How much countries spend in R&D
uis.unesco.org
uis.unesco.org
Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1].
Traditionally 'Research' was deemed to be up to TRL-3, and 'Development' up to TRL-5. The distinctions are important as there are far stricter subsidy percentage limits on public funding of 'Development' then on 'Research'.
Now industry lobbying is trying (successfully) to have everything up to TRL-7 be labeled under 'R&D'. Sad times for the real research in the EU, as overall budgets aren't increased and the higher the TRL, the higher the investments that can now make a claim on the money.
A single car factory production line development subsidy can eat up a region's whole yearly R&D budget if left unchecked. It's not private enterprises aren't already swimming in public money, but this is a further land-grab on public funds.
An example: at the same time VW got fines for diesel-gate in other parts of the world, Belgium (which holds the dubious honor of being both a 'tax heaven' for companies with rates in practice close to 0%, while at the same time being the world record holder for taxing workers pay of around 54%) was cutting VW new deals and funneling VW millions of € in subsidies).
Source: Worked at a company that got a 10M+ tax cut for moving to Microservices & rewriting a fucking frontend in React.
It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm wrong).
It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get more knowledge workers into the country and to stimulate that sort of economic activity in general.
Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I could have, only I found out about it too late).
There’s also a lot of luck in the application process. I had colleagues in identical jobs, similar salaries who didn’t get the 30% ruling when I did.
The way I see it, it's really the market at work, doing exactly what markets do. Negotiating a price (tax cuts and subdidies) in exchange for a good or service (business presence hiring staff and causing economic activity).
what are the markers a curious investigator should look for in this pile of data ?
Even when trying to be honest, the questions are posed so vaguely that they are really relying on you taking the moral high ground when choosing what _you_ think qualifies as R&D, even then it becomes an internal battle of definitions.
You have to understand that the reviews happen in context. What isn't always understood by the layman is that countries/regions etc. aren't reluctant to grant subsidies, but actually want to subsidize as much as they can get away with.
The break on the system is international treaties of mutually agreed limits on what you are allowed to subsidize. But the agreed budget will be spent.
The distribution strategy and selectivity are often set by the political factions that hold the office at the time, and the administration is bound by the strategy laid out.
This can vary from being realy critical and looking for true R&D high potential high-risk/high potential risk taking, to lowering the bar and just give everyone a little bit of the budget with few questions asked.
Reviewers are always allowed to be very honest in their assessments, and have more than enough experience in seeing through all the shady hand-waving. They also usually look into the potential of the company/team beyond the strict letter of funding proposal dossier as submitted. How the expert advise is taken into account in a funding decision is up to the administration. The reviewer is paid for the review, and is not even informed of the final decisions.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-inte...
Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between the two systems?
No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be a little bit of a rebel.
In a place like India, you are taught to conform. A hierarchy is enforced. No deviation is tolerated. (Sorry to use such dramatic language. But there is no other way to describe this system.) You don't get to do anything outside of arbitrary norms that others have drawn for you. This is too much for young and curious minds that may want to do things even a slight bit differently. The path of least resistance is to just lie down and submit to rote learning or whatever other evil the system imposes on you.
Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go to a silly route ).
You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization. Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.
I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.
As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.
I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.
I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.
On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.
I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.
The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.
For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.
First it means that a large fraction of the population is implicitly denied resources to develop their abilities. Second it means that people who do make it through the system (as it is) have no real incentives to stay back, neither cultural, nor fiscal, nor institutional.
Personally, none of the people I studied with/worked under ended staying in India. It's interesting that British India managed to sustain better state universities, than today.
Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...
fun fact, because USSR was boycotting the UN over this issue in the 50s there was no one left to veto US's intervention in Korea, therefore it was okay by UNSC
In all seriousness, data visualization requires all the space it can get. I agree the graphics are not that fancy, but displaying them on mobile would be rather uninteresting as everything would be tiny.
Hence the minimal effort put on responsiveness.
So in this case all that expensive money spent making that page isn’t really worth it since a large part of internet wouldn’t even be able to properly read it.
Worse is they half arsed responsiveness. Could have left safari to browse the page like a normal desktop page but their width metadata gives a very poor experience.
1. USA 2. East Asia 3. West Europe
East Asia combined, their spending is bigger than USA and EU.
What will be more interesting is to break down those spending on what particular field they are spent on, but I guess that data is hard to collect.
Overall, in line with my every day feeling, but kinda unimpressed as well. South Korea is an outlier here, their spending in R&D is absolutely massive in both relative/absolute terms.
I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed.
Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outlandish and illustrates quite well how our economic ideology relentlessly pushes 'financialization' of service activities that used to be non-commercial. You need a job, and when you have one then you need to spend the money you earn on others to provide daycare and school lunches and house & garden maintenance ...
Financialization is key because it not just allows 'profits' to be made, but is essential to the 'rent seeking' economy as they can only exist by the nature of intermediating on transactions.
The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk driver creates jobs for car manufacturers, police officers, and doctors) but it shows how our narrow focus on GDP rewards behavior that may not be desirable.
That evening, sure. In the long run, their productivity is likely diminished. You see a similar binge-and-reckoning cycle in macroéconomies, the difference being practically nobody is rewarded for higher GDP. Governments are rewarded for having larger tax bases.
First a question: how come 'productivity' has gone up by 2% annually for nearly a century (if you know compounding you know how massive this is), yet we all have to 'work hared' and 'longer' for less, while our social security is being eroded?
'productivity' in a 'Red Queen's Race'[1] economy has 0 value. We're not doing work to ensure 'survival' or 'progress' anymore. 10% of People could carry that. We long ago stopped having a production problem, we have a(n artificially sustained) distribution problem.
At the 'economic ground floor' level we're in a self accelerating 'service economy' which at the systems level is both driven and preyed upon by a 'rent-seeking' economy that in socio-economic power far outplays the former. Transactions are the key, not what actually goes around.
Failure to equitably distribute gains, a capricious allocation such that individuals might make mint one year, be skint the next. No viable pensions or annuity system. Etc.
Value extraction from labour is the age-old economics problem. It faced feudal peasants, it faces the modern urban/suburban knowledge wage slave paying it all out in rent or mortgage interest. David Ricardo's two bugbears were the laws of rent and wages, in opposition to one another.
GDP's distortions are legion, but you still have the rent/wage dilemma without that.
... Though some measures of gross happiness or support might address that. Hrm. We mearsure GDP. But Smith says:
POLITICAL œconomy, considered as a branch of the science of aThe first object of political economy is to provide subsistence for the people statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-...
That is, his standard for economic performance is support of the population, generally, and financing the state. Elsewhere and earlier he calls explicitly for improving the lot of the poorest especially.
GDP does none of this.
I've beeen meaning to read Kuznts's notes specifically for some time.
I know it sounds silly but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Short term happiness resulting from consumption that ensures a relapse and thus the need for more short term relief through further consumption is what the action side of our economy optimizes for. A furniture maker that produces quality tables that last for centuries will soon be bankrupt as he eats his own market. An IKEA that sells you a fashionable crap table that you want/need to replace real soon, either by induced need or low structural resilience quality, creates its own perpetual demand. That gives you an indication why despite major advances in manufacturing technology our physical goods now are so feeble when we could still make a decent washer that lasted for a lifetime just 50 years ago.
GDP is a fairly good indicator for the 'rent seeking economy' that rules our system, as it is more or less aligned with transaction sizes and volumes.
Some of it translates into better research, e.g. ability to lure international researchers, access to better equipment because you're in a richer nation, but at least partially the number is inflated without any benefit to the research itself.
If the research is constrained by resources that can be acquired from global markets, then, yeah.
However, a lot of research tends to consume capital in form of wages to researchers. In this instance a percentage of GDP is a much better indicator of the resourcing level of research.
However, I don't know if there is any way to compare research on a high level by any financial meter in a way that would not be open to critique.
Edit: What's interesting to me is just how dominant business R&D spending is for the larger economies. The top spenders in nominal terms are all large diverse economies. The main industry that came to mind for me is the auto industry. The top countries all have massive auto industries.
Would still need to adjust for poverty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
'Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.'
India on the other hand ... It's interesting how the homeland of the Semitic and Dharmic religions have fared (both historically and contemporarily).
If you removed all the US companies, restricted immigration and didn't allow people to go abroad to study it isn't clear how well they would do. From what I hear it is no dream to be young in Israel today. Also there seems to be a surprising amount of shady things coming out of Israel. Anything from spam and exploits to binary options and outright fraud. Which would suggest that people don't have better opportunities.
Mandatory military service produces a disciplined and well-networked population. Israel also benefits from sensible commercial law and relatively efficient courts, two things India grossly lacks.