American citizens as more important than their making money for personal gain. The accumulation of wealth has become perceived as valuable than personal sacrifice for the common good. To many, the entire concept of collective government is viewed as the problem not the solution.
Driven by self-serving market forces, its an attitude that has permeated nearly every aspect of our culture. Americans today by and large do not see the government budget as their money, rather they see it as someone else's money. This arises in large part because they continue to elect representatives, who represent corporate interests rather than their own. The decline of our political culture (the decline of our economy and scientific infrastructure are merely byproducts) has reached the point that corporations, most obviously in the area of health care, now actually buy politicians and market their own political agendas to keep the gravy flowing and the current system in place, craftily selling them to the foolish, who then proceed to attack their own self-interest. Corporations and corporate media in our "free" markets tout the evils of socialism and brand any collective action for the common good that may affect their self-interest "socialism". The short-sighted and the ideological rigid (conservative) are more than eager to follow their lead.
Sure, the lip service of cheap patriotism is easily paid, but you can count the number who are ultimately willing to pay either higher prices or more taxes for the "greater good" in single digits. The willingness of many to see any kind of collective activity as a sign of "socialism" only emphasizes that the kind of initiative the writer is talking about will more likely take place elsewhere, China, India, Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada, where they more readily accept and recognize that economic and social realities do not come in easily pigeonholed extremes that can be painted black or white. The transition and acceleration of societies more adept at handling and developing collective action other than our own has been picking up steam over the past few decades, particularly in the biosciences where much of the future lies. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing as the collective effort becomes globally rather than nationally oriented.
I think the problem is the proliferation of well funded conservative think tanks (CTTs), with no other agenda than shaping the public discourse, and project their own intellectual dishonesty onto their political opponents. So it makes perfect sense that some people think that there's some sort of liberal conspiracy to bring back socialism, when in fact, most liberals couldn't care less about socialism.
There are liberal think tank, however, they are mostly concerned with environmentalism and social justice. As such, they don't get a pinch of the funding as CTTs.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's interesting there where you try to claim that inferior, higher priced forms of energy are more efficient. If they were more efficient, why wouldn't they be less expensive than fossil fuels? Then we'd just switch to them because they're cheaper -- rather than being forced against our will to pay extra for them and to subsidize them.
Or did you mean "more efficient" at delivering subsidies and windfall profits into the hands of the politically-connected ruling class at the expense of the average American?
The US is __not__ overegulated, it is just poorly regulated, and has far too much politically and socially motivated regulation eg Bush, stem cell lines, [security] Id cards.
Much regulation is either WRONG, or INADAQUATELY ENFORCED, particularly in the finance sector, eg:
(a) Naked Shorts
(b) Incorrect MARK TO MARKET
(c) Capital Adaquacy
(d) Insure un-owned asset
(e) Late transaction settlement
you need the above list fixed before the next implosion or down turn.
No, mostly they are at universities or in other jobs.
Something over 90% of the research staff at Bell Labs was laid off between 2001 and 2005. Last I heard, there were about 6 guys still doing basic research there.
Not one mention of the National Science Foundation which pumps billions of dollars into basic science research per year......
It would indeed have been difficult for anyone to screw things up as badly as Fiorina; that does take real talent. When Fiorina came on board, she made it clear that she did not like the company of which she had just taken control. So she methodically set about destroying the "old" HP. The first thing she did was a masterful piece of irony: she ordered that the word "Invent" would become part of the HP logo. Evidently, she thought that "branding" is all that matters; hype can be substituted for the real thing, and nobody will notice. I guess she was right.
This is not just about one bad person; it is a pattern. I think that what has happened is that the corporate managerial and financial class (and it is a sort of ruling class, in the old sense of class struggle) have become destructive parasites that suck the wealth out of our common economy, and transfer it to their own wallets. They destroy things that have value—like a creative engineering corporation—and leave behind an empty husk that only pretends to do what the old corporation actually did: invent.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I believe there have been some recent changes encouraging more detailed reporting of R&D efforts carried out in the US. I've had to fill out some surveys recently for the accounting department asking me to itemize and detail how much of my time has applied to several categories of 'R&D'.
Granted, most of the qualifying activities are not basic research but instead specific process improvements or cost reductions for existing products.
Still, seems to be a start.
Regardless, I don't know whether it was the tax structure or the changing participation of investors in the stock market that had a worse effect. I took a history class on this in school. The course was mostly focusing on the actual history and accomplishments of 'industrial R&D', but we did discuss factors leading up to the death of it in the last 20-30 years. Part of it was the end of the cold war...lots of things were developed in secret to beat the Russkies. Corning, for example, made some extraordinary developments in glass production just to make better camera lenses for the U2.
A bigger bit was the increased trading volume and shorter share retention times in the stock market. If shares are traded on the basis of daily fluctuations and not on a long-term interest in the company. Stocks used to be purchased for a profit as well as to gain a hand in steering the course of a corporation. This latter aspect seems to have disappeared from the public interest who hope for a bit higher return on their 401k (which have turned out so great for everyone the past year or two). Companies were rewarded for increasing their stock value on a daily or weekly basis, or paying dividends rather than reinvesting in research.