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Comment by GrinningFool | Hacker News Reader

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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