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How much countries spend in R&D

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Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#51

Post by mrfusion »

PeterStuer wrote: post #12
early wrote: post #3

% of GDP can be a bit misleading as rich countries easy fall to the left of the graph. I would rather see $ spent per person

Yes, GDP. I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed. Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outland…

I wonder if we could switch away from gdp to a happiness metric. Just have periodic surveys asking people about how happy they are.

I know it sounds silly but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#52

Post by voltooid »

carlmr wrote: post #46
voltooid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low-paid job. It seems to have not a lot to…

>How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures. Hierarchical thinking is the next problem. If you want to disrupt something, you have to be a little bit of a rebel.

That's the thing about being a rebel in a hierarchical system. You really are up against much more than a "rebel" in say the U.S. would be up against. For example, think of the adoration that American people seem to have for people that do things off the beaten path. Being ordinary is to be avoided at all costs in the U.S.

In a place like India, you are taught to conform. A hierarchy is enforced. No deviation is tolerated. (Sorry to use such dramatic language. But there is no other way to describe this system.) You don't get to do anything outside of arbitrary norms that others have drawn for you. This is too much for young and curious minds that may want to do things even a slight bit differently. The path of least resistance is to just lie down and submit to rote learning or whatever other evil the system imposes on you.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#53

Post by nl »

voltooid wrote: post #42
throwaway_tvs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right to the first order about language, but having a 'colonial' system is very insidious IMO. First it means that a large fraction of the population is implicitly denied resources to develop their abilities. Second it means that people who do make it through the system (as it is) have no real incentives to stay back, neither cultural, nor fiscal, nor institutional. Personally, none of the people I studi…

What do you mean by a colonial system? edited to add: I ask the question because I genuinely don't understand what you mean by it in this context. It seems to me that it might mean some sort of system that the British introduced in India that was then adopted by the Indians after Independence. But I could be missing the nuances in your argument.

From the OP: "the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations."

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#54

Post by myth_drannon »

throwaway_tvs wrote: post #30

I really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century, and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be incorporated the world over. India on t…

A big part of its success was the collapse of USSR. So luck and ability to self-reflect and realize on their fortunes and execute on that lucky break... In the 90's they had a population of 4mil and something 300k Soviet immigrants were arriving every year. A large proportion of them was highly educated people. And those people who sent rockets to space were cleaning the streets... So what they did right was just take money from US grants and give that money to everyone who wanted to build something and asked for it. They have built these huge warehouses/offices called "hothouses" on the outskirts of cities, put the unemployed scientists there, gave them some money and said build something.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#55

Post by radicalbyte »

avar wrote: post #23
flipp3r wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I can see the Netherlands on 2+% of GDP on the chart as well. The Netherlands indeed grants tax cuts if you do R&D (The law is called "WBSO"), however it totally depends on how you word what you're doing towards the tax authorities. Installing Kubernetes & building Jenkins pipelines? Sorry, that's obviously NOT R&D. Oh wait -- someone hired a company to word it slightly differently. Now you're getting an X mill…

I work for a company mainly based in The Netherlands that gets a ~$400 million USD/yr tax cut through WBSO. Search for "Innoation Box" here: http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm wrong). It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get m…

Those knowledge workers can also get a flat 30% tax reduction which is applied to their gross wage before other reductions. The end result is that someone earning 100k EUR a year has a net take home pay of 101k EUR.

Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I could have, only I found out about it too late).

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#56

Post by virtuabhi »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #17
friendstock wrote: post #13

Where is Taiwan?! Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...

This comes out of UNESCO, a UN agency. So probably counted as part of China, but might just be ignored.

Taiwan is not a part of UN?

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#57

Post by cheeko1234 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #54
throwaway_tvs wrote: post #30

I really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century, and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be incorporated the world over. India on t…

A big part of its success was the collapse of USSR. So luck and ability to self-reflect and realize on their fortunes and execute on that lucky break... In the 90's they had a population of 4mil and something 300k Soviet immigrants were arriving every year. A large proportion of them was highly educated people. And those people who sent rockets to space were cleaning the streets... So what they did right was just tak…

Wow I had no clue about this. Any interesting books/articles that you can recommend on this topic?

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#58

Post by arteez »

virtuabhi wrote: post #56
boomboomsubban wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes out of UNESCO, a UN agency. So probably counted as part of China, but might just be ignored.

Taiwan is not a part of UN?

very simplified TLDR - Taiwan was in the UN as the representative of China and blocked People's Republic of China until 1970s when second and third world countries voted PRC in instead of Taiwan and now PRC as the representative of China blocks Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations

fun fact, because USSR was boycotting the UN over this issue in the 50s there was no one left to veto US's intervention in Korea, therefore it was okay by UNSC

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#59

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #53
voltooid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by a colonial system? edited to add: I ask the question because I genuinely don't understand what you mean by it in this context. It seems to me that it might mean some sort of system that the British introduced in India that was then adopted by the Indians after Independence. But I could be missing the nuances in your argument.

From the OP: "the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations."

[deleted]

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#60

Post by avar »

radicalbyte wrote: post #55
avar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company mainly based in The Netherlands that gets a ~$400 million USD/yr tax cut through WBSO. Search for "Innoation Box" here: http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm wrong). It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get m…

Those knowledge workers can also get a flat 30% tax reduction which is applied to their gross wage before other reductions. The end result is that someone earning 100k EUR a year has a net take home pay of 101k EUR. Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I could have, only I found out about it too late).

Indeed, but this is unrelated to whether or not their employer participates in "research" via WBSO or any other schema, it's more like the U.S. H1B program, i.e. they've got to try to search for talent domestically (or at least make a show of it), not find it, and then pay above a certain amount for the job.
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