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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..."
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/
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.
Forget the Wall Street Journal. This needs to resonant with the Dicks and Janes that walk main street USA. The US is racking up record deficits and debts, a huge chunk of which is borrowed from foreigners. It's economy is still reliant on important strategic resources like oil. There is only so long it can go on doing this. At some point, the US must produce goods and services for the global marketplace that are competitive enough to generate the tax base to not only stem future deficits, but also pay down some of the accrued debt. When I put what this article has to say together with some of the more recent studies on US literacy and numeracy, the picture is pretty scary. There is some life to the US economy right now, but what happens when all the stimulus money dries up, and foreign investors realize that US T-Bills, savings bonds, and even US currency potentially isn't worth the paper it is written on? The financial turmoil of the last 12 months is going to look like a cakewalk then.
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.
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.
False dichotomy AND strawman in two sentences.
I am old enough to remember when this country was under a real external threat (thermonuclear attack) and our response was to encourage creativity, research and learning to outproduce the "other side". Now we have a new set of problems on the horizon and we need to adjust our basic priorities: to include basic research as a source of economic competitiveness.
Unfortunately significant advances generally upset the status quo. Recently Movement Conservatives seem afraid to lose the security of the existing status quo.
For example, I cite the power of extractive and fossil energy interests in discouraging broad funding of research in distributed and/or alternative energy sources over the last 40 years. They roll out their conservative protectors, screaming "socialism!" every time anyone brings up economic opportunity cost of preserving access to oil by military means, or the strategic loss of control of economic production due to the contribution of petroleum-based energy costs as a major part of our trade deficit. These factors affect our national security in significant ways, but fail because they threaten entrenched and very very wealthy interests.
I have been watching as a working software engineer during the last 33 years. Fear of a future that does not look like the past has caused significant delays in many areas of research and development. I hope it's possible to recover.
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.
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