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Comment by lavrov | Hacker News Reader

I would speculate that the decrease in "good ideas" is at least correlated with, and probably causally related to, the decrease in government spending on research (2% of GDP in the 1970's to 0.78% of GDP in 2014[1]). Considering that the entire US technology industry was originally supported and sparked by government research, I would imagine that a large part of the problem is that corporate R&D is a poor substitute for the longer-term, non-profit-driven perspective of government research. Further, I wonder if, in general, lack of government-funded research leads to less competitive markets that are more amenable to established monopolists, since in that scenario, research is emerging primarily from corporate R&D departments and emerging players in markets can't compete. I don't have any empirical evidence, but I think interesting to consider.

[1] http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-r...

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Let's not forget how much of this research was driven by anticipated military needs. The 'D' in DARPA stands for 'Defense'.

I don't think that the US cut military-oriented R&D expenses significantly. Does anyone have and idea how did the direction change?

OTOH, AFAIK, a few of the most pervasive technology changes, like the GUI or mobile networks, were not military-driven, but were purely commercial R&D (Bell labs, Xerox PARC, etc).

Pretty sure DoD helped motivate development of cellular networks in response to lessons learned from Vietnam.

GSM, which took over most of the world, was designed in Europe. It likely was based on earlier research, very probably intersecting with military-funded research.

I wonder if the typical "towers + backbone + terminals" setup is relevant for battlefield communication. I'd expect mesh setups to be more viable and more resilient.

Given the military emphasis on CCC, it's hard to imagine cell networks - even just as theory - not coming from the DOD in some way.

GPS was (is) a lot military. Militaries , first responders and aviation still depend on VHF and in cases HF radio.

Motorola was (is?) a serious player in VHF and HF, so the first cell phone probably wasn't directly DARPA but the overall company had a lot of background with that sort of thing.

ARPA (before the "D" was added) funded a lot of the preliminary work you discuss (e.g. Engelbart's work at SRI was all government funded). They also essentially paid for the graduate school of all the folks who later did the early ARPANET work (which Bob Kahn at ARPA also paid for).

And consider that "private sector" labs like SRI and MIT are essentially government research facilities. Education is only 16% of MIT's expenditures (and 14% of revenues) and where do you think those revenues come from? Hint: most of it is not corporate grants.

Through the 70s the boundaries between corporate and government R&D were often fuzzy. True, Bell Labs wasn't "miliary-driven" but there were close formal and informal ties and remember that they were under a tight consent decree up into the 1980s. It wasn't today's "revolving door" -- think of it as a permeable membrane. This was thought to enable corruption and in the wake of the Viet Nam war some separation was put into place. Of course the resulting separation hasn't cleaned things up as expected; in many ways it's worse by shifting out of the technical and into the political domains.

Breaking up AT&T might have been a positive for competition, but it also did a number on Bell Labs.

Did we win the battle but lose the war? It's not like the USA has the world's best telecommunications.

According to [1] (easiest to just download the spreadsheet) the US defense budget for "Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation," adjusted for inflation, peaked in 2008-10 at about $80 billion and has been at a downward slide with 2015 estimated at $63 billion. The entire defense budget took a huge hit with the 2013 sequestration [2] and fell by $9 billion (over 10%) in a single year. NASA's budget in 1965-66 was more than 4% of the federal budget but now it's less than half a percent with its operations torn across dozens of Congressional districts and DARPA has only managed to avoid this bureaucratic creep because its structure is unique among federal agencies.

Combined with privatization that hasn't yielded any clear benefit, pork-barreling that cripple organizations, and general mismanagement, the falling budgets have probably had a very negative impact on US R&D capabilities, offset only slightly by modest increases in NSF and NIH grants for academia.

[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?granuleI...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_fiscal_cliff

"Necessity is the mother of all invention"

When organizations 'need stuff badly' - everything moves much, much faster and things get done.

In the Canadian Army, we could not move our troops around effectively, and 'procurement' for troop transports was taking decades. As soon as the engagement started in Afghanistan, we dropped our 'special needs' and just bought Chinooks from the US, off the shelf. Done. It's not exactly R&D, but it highlights the bureaucracy of such organizations.

I think 'necessity' will drive outcomes far greater than small variations in budget.

Consider this: 'good ideas' should be the result of 'problem analysis' - that is to say, they should be 'solutions' to existing problems. In academia in particular, they're doing a lot of 'pure' research, not so much focused on pragmatic things.

Facebook, for all of it's rubbish, is still a 'very useful thing' to a very large number of people. I don't think the very concept of Facebook lends itself well to academic ideals. Nobody would have considered such a thing a 'viable good idea' from an intellectual perspective. And yet, it really is useful.

The best ideas come from understanding where 'pain points' are and solving them, ergo, an understanding of 'the system to improve' is essential.

1970 GDP in current $: just under 1,000,000,000,000

2014 GDP in current$: just under 17,000,000,000,000

Amount as a percent has dropped - but dollars spent has skyrocketed.

A lot of research ends up supporting or augmenting existing technologies and industries -- so-called "applied" research. This research shouldn't be expected to yield major game-changing innovations.

A lot of the GDP growth over that period was fueled by technological capabilities. Which means a lot of the new research funding ended up going toward applied research supporting industries build around those new capabilities.

Given these trends, measuring against GDP is a far more reasonable metric than absolute dollar values.

Basically, research in the past made new industries possible while providing a bit of subsidy to existing industries, whereas research today is mostly government subsidy for product improvements in existing industries with a little bit of basic research on the side...

No. Definitely no.

US GDP in 1970 was 1.0759T. 2% of that is 21.5B in 1970 dollars. This is $132.91B in 2014 dollars.

US GDP in 2014 was 17.348T. 0.78% of that is 135B in 2014 dollars.

I pulled the numbers from here, which states that they are in current USD:

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

St Louis FRED. In constant dollars, pick a year, pick 2009, pick Chained 2009 Dollars.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1

1970 GDP was 4.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 2% of 4.7T is 94B.

2014 GDP was 15.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 0.78% of 15.7T is 122B.

I'm honestly not qualified to know which data set is most accurate; certainly the increase is less dramatic using this data set, but it still shows an increase in $$ spent over time - vs the decrease that was the foundation of the original comment.

I'm qualified. Acid test: do you really think we were spending 1/17th of research money in constant dollars in 1970?

Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in 1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has declined as well.

This is a bad thing.

Also, I think the point of the paper is that growth gets harder, not easier. From that perspective R&D spending should have increased massively in constant currency to keep pace, not decline even slightly.

Looking at it from the other side of the mirror, there's probably some other suite of factors that causes both things. Taken as a prisoner's dilemma, defecting from R&D may be perceived to have a payoff ( those engineers talk funny and cost a lot ) which saps R&D and also slows growth.

I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.

Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in large companies.

The use of the term in corporate spheres is also diluted.

According to the "best and brightest", R&D is now nothing more than patent pursuit. If the systems used for production are old and buggy, fixing that ( including significant new development ) is not considered "R&D", no matter how proprietary said systems may be.

That's WorldBankData. I'm fairly certain that Current US$ is unadjusted. If you use their constant 2010 dollars you get: 96 billion on research in 1970 and 126 billion in 2014

Using an inflation calc [1] that amount from 1970 today would be worth approximately $6,273,872,679,045. So that would be $125,477,453,580 spent on R&D, and we actually spend close to $132,600,000,000.

So it's seems to have been a set amount just adjusted for inflation the whole time.

1 - http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

The figures I used are shown as being in current USD:

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Percent of manpower would be an interesting stat. I think the percent of GDP resembles that a little bit.

How about adjusted for inflation? Does that help with context? I would think it should.

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