The Future Postponed – Declining Investment in Basic Research [pdf]
dc.mit.edu
dc.mit.edu
Some other graphs from the same source: http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_0.jpg http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/FunctionNON_0.jpg
A better title: "The research budget is growing, but the federal government is growing faster."
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?chart_type=line...
This means that the government is doing more stuff per person.
There is no reason to expect basic research funding or other types of funding to track either GDP growth or population growth. Population may double, but that doesn't mean there are twice as many good hypothesis to test. Once you've achieved economies of scale, programs like basic research should grow sublinearly.
Government grows with GDP because people want more services, less crime, less poverty, and stuff like that; there is a reason libertarians can't get elected.
One thing people like is going to space, having scientists trained in public/private universities. Even if they go into private industry, they are trained with lots of federal dollars. Cut off all that, and China will just pass us in a decade or two.
And really, why not spend additional GDP on public R&D? The benefits have been net positive over the long term, spurring new industries and economic growth. This is a no brainer.
Is there any proof for such a claim? Please, before attacking me, realize that there are many states between "more money for R&D" and "no money for R&D". I am merely asking if there is any evidence that adding more money will produce the benefits you asserted, not proposing to cut funding completely.
There is no reason for that stuff to grow with (real) GDP, unless you define "poverty" as a relative quantity. It doesn't cost more (in real $) to provide someone with housing and food simply because other people also consume caviar (which raises GDP). It doesn't cost more to put someone in jail simply because other people have an XBox.
That stuff would grow linearly with population, however, unlike research. Research doesn't grow because 1 scientist can make 1 discovery which then works for either 10 people or 10B people.
And really, why not spend additional GDP on public R&D?
Concretely speaking - the population increases from 150M to 300M and that population now enjoys XBoxes, MRIs, restaurant meals and larger houses. Why have the number of feasible research projects suddenly quadrupled? Why should there be a relation between restaurant meals and research projects?
Those Xboxes and MRIs came from research. Tomorrow they probably want holodecks and cures for cancers (selfish peasants!).
> Why should there be a relation between restaurant meals and research projects?
Future GDP growth depends on basic research, and so vice versa.
That's the core question which you are ducking.
No one, least of all me, disputes that research is useful - that's all you've actually argued. I'm merely disputing your assertion of a linear scaling law between GDP and the funds needed for research, and you haven't provided an argument why such a law would exist.
If the population doubles, what are those people going to do with all their time? Fast food check out? Speculation and day trading?
> I'm merely disputing your assertion of a linear scaling law between GDP and the funds needed for research, and you haven't provided an argument why such a law would exist.
Society has to do something with its resources. We've been investing in R&D since at least the neolithic revolution, increasingly more so as our populations increase. I don't see a good reason why that should stop, so ....
> That's the core question which you are ducking.
Our technology increases faster as our population increases. We'll get holodecks sooner if we have 2X resources to spend on it, and it would be nice to have them before I'm dead.
It is quite nice to have a civil debate about these things.
The goal here was to say: "The world is moving too fast for our pace of basic and applied sciences."
"One fundamental cause of cyber insecurity is core weaknesses in the architecture of most current computer systems that are, in effect, a historical legacy. These architectures have their roots in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when computers were roughly 10,000 times slower than today’s processors and had much smaller memories. At that time, nothing mattered as much as squeezing out a bit more performance and so enforcing certain key safety properties (having to do with the way in which access to computer memory is controlled and the ability of operating systems to differentiate among different types of instructions) were deemed to be of lesser importance."
Then came UC Berkeley.