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For the first time in the post–World War II era, the federal government no longer funds a majority of the basic research carried out in the United States. Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. The federal share, which topped 70% throughout the 1960s and '70s, stood at 61% as recently as 2004 before falling below 50% in 2013.
The sharp drop in recent years is the result of two contrasting trends—a flattening of federal spending on basic research over the past decade and a significant rise in corporate funding of fundamental science since 2012.
[...] The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is the major driver behind the recent jump in corporate basic research [...] investment in basic research soared from $3 billion in 2008 to $8.1 billion in 2014, according to the most recent NSF data by business sector. Spending on basic research by all U.S. businesses nearly doubled over that same period, from $13.9 billion to $24.5 billion.
Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country's spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fubari on Friday March 10 2017, @04:47AM (2 children)
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry is the major driver behind the recent jump in corporate basic research
So... is that research in how to raise epipen prices and maintain market share [msn.com]?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 10 2017, @05:51AM (1 child)
The price gauging is driving the profits, and the profits enable the increased investment.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by fubari on Friday March 10 2017, @05:33PM
True. I suppose that is something of a silver lining :-)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 10 2017, @05:14AM (10 children)
Translation: US poised to lose its status as a major basic science driver in the next decade. For your daily science news to post on SN, start looking into science advances in China, EU (excluding Britain) and maybe Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Friday March 10 2017, @05:32AM (9 children)
If you read the summary, you would know that the percentage is slipping because way more is being spent on science in America. America leads the world by a large margin, and alone outdoes entire continents.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @06:39AM (3 children)
Two comments here.
The first is that the federal budget of the US has been skyrocketing in recent years. A flattening of the budgeting for anything is equivalent to a sharp deprioritization.
The second is that I think it's very questionable if the US is leading the world anymore. There was a time this wouldn't have been in doubt at all and things like the Nobel Prize for the 'heavy sciences' were effectively the "US prize for science achievement." But increasingly we're seeing our name starting to slip. In physics for instance in 2015, 2013, and 2010 - there wasn't a single US laureate. Like you probably know many researchers today hold multiple citizenships and nobel teams are increasingly often the max size of 3. To have no US names show up 3 times in 5 years is quite an unusual event. Rather than this one sample a better idea might be to graph the trajectory of US representation among laureates as a sort of quantifiable measure of US dominance. I think we'd see a very consistent downward trend. And as for "US vs the world" that's not even close. US only teams were a typical sight not that long ago. Now a days we'd have to go back more than a decade to 2006 to see one, at least in physics.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Friday March 10 2017, @01:11PM (2 children)
Yup... science is seriously slipping already ... 2010 - 2015 is 6 years and not 5... :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @02:24PM (1 child)
It depends on whether you count from 2010-01-01 0:00:00 inclusive to 2015-01-01 0:00:00 exclusive or 2010-01-01 0:00:00 inclusive to 2015-01-01 23:59:59 inclusive.
It seems GP meant the latter but only counted by the former.
I assume by the smiley you caught that as well and are trying to be funny.
It could be worse. One piece of shit software I work with has an astoundingly stupid epoch of 1899-12-31 0:00:00. But that's far from the only astoundingly stupid thing about it. I digress.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 10 2017, @03:31PM
Should one of those dates have been 2015-12-31?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @07:35AM (4 children)
Yeah, sure. Federal budget to science is flat, pharma research budget is increased (and new antibiotics? Perhaps if another WW starts over, otherwise there's not enough profit to be made. So let's research... I don't know... fructose intolerance - most of the sufferers just fart more when eating fruits, and we can't gave that, those antibiotic-resistant TB sufferers are less in numbers than fructose intolerants).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @02:03PM (2 children)
And why are we supposed to care about the European Extremely Large Telescope and Square Kilometre Array projects, but not about US projects in the same areas (Keck Observatory, Allen Telescope Array, James Webb Space Telescope, etc).
"by a large margin" - NIF vs HiPER
NIF is real world while HiPER is a paper project. Of course, they can manage two orders of magnitude better. They haven't built anything yet!
Indeed, Antarctica is a continent
So is South America, Africa, and Australia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @03:17PM (1 child)
I do think CERN is a relevant example. The US was previously going to be developing its own super collider, creatively named the Superconducting Super Collider.] [scientificamerican.com] It was planned to be beastly at 20 TeV. This project goes back to the early 90s. For some frame of reference on that scale - CERN currently operates at 13 TeV and started at 7. It would have discovered the Higgs years earlier and one can only imagine how many other discoveries, yet to be made, could have been made stateside first. Alas, our government ultimately decided to cut its funding and kill the project. And with no profit motive, private industry obviously couldn't care less.
I think people don't seem to understand that technology doesn't just magically push itself forward. For instance everything Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX could have been started decades ago from a technological point of view. But it just never happened. We had inertial behemoths in charge of the industry and it's the reason today recreating what we did more than 45 years ago is supposed to be an achievement. And it will be, but it shouldn't be. The US in the past decade or two has really begun to slide downward. Hopefully we can pick ourselves up again, but it's not going to happen by itself.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @03:42PM
I think people don't seem to understand that technology doesn't just magically push itself forward. For instance everything Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX could have been started decades ago from a technological point of view. But it just never happened. We had inertial behemoths in charge of the industry and it's the reason today recreating what we did more than 45 years ago is supposed to be an achievement. And it will be, but it shouldn't be. The US in the past decade or two has really begun to slide downward. Hopefully we can pick ourselves up again, but it's not going to happen by itself.
Public funding is a key reason why that didn't happen decades ago. For example, the publicly funded Space Shuttle needed to justify their existence. So for roughly a ten year period ending in 1984, the Space Shuttle had a monopoly on most US payloads - public or private launched to space. It wouldn't have made sense to start SpaceX prior to 1984 as a result. You can write off the entire first two decades of the space launch industry because of that monopoly.
Then NASA created a stable launch cartel in the late 80s and early 90s (Orbital Sciences's Pegasus rocket for the really small payloads, Delta II for intermediate, Atlas I and Titan III for large payloads (Titan III military only), and of course, the Space Shuttle for the largest payloads. Notice how everyone had their own unique market niche. This was IMHO enforced by NASA, a big, publicly funded consumer of launch services.
This cartel stayed in place until the advent of the Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV) by the US Department of Defense, the first deliberate act of the US government to create competition in the commercial launch market since Reagan ended the Space Shuttle monopoly in 1984. The first launches of the EELV rockets (Atlas V and Delta IV) were in 2002 and 2003 respectively. SpaceX was formed in 2005. It really couldn't have formed much earlier than it did and still have a market in the US!
So yes, I think that huge delay, forty years roughly, in launch costs innovation was due to the heavy domination of demand for US launch services by publicly funded sources which had the power to create and enforce cartels and monopolies on launch services as well as the conflict of interests to encourage such even though it raised the cost of launch services in the US.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 10 2017, @05:34PM
The National Ignition Facility
[...] is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is a key element of NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the reliability and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without full-scale testing.
-- https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/ [llnl.gov]
It can be a success by just being great at that one thing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Friday March 10 2017, @05:38AM (8 children)
Why is R&D so expensive? Computers are cheap, PHD grads are a dime a dozen and have proven their willingness to work for sub-minimum wage time and again. Scientists can share expensive equipment like electron microscopes and particle accelerators such that tens of thousands of projects can share the cost. It really does not seem like you would need to spend billions to come out with one drug slightly better at treating a disease.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @06:15AM (4 children)
It's not. The open secret is that pharmaceutical companies still spend billions more on advertising and marketing than they do actually developing drugs. The exact ratio by a recent study [bmj.com] has pharmaceuticals spending an aggregate of $19 on marketing and promotion for every $1 spent on actually making drugs. The more concerning things is that the vast majority of this money is spent marketing and effectively lobbying doctors to push their drugs.
This leads to an incredible amount of misinformation at all levels on drugs. I actually wonder something. If we didn't have any drug developed after let's say 1950 how much less healthy (if at all) would society be? I think there is a strong argument to be made that increases in longevity are more attributable to the increased availability of basic care and general increases in social health such as sewage, healthful food, and so on. This would also explain why even though the US is supposed to be home to some of the most advanced healthcare in the world that our health outcomes are overall very poor. We rank about 40th in the world in terms of life expectancy with countries life Chile, Cuba, and Costa Rica coming ahead of us. You can blame the fats and while I agree, I think that is actually supporting my hypothesis. Look at the data [wikipedia.org] on countries ranked by BMI. It's generally poor countries that are fat. The reason people are fat is not an overabundance of food (which is now the case most of everywhere in the world) but the healthfulness of their food. Food served to the masses in the US is designed to make a profit, not to make people healthy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @12:46PM
If we didn't have any drug developed after let's say 1950 how much less healthy (if at all) would society be?
Polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and HBV vaccines weren't out yet.
No HCV cure and no HIV treatments.
No targeted therapies for breast cancer, chronic myelogenous leukemia, or various other cancers.
(Score: 1) by zugedneb on Friday March 10 2017, @02:50PM (2 children)
I actually wonder something. If we didn't have any drug developed after let's say 1950 how much less healthy (if at all) would society be?
not all drugs are made by corporations.
i also would like to see the list of drugs made in the past 67 years, but only those made or financed by governments around the world.
then see the list of corporate only drugs.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @03:36PM
not all drugs are made by corporations
True, some are made by private companies such as Boehringer Ingelheim.
[government only vs corporate only]
"Only" makes things very difficult. Does government-funded basic science not directly related count? Does for-profit QC, manufacture, and distribution count?
If you limit the definition to "discovery", then it was about 15% from 1998-2007 that were discovered in academic labs. I don't know of any other references off-hand.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/02/02/drugs-purely-from-academia [sciencemag.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @03:45PM
i also would like to see the list of drugs made in the past 67 years, but only those made or financed by governments around the world.
How about when a corporation bribes a government to chip in? Who actually is doing the finance in that situation?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 10 2017, @07:49AM (1 child)
Many factors.
Have a look over the price of reagents. Take NaOH [sigmaaldrich.com] - what do you see? (for AU region, a 500g bottle of NaOH pellets 98% purity is AUD116 on SigmaAldrich - the site is geocoded).
Have a look over the price for accessing scientific publications... do I need to continue? (thanks, sci-hub).
Have a look over the PR budgets [sacbee.com] of a certain university. Do you think it's an isolated case?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Friday March 10 2017, @01:10PM
Are you implying they use billions of pounds of reagents to develope a single drug? 5 thousand Kilograms of this reagent might equal .1% of a drug development budget.
Individuals don't pay for access to these publications, institutions do. A university pays once, for thousands of their members to benefit. We are talking about a few thousand dollars per individual. Even if every single researcher had to pay the same cost as a university, to access scientific publications, that is still only talking .1% of the budget.
PR isn't R&D.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @02:40PM
Third, it's the variety of political games that are played, particularly with earmarks/pork and large projects. The really big manned space NASA projects don't really need to be built all over the US, it just happens that to Congress spreading pork over the entire US is a higher priority than anything NASA does.
Finally, the public project doesn't have to work. There's no negative consequences to burning a bunch of money and not getting anything back on it. For example, nothing happened when after decades of price inflation, that the ISS ended up costing $100 billion instead of the initial $14.5 billion. Or when at first, it could only manage reduced man-hours towards actual experiments. And certainly, nothing is happening now, even though it's not doing much to justify the over a billion dollars spent annually on it.
An even more glaring example is the Superconducting Super Collider. Sure, it did get canceled after $2 billion had been burned and the project had grown in cost by a fact of three. But there were otherwise no consequences to the various parties that had grossly mismanaged construction of the project.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday March 10 2017, @06:36AM (20 children)
Now that we have proven that industries who benefit from research can and will pay for it themselves, lets get the NSF zeroed out. Throw in the National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a few more the Federal Government has no lawful authority for and it would be a good start.
The only authority the Feds have is their power to grant copyrights and patents to "promote progress in Science and the Useful Arts."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @06:45AM (13 children)
I definitely wouldn't mind seeing these organizations, which are increasingly political, get wiped out so long as their budget was redirected to a good purpose. For instance towards science that clearly has no profit motive or apparent path to monetization. Corporations tend to only pay for science that can make them a buck. Peter Higgs himself stated he likely would have been able to survive in today's "scientific culture." He helped monumentally advance our understanding of the universe, but nobody's making a buck off it.
There'd still be the problem of who's allowed to work on such research since now a days we have far more phds than we do research positions, public or private, available but it'd at least provide some clear avenue for science to progress in a less bastardized fashion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @02:55PM (12 children)
For instance towards science that clearly has no profit motive or apparent path to monetization.
Let us also keep in mind that applied science is a strong driver for pure science progress here. You will get considerable pure science progress, merely because it is necessary in order to develop the applied science venues. I believe Higg's theoretical work, for example, would fall in that category. In addition, prior to the takeover by public funding, there were considerable non profit donations to pure science, such as in the US for about half a century prior to the Second World War. If you have science that isn't covered by these two avenues, then it's probably not worth doing with public funds either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @03:25PM (11 children)
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. If a purely theoretic science was seen as a viable precursor to an application then it would be considered purely theoretic!
And lots of theoretic work seems to have absolutely no relationship to what it ultimately ends up being used for. For instance imaginary numbers were developed around 1500-1700 and seem like mathematicians just having some fun thinking about the implications of the square root of negative 1. Of course now days they're of critical importance in everything from electrical engineering to rotational mechanics.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @04:09PM (10 children)
I think that's putting the cart before the horse. If a purely theoretic science was seen as a viable precursor to an application then it would be considered purely theoretic!
I assume you mean "it wouldn't be". I'll just note here that I've played a game off and on over the years, where someone takes some historical research that they think is purely theoretic and I show how it had near future application (electricity -> lightning rods, quantum field theory -> X Ray imaging of the human body, cosmic microwave background -> understanding important sources of noise in microwave communications, general relativity -> explaining better why light/EM waves appear to have constant speed -> radio communications, etc). Science doesn't happen in a vacuum, not even supposedly pure theoretical science.
For instance imaginary numbers were developed around 1500-1700 and seem like mathematicians just having some fun thinking about the implications of the square root of negative 1.
And yet it had near future application to the understanding of polynomials, key mathematically constructs used everywhere, even then.
And lots of theoretic work seems to have absolutely no relationship to what it ultimately ends up being used for.
Which is irrelevant. No one researched electricity because it would result in computers. No one researched special relativity or quantum mechanics because it would yield nuclear power. Sure, everyone is quite aware that science can and routinely does result in unforeseen added value. But it doesn't get funded because the current research might result in an epic breakthrough three centuries hence.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 10 2017, @06:22PM (9 children)
general relativity -> explaining better why light/EM waves appear to have constant speed -> radio communications
Communication by radio was in use before relativity was understood. It can be traced to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and Hertz's experiments with a spark gap transmitter, which he deemed "of no use whatsoever."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz#Electromagnetic_waves [wikipedia.org]
Your post reminds me of the television series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed (which are also available as books).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29 [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday March 10 2017, @08:14PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @09:31PM
but I suspect from your quoted segment that khallow wanted to draw the connection between c being c and Special Relativity, rather than General Relativity.
The thing is, general relativity explains why special relativity works. Special relativity is an approximation where space is nearly flat (with objected in it moving at speeds close enough to the speed of light to be significant).
It's simply a case of knowing that certain things (stones, metals, circuits) have certain properties, and have them reliably.
There's a lot of materials. How can we determine what properties the materials will have without going through a very costly amount of testing? That's where model building comes into play.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @09:33PM (6 children)
Communication by radio was in use before relativity was understood.
And communication by radio was in use after relativity was understood too.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:03AM (5 children)
And you think that knowledge of relativity is somehow used for that purpose? Do tell.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 11 2017, @05:43AM (4 children)
And you think that knowledge of relativity is somehow used for that purpose?
How can you understand how general relativity affects or doesn't affect important things like radio communication till you have a model of it?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday March 14 2017, @07:15AM (3 children)
Near the Earth, the effects described by general relativity are minuscule and, for most purposes, can simply be ignored. An often-mentioned exception is satellite navigation. The caesium atomic clock in a navigational satellite ran faster than clocks on the Earth by 442.5 parts in 1012.
http://www.phys.lsu.edu/mog/mog9/node9.html [lsu.edu]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 14 2017, @07:55AM (2 children)
Near the Earth, the effects described by general relativity are minuscule and, for most purposes, can simply be ignored. An often-mentioned exception is satellite navigation. The caesium atomic clock in a navigational satellite ran faster than clocks on the Earth by 442.5 parts in 1012.
And you would know this ahead of time how? For example, this eliminates a fair number of anti-gravity schemes.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday March 15 2017, @01:11AM (1 child)
> And you would know this ahead of time how?
As I was trying to communicate, it was predicted by general relativity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15 2017, @06:45AM
And you would know this ahead of time how?
As I was trying to communicate, it was predicted by general relativity.
So you would have to know general relativity first in order to know about this prediction of general relativity. It's not sexy, but theories that show certain near future avenues of research are fruitless to pursue, are useful too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @07:55AM
By all means, do it. The sooner, the better.
Maybe this is how you'll get to learn their value: by missing them.
Meanwhile, download a copy of the Franklin's stove design - while you can afford the internet connections
One never knows when you'll need to burn coal again.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @08:00AM
Your brain is too rigid and small to really grasp the scope and depth of humanity. Back under the bridge! Go make the machines work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @12:08PM
I guess you missed the part where nobody wants to pay for new antibiotics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @12:44PM
You've been warned [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 10 2017, @06:10PM (1 child)
Why do you want to gut the people's programs, and narrow our funding options down to only private corporations? Don't take such an orthodox view of competition, thinking the only good kind is within the private capitalist market system and all other forms are inferior. To the contrary, the more models we try, the better. I get a chuckle out of private businesses blowing their horns about them being ruthless competitors driven by market forces to excel, when in fact the biggest are doing all they can to kill the market and gain monopoly power.
Private funding has serious limitations. There are many projects that are too big for private corporations and the stock market to tackle. They need lots and lots of help from the people. The most ambitious railroad projects, such as the Transcontinental Railroad and the Channel Tunnel, needed a lot of public help. When it came to automobile roads, private companies made a real mess. They pulled crap like deliberately lengthening routes, to extract more revenue from travelers. It was public outcry over such practices that lead to the creation of the AAA, and when that still wasn't enough to stop the attempts to fleece travelers, finally the numbered highway system in 1926.
No way could the moon landing have been done in the 1960s without public help, in more than just funds. Needed public oversight. Needed vast resources poured into applicable research, public universities all encouraged to help solve the thousands of details that needed to be worked out. With the backing of the people, NASA had the resources to build the Saturn V rockets. Those rockets were not COTS, nowhere close. They were full of custom work and research results. They used extremely expensive methods to build the rockets sooner, stuff like hand grinding weld joins to smooth them, rather than wait on improvements in manufacturing. Lot of advances came out of the efforts to put a man on the moon.
As for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, remember how that played when Mitt Romney announced a desire to throw Big Bird under the troop bus.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday March 11 2017, @02:47AM
Why do you want to gut the people's programs, and narrow our funding options down to only private corporations?
Because it doesn't work. Your ideas have been tried, multiple times in multiple places and do not work. There are very few things a government (i.e. institutionalized force) do better and I suspect it is only because our civilizational tech is insufficiently advanced to replace the government in those areas.... yet.
Government drones at the NSF are not accountable, they suffer zero consequences from dumping hundreds of millions (or even billions) into unproductive lines of research. On the other hand the rewards for playing politics the way the Party wants them to are many. Do not look only at the few good things that come from government funded research, one must also account for the many good things those seized tax dollars didn't do. The ledger is always badly out of balance.
To the contrary, the more models we try, the better.
Ah, you get close to the No True Scottsman here. We have tried Socialism / Statism / Fascism how many times? But I'm to believe you when you say that if we only try harder, "Once more, with feeling!" it will work.
I get a chuckle out of private businesses blowing their horns about them being ruthless competitors driven by market forces to excel, when in fact the biggest are doing all they can to kill the market and gain monopoly power.
Yes. And what is the one and only way for businessmen to kill the market and gain monopoly power? Get into bed with the government. Every. Single. Time.
Private funding has serious limitations. There are many projects that are too big for private corporations and the stock market to tackle. They need lots and lots of help from the people. The most ambitious railroad projects, such as the Transcontinental Railroad and the Channel Tunnel, needed a lot of public help.
Actually, no. The Transcontinental Railroad probably needed imminent domain, like any road, rail project, etc. It needed no other help, railroads were being laind everywhere, the coasts would have soon connected. The government had policy goals and incentivized it happening sooner, that may or may not have been net positive or negative. Whether the public joint stock corporation really needs to retain it's government sponsorship is even a question I think should be laid upon the table for debate. I certainly think they should limited, probably have a firm sunset date, etc. The current corporate model tends to privatize rewards and socialize risk.
When it came to automobile roads, private companies made a real mess.
Roads are actually an enumerated power given to the Fed Gov but I suspect that in most cases letting States have most of the responsibility is the wise move. The Interstate Highway system is probably a justifiable exception, the name is self explanatory.
No way could the moon landing have been done in the 1960s without public help, in more than just funds.
You say that like it is a good thing. It probably was, not as science but as a PR stunt in the Cold War. But it isn't really debatable that going to the moon decades before we were really ready has stunted our space efforts. But when Musk or Bezos finally get there, odds are it won't be a grab some rocks and scoot deal.
As for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, remember how that played when Mitt Romney announced a desire to throw Big Bird under the troop bus.
That wasn't a rational argument, it was shameful political rhetoric. Successful because Romney was a fool who hadn't a clue how to play dirty in the big leagues. But Big Bird sold out to HBO soon after that and right now they have no photogenic mascots at PBS to save them. Besides, all their children's programming is usually viewed on Sprout now anyway. Now all they would have to argue is saving Stuff Rich White People Like, hard to justify stealing tax dollars for stuff that outta be on BBCA anyway. Well that and NOVA which would move to Science Channel or Discovery if PBS really couldn't stay on the air with only donations from viewers like YOU.. (and corporations, big foundations, etc.)
In a saner world Romney would have instantly fired off a rejoinder like, "In a sane world PBS would be getting paid by CTW to air Sesame Street. Have you seen how much coin they rake in from the merchandising? It is more profitable than those inane cartoons explicitly designed around toys. But no, PBS is content to throw our tax dollars at their friends. But with public debt at current levels we can't afford to be dumb anymore."
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Friday March 10 2017, @03:42PM
Aren't drugs created with Federal grant money sold to pharmaceutical companies for profit anyway? If they want the drugs, they can fund the R&D. Obviously this is not bypassing FDA guidlines and regulations, right? So...what's the problem, exactly? I didn't RTFA.