Does academic research cause economic growth?
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Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#2I do not believe that the U.S. government should fund translational research. I firmly believe that private enterprise will be able to efficiently make immediate use of any important scientific breakthroughs or discoveries. Instead, I believe that the government should pore funding into basic science research.
I completely disagree with the Author's implicit assertion that the U.S. government should spend less money funding scientific research. Private industry did not discover the importance of DNA, nor was it responsible for determining the chemical structure of this nucleic acid. Many fundamental discoveries would never have occurred in private industry simply because private industry cannot afford to heavily fund basic science.
The value of basic science is not felt within a decade or two. It takes a lifetime to appreciate.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#3For the studies mentioned, how do you decide what leads to economic growth and what doesn't?
Take Lasers for example. The first Laser was made at Bell Labs, a commercial research lab. It would not have been possible without the maser that came before it in academia, or the work done by Einstein, also in academia. Lasers have had an immense economic impact, but do we credit them to academic or commercial research?
The answer is both.
Academic research is less frequently the final link in the long chain to profits than commercial research is. This is only natural since commercial research labs are motivated to invent products that will make money while academics can afford to take a longer view.
Why else might nations that spend a lot on fundamental science benefit? A skilled work-force. Scientists may publish how their experiments work in broad strokes, but the nitty gritty details are often something that can only be learned by working in a lab. If your country has a lot of labs, you have a workforce that commercial enterprise can draw upon to bring products to market based on research. A country can always lure immigrants, but having a home-field advantage is more cost effective.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#4I looked up the Author's published manuscripts to see what his background is in research. It appears that his expertise lies outside that of physics, chemistry, or biology but is instead in algorithm design(??) and data analysis(??).
I wonder if the programming community relies on academia as much as for example the medical industry or the aeronautical industry.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#5I do not believe that the U.S. government should fund translational research. I firmly believe that private enterprise will be able to efficiently make immediate use of any important scientific breakthroughs or discoveries. Instead, I believe that the government should pore funding into basic science research. I completely disagree with the Author's implicit assertion that the U.S. government should spend less money…
Some private organizations have very deep pockets, and it's not just industry, as non-profits can also fund research. But if industry is biased toward applied/translational research, perhaps it's not just a focus on short-term profitability or a lack of funds for large projects. One interesting idea is that patent laws are partially responsible for this bias, because they grant a temporary monopoly on inventions/applications, but not on basic science.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#6I looked up the Author's published manuscripts to see what his background is in research. It appears that his expertise lies outside that of physics, chemistry, or biology but is instead in algorithm design(??) and data analysis(??). I wonder if the programming community relies on academia as much as for example the medical industry or the aeronautical industry.
I think the programming industry is interesting because my impression (I have no idea if this is backed up by data) is that there's much more mixing between academia and the private sector (i.e. people move from academic to industry jobs and vice-versa more frequently/easily) than in other fields (natural science, social sciences). I wonder if this increases the productivity of either.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#7From what I've heard, those regressions aren't totally valid. It can simply be that poor countries grow faster (leapfrogging on the research of rich countries), but don't fund a lot of public R&D.
Once the regression hits a dead end (as it doesn't distinguish the causal factors), we jump straight to anecdotes - the Industrial Revolution, and the USA. Both of these are probably outliers.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#8I looked up the Author's published manuscripts to see what his background is in research. It appears that his expertise lies outside that of physics, chemistry, or biology but is instead in algorithm design(??) and data analysis(??). I wonder if the programming community relies on academia as much as for example the medical industry or the aeronautical industry.
I think the programming industry is interesting because my impression (I have no idea if this is backed up by data) is that there's much more mixing between academia and the private sector (i.e. people move from academic to industry jobs and vice-versa more frequently/easily) than in other fields (natural science, social sciences). I wonder if this increases the productivity of either.
I am in the Natural sciences. I see that people are trained in esoteric technologies or procedures that may only be useful to the immediate scientific question at hand. This would seem to make it hard for these individuals to transition to industry, unless their specific expertise is required.
The computer programming community has the advantage that its technologies and best practices are ubiquitous throughout the industry and academia (??). This may facilitate an easy transition from industry to academia and vice-versa.
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#9I like "number theory" as a favorite example of practical reasons to fund seemingly impractical and useless academic research. A quote from Hardy (who I think was a number theorist, but could be misremembering) that I like is:
"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world... Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value."
And I can't find a quote, but I think I remember reading that he viewed his mathematical research as consistent with his pacifism, because nothing he developed could be used for military purposes.
Of course, now that we have computers...
But, given the different channels that research can become commercially viable, and given the long and uncertain time lags before new developments in research show up in GDP, a statistical analysis based on aggregate data is going to be absurdly difficult. And there are other reasons to expect that private companies will underspend (from a societal-benefit point of view) on research that has positive spillovers/externalities (really quickly: they're only going to want to spend to the extent that they directly benefit. If there are benefits that they can't profit from, as a society we'd want them to pay for the research anyway, but they'd be crazy to). So funding as much research as possible seems like a decent approach.
Incidentally, this is the first time I've seen someone claim that the US or Canada governments have massive research expenditures. Does anyone have a link for good numbers?
Re: Does academic research cause economic growth?
#10I looked up the Author's published manuscripts to see what his background is in research. It appears that his expertise lies outside that of physics, chemistry, or biology but is instead in algorithm design(??) and data analysis(??). I wonder if the programming community relies on academia as much as for example the medical industry or the aeronautical industry.
I think the programming industry is interesting because my impression (I have no idea if this is backed up by data) is that there's much more mixing between academia and the private sector (i.e. people move from academic to industry jobs and vice-versa more frequently/easily) than in other fields (natural science, social sciences). I wonder if this increases the productivity of either.
I think it's actually the opposite. Academia is more divorced from industry in the computer science world than say the aerospace world. When I was working with grad students as an aerospace major, they were by and large working directly on problems relevant to industry. Most computer science research seems much more mathematical/theoretical than practical, in comparison. I think this is also a relatively recent phenomenon. Compare say Preston Brigg's thesis on graph coloring register allocation (1992) to Sebastian Hack's thesis on register allocation for SSA form programs (2007). The former I think was much more written with implementers in mind, and the latter has a lot more math and proofs (though it's more readable than a lot of CS papers these days, which can tend towards a dense maze of proofs and esoteric notation).
Indeed, I think there is a language barrier between CS academia and CS industry that doesn't exist between AE academia and AE industry. In aerospace, everyone speaks the language of differential equations, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, etc. But CS academia is deeply steeped in type theory, automated proofs, etc, while CS industry talks about object orientation and test frameworks, etc.