If you like free time and available funding to develop technology, this graph should make you very happy! It represents the hourly productive output of each person in the United States. In other words, it shows how good we are at making the food, houses, freezers, toothbrushes and everything else we all need to survive. Looking at that slope we are clearly getting more efficient at making the things we need each year which means we have more time and money to spend developing new technologies. For incremental sustaining research this is absolutely what has happened over the last 60 years. Unfortunately this graph has actually made it more difficult to find funding for basic research.
Since the 70s total private and public sector R&D spending has been relatively flat with an average around 2.5% of US GDP and a range of about 0.5%. This is what you would hope would occur at a bare minimum given the 2X increase in productivity. The growth in R&D spending has been about $200B since the 70s and has matched (or fueled in perhaps a better word) our GDP growth during that time. Unfortunately, this rosy picture becomes quite skewed when we break down the information a bit more.
First, we need to make an assumption: levels of federal funding are good indications of basic R&D where as private sector funding is a good indicator of incremental R&D. As generalizations go, I don't think many people will argue with this. When we break down the funding growth by private or public source, the picture looks grim for basic R&D. Private sector R&D funding increased from 1% of our GDP in the 70s to more then 2% today while federal funding decreased from 1.5% to just above 0.5%. In other words, while total federal funding remained nearly constant, private R&D funding increased from $50B to more then $200B. This means that none of the extra money and time that was generated by a 2X increase in productivity ended up going to basic research. Instead, it went to incremental research inside existing companies. The question is why?
There is certainly no clear answer to that question. But a part of the answer can be found by looking at who had power over the wealth created by the increased productivity. The answer to that is not the federal government. Instead, the wealth went largely to the CEO/Investor class. During that same time period, compensation for these groups increased on the order of 800% (while compensation for workers increased 5%, but that is a different problem). In other words, as productivity improvements of the 20th century set in, the CEO/Investor class took all the money and time that was generated and where else to invest all that money then in the same companies that had just created it, driving the next set of incremental technologies.
You might be asking yourself some of these questions:
Why should anybody care?
The reason you should care is that everything has an opportunity cost. Each dollar that got spent on an incremental R&D project from 1970 to 2013 was a dollar that did not get spent on a more basic R&D project that might have been able to address the now crushing problems we face today; which believe me, the funding from 1970-2013 fell far short of solving.
Maybe we have researched all the basic research that is out there?
For all of Human history people have made such claims. They are utterly false. The only defensible position is that we, on the contrary, know nothing compared to the vastness that is all knowledge. There is always more to discover and it will always be valuable to the people who do.
What value does basic research really have?
It is common to defend basic research by pointing out all the technologies that started out in a very basic setting. I will take a different argument. As an engineer developing a disruptive technology with a clear market motive, I rely on basic research that was done years ago every single day. I could not be creating the disruptive technology I am without the huge public investment in materials testing that occurred in the mid to late 20th century. The discovery of new, interesting things will always have an unquantifiable value until someone finds a way of quantifying it.
Shouldn't all research be justified with a clear market motive?
Absolutely not. All research should be motivated by a clear technical motive: "This is interesting", "This is unexpected", "This is unusual". Market motive can change in an instant as other market drivers (cough natural gas) fluctuate. Invest in things that are technically unique and motivating and a market motive will materialize.
But given scare resources, shouldn't we invest where we know it will make a return?
Resources are not scarce!!!! Over the past 200 years, R&D has delivered an unprecedented increase in life span, health, productivity, available time, and affordability. The problem is that a small group of people wound up with all the wealth and power that we generated and are now only investing it in short term projects. Given our productivity, it is mathematically impossible that we lack available wealth.
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