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posted by martyb on Friday March 10 2017, @04:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the still-paid-for-by-the-taxpayer/consumer dept.

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.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 10 2017, @02:03PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 10 2017, @02:03PM (#477348) Journal
    What bizarre assertions. Why does it matter that the US is not majority funding every research organization and project on the planet. You can always cherry pick things that the US isn't doing or funding very much. And really, why are we supposed to care that the US isn't majority funding CERN (in English: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for which the US is not European) or dead-end fusion research like ITER (if commercial fusion reactors are going to be well over ten billion dollars apiece, like ITER is, then they'll need a vastly larger output than ITER will manage)?

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 10 2017, @03:17PM (#477367)

    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

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 10 2017, @03:42PM (#477377) Journal

      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.