Bill Gates Calls On the US Government To Invest More In Research and Development (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on Fortune: On Monday, Bill Gates attempted a commendable feat: to get politicians to focus on something other than the current election cycle and its partisan bickering. In an op-ed published by Reuters, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft called on the United States to spur technological innovation by increasing its investment in research and development. "Government funding for our world-class research institutions produces the new technologies that American entrepreneurs take to market," he wrote. But while other nations like South Korea and China have drastically upped their R and D spending, the United States' has "essentially flatlined." He said that the rest of the world's commitment to research and development is great, "but if the United States is going to maintain its leading role, it needs to up its game." His call for more government-sponsored R&D also comes as corporations pull back on their commitment to discovery and innovation. With more government investment, he said, U.S. scientists could completely eradicate polio and further decrease the number of deaths from malaria. More funding could also "develop the technologies that will power the world -- while also fighting climate change, promoting energy independence, and providing affordable energy for the 1.3 billion poor people who don't have it today."

Comments

Rich guy wants us to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

Always easier to spend other people's money than it is to spend your own, eh Billy?

Re:Rich guy wants us to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

He and his rich buddies also want to take advantage of all that 3rd world labor whose diseases they'll be eradicating. "Okay, now that we've eliminated your malaria, you need to to come work for us for $2 a day!" Great news if you're either very rich or very poor. For the rest of us, it just means fewer middle class jobs.

hard

[religionofpeas]

Government spending is easy. Making sure it doesn't result in people lining their pockets with the money without producing tangible results is hard.

Re:hard

[Tablizer]

Government spending is easy. Making sure it doesn't result in people lining their pockets with the money without producing tangible results is hard.

Gates has a point (for once). The US economy typically depends on the leading-edge. Once something becomes a commodity, it flows to cheaper-labor countries, where we can't compete.

And if we want to continue to surf the leading edge, we have to create the leading edge. Nobody else is going to do it for us.

That may require government money. The Internet, early computers, jets, the space program, and indirectly the semi-conductor industry were all spurred on by government spending, changing the world.

The private market has decided to focus on near-term R&D and products for the most part. The days of Xerox's GUI-like research are mostly gone (with the notable exception of near-Earth-orbit spaceflight.)

I'm not sure why industry changed. It could be a bad batch of MBA's trained via education fads to chase short-term, or maybe the pressure of global competition putting companies in semi-panic survival mode. But it has changed.

Thus, government has to step in the fill the void. I don't see the private sector growing more interested in medium- and long-term R&D again. It's not whether the government sucks, it's whether the alternative is worse.

Perhaps some form of collaboration between government, universities, and private industry needs to be explored more. Sometimes you just have to experiment with collaboration systems.

Either way, if we don't find a way to stoke the leading edge, our comparative advantage of pushing the envelope will disappear and we'll become a second-rate economy. Stagnation is not our friend.

Re:hard

[PopeRatzo]

Government spending is easy. Making sure it doesn't result in people lining their pockets with the money without producing tangible results is hard.

Fortunately, government-financed R&D has produced lots of tangible results. If some grad students and associate professors "line their pockets" with a barely-living wage, I don't care.

And if companies can share in the benefit from this research and make billions, great.

Article haiku

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Government funding for our world-class research institutions produces the new technologies that American entrepreneurs take to market

You pay the taxes
Public schools research the tech
Big business profits

Re:It's too late now.

[dAzED1]

This. The mega-corps like Google, Apple, and MS offshoring (or insisting on H1Bs) and avoiding taxes is a lot of why we're having our current problem. The Gov already *did* this for us - they invented the Internet (as an example), which Gates thought was a passing fad, and then the ultra-elite moved the rewards of the monetization of it offshore. Timothy Berners-Lee has a net worth of 1/1600th of Gates, yet none of us would be having this convo without him. Either TBL gained too little, BG gained too much, a bit of both, or...? But the greed of the ultra-rich is the problem here, not under-investment by the government.

Makes sense, companies aren't doing it anymore

[ErichTheRed]

Regular companies have slashed their R&D or eliminated it completely. Bell Labs barely exists anymore, HP, IBM and Microsoft's Research arms are so product focused that very little long-term groundbreaking science comes out of there these days. Product manufacturing being shifted overseas means the engineering around manufacturing and product development is slowly shifting closer to the factories. Add in the fact that science in the academic world is a notoriously unstable, low-paying area to be in, and it's no wonder that basic research gets underfunded. It's not the same in other countries -- foreign students come back from their education here and are treated quite well compared to students here.

The problem is that to continue innovating, you need that R&D pipeline. The public market and the MBA crowd prohibit investment in anything further than 2 quarters out, so something has to come in and pick up the slack. The golden age of for-profit companies paying for R&D is over unless some major shift happens. Not that I want to go back to the Cold War era, but look how much money got poured into the Space Race and defense programs. When the limitations of budgets, etc. were removed, progress was made quickly. The goal was to beat the Russians to the Moon, or to protect the country from a nuclear attack at all costs, and the work got done.

tl;dr: Yes, throwing money at this particular problem will work, and it has in the past. It just takes the will to do it.

Re:Makes sense, companies aren't doing it anymore

[phantomfive]

Microsoft's Research arms are so product focused that very little long-term groundbreaking science comes out of there these days.

It's actually kind of amazing how little good stuff comes out of Microsoft research, considering how much money they throw at it.

$5 Trillion

[Anonymous Coward]

That $6 trillion we pissed away in Iraq and the Afghanistan would have come in handy right about now.

Re:It's too late now.

[nine-times]

Also ironic because Microsoft spent years squashing competition and innovation in the tech industry. Now the guy responsible complains that we don't have enough innovation.