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Comment by joshuaellinger | Hacker News Reader

You know what is damn funny about this....

In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research. I won't go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups.

Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress.

This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building weapons or (b) advertising/marketing or (c) the legal profession.

Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that collectively benefits society. Until then, he's just like a drunk complaining about a hangover.

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Actually, there's reason to believe the shift started much earlier -- in The Organization Man, William Whyte describes how in the '50s we shifted away from fundamental research and into applied research, away from individual grants and towards group work. This focus on both consensus (which encourages incrementalism) and application is likely what reduced research timelines, and had nothing to do with Reagan.

That's an insightful way of looking at it. Reagan was likely the crest of a wave rather than the start of a new one.

> away from individual grants and towards group work.

I see this in the startup world in the form of a strong bias against sole-founder companies and toward large teams with huge numbers of advisors and even "party rounds" with three dozen VC firms involved. It looks like a football pileup, but hey they can't all be wrong can they?

That strikes at the heart of it, perhaps. The techniques were adopted to reduce variance, but we honestly do not know how they effect the work. Maybe we have fewer failures and fewer out-of-the-park accomplishments, but I would be surprised if that was the only effect.

Notably, I see a world where we are less and less likely to acknowledge truths that violate e.g. tribal ideology, because of in-group pressures. The diversity of opinion and viewpoint that lets you harvest good ideas is typically the same mechanism that's used to put the breaks on them. You grab 100 random Americans and you'll avoid spending millions looking for Noah's Ark in the Black Sea, but you'll also avoid spending money to combat climate change. The problem isn't how difficult the technical challenge is, but how far it is outside the universally-shared worldview.

> In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research.

I don't think that's a reasonable assessment of the Reagan Administration's policies toward basic research. A more even handed assessment can be found here: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/8224/8224earlygov.html

Reagan did slash fusion funding in 1986. This included cancelling a $372 million reactor the day they finished building it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility

Of course the Clinton administration cancelled the Integral Fast Reactor when it was a year or two away from finishing up a development project of thirty years, so there are complaints on both sides.

Yeah, I was overstating it when you look at the top line numbers.

The real action is where and how the money was spent and I'm having trouble finding a good source that splits it out that way.

You had a number of different things going on.

1. In the 80s, Federal funding got focused on big defense and big science projects that basically didn't payoff unless you give them credit for bankrupting the USSR. The biggest miss has to be investing in solar.

2. Deregulation shook up a lot of industries and took on a life of its own. Big companies became a lot more short-term focused as competition increased. A lot of them were funding be R&D labs and that started to disappear in the 80s.

3. What we wind up with today is a couple of the crazy profitable tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have internal R&D capable of taking big steps but only Google is really looking deep into the future. The rest of corporate America has outsource R&D to startups.

4. The problem with startups and V.C.s in the context is that they are great at taking a breakthrough to market but don't have the time/money/patience for the 10-20 years of basic research.

...

So Mister Peter "There has been no innovation since Disco" Thiel really wants big innovation then he should support a return to the 1970s -- you know, top tax rates of 70%, heavy regulation, and big companies/government looking out for the long term.

Personally, I'm glad to be in 2010s but I do have a little bit of concern about how we are heating up the planet.

d) manipulating financial markets.

Reagan (really more Phil Graham) killed a lot of the depression era regulation that made financial markets safe and boring. But the talent drain into Finance didn't really pickup until much later.

Certainly a giant waste of smarts today.

You know what's really funny? When someone gets on the Internet and makes a big claim without providing any source evidence. Maybe you're telling the truth, maybe you're simply offering an opinion. The rest of us have no idea. The country was in a deep recession so it is possible there were cuts.

Just think about how much money was saved by ending the Cold War. That was actually driven by government spending. It was also driven by technology (and spending on technology).

To say that Reagan "ended" the Cold War is a charitable interpretation, to say the least.

#1 The dynamics of the cold war ended because of spending on technology--not because "technology spending" was cut.

#2 The cold war ended under reagan as a point of history.

Not sure how much is left to quarrel about?

1. Big Build up in defense spending 2. Very High Interest Rates (Volcker in 80-81). 3. Collapse in Oil Prices

Yes, ending the cold war was great. I even give Reagan some credit for it by pushing them over the edge. Seems like we could have gotten the same outcome at a 1/10 the cost.

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