Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much countries spend in R&D

uis.unesco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dewey wrote: post #49
iagovar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why does this happen in Israel? They don't benefit from the huge capital flows and single market of the US

I could be wrong but from what I read a while ago it's that there's not much traditional resources to export (Farming, Mining,..) and instead there's a focus on R&D and exporting technology. There's probably also a very high amount of R&D in the military sector that's subsidies as they have a very high export rate there (Elbit, Rafael,...).

> there's a focus on R&D and exporting technology

Mandatory military service produces a disciplined and well-networked population. Israel also benefits from sensible commercial law and relatively efficient courts, two things India grossly lacks.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#72

Post by mrmrcoleman »

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).

The rules are much stricter these days and it’s not indefinite. When I left it was 5 years with a possible 5 year extension.

There’s also a lot of luck in the application process. I had colleagues in identical jobs, similar salaries who didn’t get the 30% ruling when I did.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#73

Post by PeterStuer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48
philipps wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why a more exaggerated comparison would be this: a person who walks home after finishing work to cook dinner with the family using vegetables grown in the backyard vs a person who eats out in a bar, drives home drunk, gets into an accident, ends up in hospital, and creates a huge increase in GDP. The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk driver creates jobs for car manufa…

> and creates a huge increase in GDP That evening, sure. In the long run, their productivity is likely diminished. You see a similar binge-and-reckoning cycle in macroéconomies, the difference being practically nobody is rewarded for higher GDP. Governments are rewarded for having larger tax bases.

I hope you'll forgive me for the bluntness, but I'm trying to be brief.

First a question: how come 'productivity' has gone up by 2% annually for nearly a century (if you know compounding you know how massive this is), yet we all have to 'work hared' and 'longer' for less, while our social security is being eroded?

'productivity' in a 'Red Queen's Race'[1] economy has 0 value. We're not doing work to ensure 'survival' or 'progress' anymore. 10% of People could carry that. We long ago stopped having a production problem, we have a(n artificially sustained) distribution problem.

At the 'economic ground floor' level we're in a self accelerating 'service economy' which at the systems level is both driven and preyed upon by a 'rent-seeking' economy that in socio-economic power far outplays the former. Transactions are the key, not what actually goes around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#74

Post by PeterStuer »

mrfusion wrote: post #51
PeterStuer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because for the current socio-economic market ideology, sustained happiness is a negative. It makes people consume less.

Short term happiness resulting from consumption that ensures a relapse and thus the need for more short term relief through further consumption is what the action side of our economy optimizes for. A furniture maker that produces quality tables that last for centuries will soon be bankrupt as he eats his own market. An IKEA that sells you a fashionable crap table that you want/need to replace real soon, either by induced need or low structural resilience quality, creates its own perpetual demand. That gives you an indication why despite major advances in manufacturing technology our physical goods now are so feeble when we could still make a decent washer that lasted for a lifetime just 50 years ago.

GDP is a fairly good indicator for the 'rent seeking economy' that rules our system, as it is more or less aligned with transaction sizes and volumes.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#75

Post by dredmorbius »

PeterStuer wrote: post #73
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and creates a huge increase in GDP That evening, sure. In the long run, their productivity is likely diminished. You see a similar binge-and-reckoning cycle in macroéconomies, the difference being practically nobody is rewarded for higher GDP. Governments are rewarded for having larger tax bases.

I hope you'll forgive me for the bluntness, but I'm trying to be brief. First a question: how come 'productivity' has gone up by 2% annually for nearly a century (if you know compounding you know how massive this is), yet we all have to 'work hared' and 'longer' for less, while our social security is being eroded? 'productivity' in a 'Red Queen's Race'[1] economy has 0 value. We're not doing work to ensure 'survival'…

You could see real productivity increase by some measure (entropic, say, or total available free energy), with the "work harder and longer" dynamic, by other mechanisms.

Failure to equitably distribute gains, a capricious allocation such that individuals might make mint one year, be skint the next. No viable pensions or annuity system. Etc.

Value extraction from labour is the age-old economics problem. It faced feudal peasants, it faces the modern urban/suburban knowledge wage slave paying it all out in rent or mortgage interest. David Ricardo's two bugbears were the laws of rent and wages, in opposition to one another.

GDP's distortions are legion, but you still have the rent/wage dilemma without that.

... Though some measures of gross happiness or support might address that. Hrm. We mearsure GDP. But Smith says:

POLITICAL œconomy, considered as a branch of the science of aThe first object of political economy is to provide subsistence for the people statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/smith-an-inquiry-into-the-...

That is, his standard for economic performance is support of the population, generally, and financing the state. Elsewhere and earlier he calls explicitly for improving the lot of the poorest especially.

GDP does none of this.

I've beeen meaning to read Kuznts's notes specifically for some time.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#76

Post by baddox »

philipps wrote: post #32
baddox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even your example doesn’t seem that pathological if you assume that the individuals are actually pursuing their preferences rather than deliberately trying to inflate their group GDP.

Which is why a more exaggerated comparison would be this: a person who walks home after finishing work to cook dinner with the family using vegetables grown in the backyard vs a person who eats out in a bar, drives home drunk, gets into an accident, ends up in hospital, and creates a huge increase in GDP. The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk driver creates jobs for car manufa…

That example would make sense if anyone was thinking or arguing that every individual transaction that increases GDP is inherently good simply because it increases GDP. But I don't think anyone has that narrow of a focus on GDP. Obviously no one enjoys needing to spend money for medical issues.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#77

Post by rapnie »

flipp3r wrote: post #19
PeterStuer wrote: post #9

A large proportion of the so-called public R&D spending is actually backdoor subsidies to company's normal production activities. Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1]. Traditionally 'Research' was deemed to be up to TRL-3, and 'Development' up to TRL-5. The distinctions are important as there are far stricte…

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…

Yeah. I was in the same situation a couple of times: As a tech guy being asked to review the WBSO request drafted by some supposed subsidy expert, who was hired for a couple of days and for good money. These requests always contained utter gibberish. If I could bring some sense into it, but by using as much complex technical jargon and expensive words in it as possible. Otherwise they might conclude that most of it was not R&D. Rubbish. Did it twice, trying to be as honest as possible in the circumstance, but from then on always pressed my moustache (is that an expression in English? I made myself unavailable) when these things did the round again.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#78

Post by qubax »

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.

> No rote memorization for starters. I have found that if you want problem solvers, it's usually not people from rote memorization cultures.

Rote memorization is the basis of all learning. It's actually the first step and it's at the heart of western education ( or it was until we decided to go to a silly route ).

You have to memorize the ABCs, the multiplication table, vocabulary, etc. And we used to teach kids latin and greek which required lots of memorization. Creativity and problem solving comes afterwards.

I'm against the anti-memorization movement in the US/West. It's great to memorize things and it's great to memorize things intelligently. Whether it be poems, songs, vocabulary, math theorems, code, etc.

As long as rote memorization isn't the end but the means to an end.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#79

Post by PeterStuer »

tomxor wrote: post #50
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely - in the past I've been asked to review past work to see if it qualifies as R&D for tax purposes; this was all bespoke client stuff really, but the retrospective criterion was a vague handwave about reusability.

Yes I had exactly the same experience! it seems like the people reviewing what qualifies have absolutely no technical understanding. Even when trying to be honest, the questions are posed so vaguely that they are really relying on you taking the moral high ground when choosing what _you_ think qualifies as R&D, even then it becomes an internal battle of definitions.

As one of those reviewers I beg to differ on the non-understanding part :).

You have to understand that the reviews happen in context. What isn't always understood by the layman is that countries/regions etc. aren't reluctant to grant subsidies, but actually want to subsidize as much as they can get away with.

The break on the system is international treaties of mutually agreed limits on what you are allowed to subsidize. But the agreed budget will be spent.

The distribution strategy and selectivity are often set by the political factions that hold the office at the time, and the administration is bound by the strategy laid out.

This can vary from being realy critical and looking for true R&D high potential high-risk/high potential risk taking, to lowering the bar and just give everyone a little bit of the budget with few questions asked.

Reviewers are always allowed to be very honest in their assessments, and have more than enough experience in seeing through all the shady hand-waving. They also usually look into the potential of the company/team beyond the strict letter of funding proposal dossier as submitted. How the expert advise is taken into account in a funding decision is up to the administration. The reviewer is paid for the review, and is not even informed of the final decisions.

Re: How much countries spend in R&D

#80

Post by nojvek »

131012 wrote: post #63
siruncledrew wrote: post #2

I was excited to see such a fresh UI from the UNESCO site when the page first loaded, then as I started reading I realized the right half of every sentence is cut off in Safari on iPhone 6/7/8.

May I suggest you get access to a monitor? In all seriousness, data visualization requires all the space it can get. I agree the graphics are not that fancy, but displaying them on mobile would be rather uninteresting as everything would be tiny. Hence the minimal effort put on responsiveness.

Usability. They tried to do all sorts of fancy charts when a simple one could have sufficed. I’d bet HN has more mobile viewers and desktop.

So in this case all that expensive money spent making that page isn’t really worth it since a large part of internet wouldn’t even be able to properly read it.

Worse is they half arsed responsiveness. Could have left safari to browse the page like a normal desktop page but their width metadata gives a very poor experience.

Post reply on HN