It's a real shame how the recession has hit STEM funding. There are a lot of really exciting new technologies that are simply not funded.
The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited resources.
The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.
> The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight
That feels like a sweeping condemnation of R&D in the private sector in general. I know very little on the subject, is there a strong base for this position?
While "cannot" might be a little strong, it can be true, depend on the field and company of course.
I used to work at a large company that in the past performed a large amount of fundamental research into physics, since it affected their products. I took a tour of the labs recently and they are a shadow of their former selves. It was depressing.
I think reduction in private sector STEM comes from several sources. One is the private sector not willing to take the risk of something not working, no long-term thinking, etc.
Another might be the relative difficulty in measuring the impact of your R&D department. In an era where every cost has to be justified and everything has to be measured by some metric, R&D begins to look like an expense rather than a profit generator, at least in the short-medium term.
It's a side effect of changes in the marketplace and the world.
When big conglomerates ran big horizontal and vertical businesses, they did general R&D work that benefited their broader corporate mission. Bell Labs wasn't there because AT&T was some sort of benevolent charity.
Now companies are mostly brokers between outsourcers and have a narrow focus. We haven't "caught up" with the capability that we already have, so startups have replaced corporate R&D, mostly using off the shelf stuff to make minor incremental changes.
I don't know if this was legally enforceable, but I have heard that the existence of Bell Labs was essentially a quid pro quo with the federal government in exchange for being granted a regulated monopoly on phone service. More generally, I have heard that corporate executives in the golden age of American industry had more of a sense that they owed a debt to the public for all the free stuff they had been given (cost plus defense contracts, government R&D, radio and TV frequencies, ect.). I think there are some rose-tinted glasses involved in that analysis, but it was probably part of it.
The private sector cannot innovate until monetization is in sight and the public sector is increasingly squeezed to publish papers with limited resources.
The overall effect is less innovation and bad science.