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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."
Always easier to spend other people's money than it is to spend your own, eh Billy?
Government spending is easy. Making sure it doesn't result in people lining their pockets with the money without producing tangible results is hard.
>> 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
Given its track record, I have little faith that the government would use taxpayer funds to get promising ideas developed by people who would otherwise not have the resources to do it on their own. More than likely, this would be just another avenue to funnel tons of cash to the friends and donors of those in power (on both sides of the aisle).
The government might have the money to increase R&D funding if companies like Microsoft hadn't used creative accounting to almost totally avoid paying taxes. Perhaps Bill should have thought about that sooner.
Gee, I wonder why they do that?
Corporations used to have R&D centers. In fact, I work down the street from a rather famous one in Palo Alto that the corporate owners had no clue what to do with. But the bean counters from Wall Street ruled that R&D was an expense that added nothing to the bottom line. God forbid if you reduce today's profits for a future cow cash that might revolutionize the industry and make even more money.
Microsoft for example has a very well regarded pure resarch division.
Microsoft closed the R&D center they had in Silicon Valley. I had a job interview at their campus several years. It was dead, dead, dead. Walk a couple of blocks away, all the Googlers were dancing in the street, chasing after unicorns and looking for lunch.
Bill Gates attempted a commendable feat: to get politicians to focus on something other than the current election cycle and its partisan bickering.
I didn't know his middle name was Sisyphus...
Getting politicians to care about anything other than getting power and bashing the opposition these days is nigh impossible.
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."
The party which currently controls Congress cares about none of those things. They plainly dispute even the existence of climate change, they aren't concerned about energy independence because that would hurt their oil and coal buddies and they certainly don't care about providing energy for poor people, especially ones that aren't American citizens.
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.
That $6 trillion we pissed away in Iraq and the Afghanistan would have come in handy right about now.