The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

While I agree with regard to companies, I disagree with regard to countries. The equivalent for a nation is education, which would mean every nation would be happy to accept any immigrant who can speak the local language while also doing whatever they can to prevent people leaving. The higher the education, the more this matters, but even K-12 equivalents are ~13 years of state support. Potentially more if they were born somewhere where the state pays for early childhood and p/maternity.

Moving country is still hard for most people.

Companies still do this today, they just go about it differently. Google started Google X, Cisco has (had?) spin-ins, functionally everyone large enough has an unofficial rest and vest program.

Like another commenter said, it just seems like the financial incentives don't lend themselves to formal research orgs anymore.

Now, newsflash for the MBAs, if you just sell the same thing as everybody else, you're just competing on price (and maybe marketing/sales channel). Otherwise you need to get your hands dirty. (Though apparently there's still money in dropshipping to be made, until people realize everything was already on DX/AliExpress)

But oh thank to the wise Master minds of Business Administration, everything is on the shelf to buy somewhere and what isn't doesn't exist. R&D? It's a cost center.

Time is money on different terms for different people.

So science costs money.

How much science would you like?

>the tension between managing scientists with their own pure research goals in such a way that they produce something commercially viable, while still leaving them enough latitude to make important leaps, seems huge. But these problems were always there in the model. What is harder to identify is an exogenous shock or set of shocks that changed the situation that existed from the 1930s until somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Not that hard.

During this period the US dollar had been tied to gold at $35 per ounce while Americans and their firms were prohibited from owning or speculating in gold.

The strength and stability of the dollar gave confidence in what it would purchase in the future. This is very important if long-term projects are to be considered. Especially if the projects themselves have uncertain outcomes. Which is actually supposed to be intentional for research.

It was pretty good knowing that 35 dollar bills in your wallet would get you an ounce worth of gold, even if you were only allowed to own a limited amount of it, and jewelry form.

Then one day Nixon comes along in the early 1970's and destroys the currency by fiat.

No longer backed by gold, the dollar floats. Like the Titanic.

Gold can't float it was the backing, realistically since before biblical times.

As rapidly as possible as many Americans as possible and crucially other target dollar holders were only worth about half of what they were a year or two earlier. From the top corporations to the everyday citizen, it was devastating.

With wage & price freezes, middle class was bumped right down to lower-middle with downward pressure going forward.

The rich were still rich, but only half as rich. So their losses were actually very significant and added more pain to the economy as a whole. Even in some of the biggest corporations the cutbacks were huge. No way they were going to be able to afford research again until they can get as much of it for $35 as they did when it was really working.

There was no recovery from the Nixon Recession.

The malaise continued and by the 1980's even the most well-insulated from the initial shock had adjusted to the _new normal_.

Never again were Americans going to be able to fit enough dollar bills in one wallet to purchase an ounce of gold, not even close.

Never again would the dollar be trustworthy enough to accomplish as legendary a form of scientific progress.

It would have to be done in some other way on some other terms for labs that take longer to build than the dollar can be expected to remain stable, with no risk of further losing value.

That doesn't invalidate the assertion that it used to be even harder before in any way.