Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research? 599
thesandbender writes "The recent post about GM opening its own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise ... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions are two of the pinnacles of 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the '70s and that's when the US started its slow decline. To be true to the 'Ask Slashdot' theme, what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?"
it is... (Score:5, Informative)
The US government is funding research. A lot of it. So much that a giant company like GM opening a *single* research lab is big news. Either directly (through grants and contracts) or indirectly (through tax incentives) the government is funding much of the industrial research that is done anyway.
Why has science stalled since the 70s? That's when the number of physicists being trained exceeded the demand. The job market for physicists tanked and has never recovered (due to an excess of government funding for training). Physics became very competitive (rather than collaborative), and focused on making very small incremental changes in niche areas so that you could keep your job (big risks are bad, now). We've make tremendous scientific progress, but the system isn't designed for rock-star leaders and breakthroughs any more. More industrial labs will only change that until growth saturates again.
We need to either stop training too many physicists (and make sure we're not doing the same with other fields), or live with what we have (which does work well, for anyone who is not a physicist). To encourage risk (and thus greater... or at least flashier scientific rewards), we need more long term grants and contracts (long term being >10 years). If I know a several year project can fail, but I'll still be able to pay the rent, I'm more likely to try something new. To actually answer the question, I would put those grants in solar fuel research.
Figures to back up the claim (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. The US is spending 2.6% of GDP on R & D. It is number two in the G7. Obama has said [cio.com.au] he wants to bring the spending up to 3.0%.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Here [technologyreview.com] you go.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:morons in charge (Score:2, Informative)
Weird. The vast majority of US research is privately funded, by a huge margin, and the US leads the world in research spending (more than all of the countries in Asia combined, never mind Europe which runs a somewhat distant third). Even in the case of basic, "pure science" research, the government funded research is a shrinking majority. Clearly those corporations are doing something with that investment in the research department.
I am going to guess you never googled the statistics, easily found, before you posted.
Re:Baby Boomers (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, we did it on purpose. You see, huge deposits of untapped fun were uncovered in the 60s: sex before AIDS, cheap weed that was so bad that you only got a little stoned instead of being turned into a zombie, and the best popular music in the history of the planet. We found it all, and we used it up and we didn't leave any for you. It all got burned down and all you have is ashes and burn earth. cause that's all you deserve, you whiney twit.
Re:Fixed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Food Production (Score:3, Informative)
Monsanto are one of a very small number of entities who scare the living crap out of me.
I have no idea about if/how the government are involved with their affairs. However, I do know that they control 70-100% of the United States' supply of certain crops. I also know that they own and control a technology that can produce 'sterile' crops that don't yield any seeds at the end of the harvest.
They've literally got the ingredients for a mad-scientist-plotting-to-take-over-the-world scenario. I'm no libertarian, but that's an unreasonable amount of power for any one entity to hold over humanity. They might as well have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
You're full of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
From the Brookings Institution.
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/0423_canada_nivola.aspx [brookings.edu]
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 1999 basically overturned Glass Steagall. Take a look at any housing bubble chart you'd like. When did the spike start? About the same time the deregulation fantasy took effect, and corporations knowingly created bad mortgages and passed off the bad debt as good debt because no one had their eye on them. In summary, they knowingly created huge leveraged risks in order to pocket huge comissions and leave someone else holding the assets. If you can come up with a more plausible explanation, please go ahead.
It was 80% (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
The highest tax bracket was 80% in 1939. Today it's 35%.
I pray to God that you get what you just wished for.
Re:morons in charge (Score:3, Informative)
Or you can get 39.974 mpg (I converted Imperial gallons into American ones to arrive at this figure, the original is 53.3 miles per imperial gallon), from 95 horsepower, and that's without all the hybrid nonsense. Top speed of 115mph.
That's for a Mini One, of course. Costs under $20,000, so for the price of a Cadillac Escalade ($63,155 for a 403 horsepower 6.2L V8 engine), you can have three of them (dare I say, a red one, a white one, and a blue one? [wikipedia.org]), and still enough left over for a really bitchin' home entertainment system.
I can honestly say that I've never seen an SUV being operated "at capacity". Most of the time, the sole occupant is the driver, the back seats are empty (and are usually pristine), the cargo space is empty. My family of four did just fine with saloon cars, even to go on camping holidays. If you really need to haul a few hundred pound of gear on occasion, buy a trailer.
The real reason the SUV is popular is, of course, because they enjoy a tax subsidy intended for commercial trucks.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Global warming doesn't affect us now.
I live in Nunavut you insensitive clod. [thestar.com]
Re:Food Production (Score:4, Informative)
I'm something of a libertarian myself, and yeah Monsanto has way too large a share of the seed market for my comfort. Competition is always a good thing and the seed market could use more of it.
That said, let me see if I can do anything to reduce the scariness of Monsanto. First thing you need to realize is that they do have significant competition. Pioneer Hi-bred and Syngenta, the number two and number three companies in the seed business (and to a lesser extent Dow and Bayer) are spending heavily on research to match Monsanto's genetic resources. Beyond those companies, there are still a number of significant companies focused on traditional plant breeding techniques. In critical crops such as grains Monsanto controls less than half of seed sales in the US, and a fraction of that worldwide.
The crops monsanto has the largest share of the market in are vegetables where total seed sales aren't enough to support much competition. Even for these crops, checks and balances exist, in the form of public university crop breeders, and the National Plant Germplasm System that preserves diverse crop lines from pretty much every crop species you could think of, so seeds are available from both these sources.
As for terminator technology (sterile crops), that's the one thing I don't get people worrying about. Sure Monsanto could deploy this technology, there are still going to be plenty for fertile crops around from their competitors, universities, and seed blanks, and by definition, sterile plants can't cross contaminate other plants. That'd be like inheriting sterility from your father. If your father were truly sterile you'd never have been born. (Recessive alleles make the picture a little more complicated, but the bottom line remains, sterile plants are always going to quickly and simply selected against by either natural or artificial selection.)
So in summary, while Monsanto has more control over the seed market than should ever be concentrated in a single company, this doesn't give them the power to take over the world/cut off our food supply. Other sources of crop seeds would simple expand into their market share. It gives them the power to charge too much for their products, treat farmers poorly, and keep technologies that could be live-savers out of the hands of the third world farmers than need them the most.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:1, Informative)
As to whether they beat us or not, I guess that depends on your point of view. They kept us from invading them, so in that respect they won, but overall the war between the US and Britain was a stalemate.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:1, Informative)
He's probably referring to Canada beating back the US during the revolutionary war when we decided to invade there. However i'm pretty sure if there was a spat today that we would spank them. Back in the pre-WWII era there was a military plan to invade Canada "just incase". We have a pretty good relationship with Canada right now that I really doubt we would start something. Plus an infraction on Canada would probably piss off Britain and Australia (Mostly Britain) though post-WWII has shown they aren't the military might they used to be.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
the war between the US and Britain was a stalemate
It always amuses me to hear Americans talk about the war of 1812, as if there was only one of any import. And there was; the French invasion of Russia, which was the beginning of the end of Napoleon's empire and changed the political landscape for Europe and the colonies. By 1812, Britain had been at war with France for 9 years, and would continue to be for another 3 years. 1812 came right in the middle of the Peninsula War, where the Spanish, Portuguese, and British, were repelling the French invasion.
With this background, it's hardly surprising that the British navy didn't devote much by way of resources to a sideshow. The point of the war - to stop the Americans supporting an aggressive empire-building regime in Europe - became irrelevant with Waterloo, and the war ended.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:4, Informative)
The Apollo project was knowledge for knowledge's sake [...]
I guess you never heard of the Space Race [wikipedia.org].
The current space program could be, more accurately, described as "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Compare NASA's funding level now, to when we had a more concrete goal.
Re:It was 80% (Score:3, Informative)
91% in 1957 (Score:3, Informative)
My co-worker brought in an original 1957 IRS 1040 form with tax tables. The top rate in the tax table was 91% for income over $300,000.
Re:It was 80% (Score:3, Informative)
Of course your implication that taxes (not the maximum tax rate) were higher in 1939 is still probably false.
The wikipedia article does not spell out at what income level that 80% kicked in. Nor how it compares to the average income of the time.
According to the IRS [irs.gov] that 1939 79% tax rate was for folks over $5m. Of course, they also claim that the 1951-1963 top tax bracket of 90% started at income of $400k. According to the census bureau [census.gov], in 1967, an income of $19k would put you in the top 5% of households, equivalent to $180k today. By wild extrapolation, you might imagine the 90% tax rate to start around $3.6-4m today.
In today's terms, if income tax rate topped out at 80% but only for incomes larger than 100 million then it would have practically no impact at all and certainly wouldn't end up accounting for more than a very small fraction of all taxes collected.
And how much benefit does a $200m earner gain from that second $100m? One often hears the argument that high salaries are required in order to recruit the best talent to extremely difficult, stressful, or unpleasant jobs: is the guy working for $200m really going to refuse to work for $100m, or is he motivated by other than money? Meanwhile, $100m is all the budget cuts Obama has ordered. It's the sum total of the US investment in a smart electrical grid. It's 50 NIH grants. It's the tax paid by nearly 12,000 median-income earners.
Don't get me wrong: people with extraordinary skills ought to reap extraordinary benefits. Surely there's a point where money extra money becomes more or less meaningless.
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/development.topstories3 [guardian.co.uk]
You were saying? China has international aid groups all over the second and third world.
Re:What research we should do (Score:5, Informative)
This effect is why you see so many exciting scientific reports, like "Scientists cure 10 kinds of cancer in mice with white blood cell treatment!" or whatever, that never even go into human studies or trials, much less make it to the drugstore.
you could not be more wrong. The reason that you have these kinds of reports is that the scientists doing the research are not the ones writing the press releases, never mind the actual articles that get published. Most employees in the press and in corporate/university press offices are not scientists. They are Humanities majors, and don't know shit about how science actually works. Terms like Goodness of Fit, Extrapolation, and the difference between conclusions and implications are lost on these people. Their job is to make headlines, not report the facts accurately.
2) Potential medicines or treatments that may be extremely useful but cannot be patented and so never get funding for research, because the company who spent 15 million to do the research would immediately get outcompeted by other companies who wouldn't have to recoup the research investment. Hundreds of these exist. For example, scientists discovered decades ago that the hormone progesterone dramatically increases the speed of wound healing (first noticed when it was observed that pregnant mice heal faster than other mice). It has never been studied as a potential treatment for wounds, however, because progesterone can't be patented.
Progesterone is a steroid hormone, and as a result has anti-inflamatory properties. The reason that it aids in wound healing is that it suppresses certain components of the immune system. Fine if there is no contamination of the wound because it prevents inflamation from causing the wound to get worse before it gets better. However, if there is bacteria already present then this is a bad idea, becase the infection will do even more damage that the attenuated immune response will take longer to control. There is no need to look at progesterone within the scope you describe because we already understand how it does this, why, and why we shouldn't use it in most cases. In cases where we do want to suppress an overactive immune response, there are other drugs (many not under patent) that physicians prefer to use.
I'm not knocking the idea of government funded health research, but I can assure you that they already do that. Most biomedical research in this country is funded directly by federal agencies to the tune of several hundred billion (if it's not now up into the trillions collectively) dollars a year.
On $5M income Re:It was 80% (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fixed (Score:4, Informative)
Governments compete for resources in more ways than simply wars.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War#Application_outside_the_military [wikipedia.org]
Which is why this thinking from the title info is flawed (when applied to Governments)
"You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free."
Governments compete for resources and use (and work with) businesses to compete for resources. Therefore they are more likely to want to protect what they give to a business by making it closed information that prevents competitor (countries as well as) businesses just taking and using it to compete against them. Governments are playing effectively giant chess games with their resources trying to out smart their opponents at every turn.
Its a nice sharing world idea to just give the information away and then everyone benefits from it but the current world doesn't work that way.
Governments are exceptionally competitive in their outlook as they are filled with very competitive people all trying to climb up to ever greater levels of political power. Its no wonder then that they apply that same competitive thinking to everything they do. The same is true of high up corporate people in big businesses so its no wonder they want to work with politicians. Money and power used to make more money and power.
Our world throughout history has been composed of people holding one of two Utopian views which are ironically mutually exclusive. What some people want other people don't want and so we get two opposing groups each wanting something the other doesn't want.
Therefore if you want a sharing world, you will not get that by appointing competitive political suits to the role of managing the world as they don't want a world where everything is shared out. They don't even want to compete. They simply want to be in control and won't let others have a chance to compete if they can at all avoid it. (Meanwhile they will happily use divide on concur on all they wish to control). The rules they use to maintain control vary around the world, but ultimately they are still in control. So their thinking centers around means of maintaining control. Concepts of sharing are wrong as far as they are concerned, as they could then inadvertently be helping their competitors. Its therefore no wonder they so often bias towards seeking means of control.
Its for this reason I find our current time of witnessing the earliest moments of the growth of the Internet is utterly fascinating The Internet is growing out of the concepts of sharing knowledge. Its mutually exclusive to the concepts of control and yet its clear the majority of people around the world want to be able to sharing knowledge. (Exactly what they appointed politicians (and big business) doesn't want, but try ever getting that straight answer out politicians
Its fascinating that we are watching the world trying to come to terms with the concepts of sharing knowledge. Open source is another one of these battle ground areas where some think it should be closed and so they can maintain control over it (and want to maintain control over it).
I think we really are at a turning point in human history. Which way it goes who knows, but I can't help thinking the people in power don't want the Internet the way it is and would sooner use it to find new ways to control.
Re:it is... (Score:3, Informative)
Your suggestion sounds like a variation of this physicists suggestion:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
But there are a few deeper issues. Goodstein, for example, talks about general elitist issues in education.
Another I add is another interpretation of what it means as you suggest that the number of physicists exceeded "demand" (in a classical economics sense), since is that not just another way of saying the number of physicists exceeded what those with money were willing to pay for? And most of the problems the world faces (like starvation or river blindness or pollution or human rights issues) are not of urgent interest to many of those with serious money, who are often busy amusing themselves to death?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death [wikipedia.org]
Or alternatively fighting to stay financially obese. Or alternatively, want do do good, but are so locked into a narrow competitive mindset they think the world will be saved by spreading competitive capitalism everywhere, like Iraq? This a broad failure of morality and ethics in our society, cultivated in part by a cult of consumerism linked to a malfunctioning industrial control system.
Here is the reason that everyone who wants to study physics in this potentially abundant world can not: ... The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution [wikipedia.org]
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis.
We need to transition in general to a post-scarcity society moving beyond rationing the basics (perhaps a guaranteed basic income like social security for everyone would be a start). Right now, the post-scarcity technologies physicists and engineers (and even poets and novelists) have provided us with (like biotech, nuclear tech, nanotech, robotics, AI, advertising, the internet, and so on) are being wielded by people preoccupied with a scarcity worldview. That is a terribly dangerous situation, that people have the power to create and destroy so rapidly and so extensively, but many with that power do not see there are other options to
Re:That's Obvious (Score:2, Informative)
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
Oh, but they certainly did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Syphilis_Study [wikipedia.org]
Scientific research still getting funded (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Food Production (Score:3, Informative)
What do we eat in the meantime?
I'd imagine we'd eat exactly the same stuff we eat today.
... simultaneously. Terminator isn't a trait I'd want in and seed I was buying, but it's treat to our overall agricultural system is minor.
Remember terminator doesn't create plants that don't produce food, it produces seeds that won't germinate. So the farmer can still sell his corn (or wheat or tomatoes, or kiwis for that matter), but if he plants it next year nothing is going to grow.
As far as the idea of cross contamination goes, lets address your fears by taking them to the most extreme condition imaginable, 100% pollen contamination. (We can't achieve 100% crossing rate even when we're trying to make crosses to produce hybrids.) But in this beyond worst case scenario, what happens? Treating the terminator trait as a recessive allele, in the next generation, every plant will be heterozygous for terminator. This is like being a carrier for a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis, the plants show no symptoms, but can pass the trait on to their offspring. In the second generation a quarter of the plants are homozygous for terminator, and produce seeds that won't germinate. A quarter are homozygous wild type, and half are still heterozygous. In the third generation, germination rates decline 25% (those are the seeds produced by terminator homozygous plants). Of the plants that germinate 50% are heterozygous, 33% are wildtype and 17% are homozygous terminator. So in the forth generation, germination is down only 17% from pre-terminator levels, and it continues to trend back up in each successive generation.
If we use a more realistic level of initial contamination (say 10% between neighboring fields which is still higher than I've ever seen), then that maximum drop in germination rates in 1%. If you treat terminator as a dominant trait, the germination rate drops in the first generation after contamination and then returns completely to normal in the second and beyond. And all this assumes contamination of every crop species in every region of the country or world
Does this address your concerns? If not, could you tell me why? Need to be able to teach this stuff effectively to college students.
And on a side note, if something did wipe out food production (global climate change, new disease, asteroid impact) we'd be in real trouble. Back in 2006 global food reserves were at less than two months demand, and as far as I know they've continued to drop since then. Food stops coming in from the fields, and people are going to start starving quickly. Which is another reason it makes sense for the government to get back in the business of funding crop improved to improve yields and make crops more resilient in the face of biological and non-biological stresses.