Can Silicon Valley take care of its own long term needs? Basic math and science research now is the soil Silicon Valley needs in the future. But government bu

Can Silicon Valley take care of its own long term needs? Basic math and science research now is the soil Silicon Valley needs in the future. But government budgets are cut, and there's a philosophy that predominates that government is not the answer. So Larry Page has Google do research and development. But there is the beginning of a stockholder rebellion. The trend is toward focus on short term ever-increasing stock returns each quarter. The powers-that-be want funding for basic math and science research trimmed down to nothing - both government and corporate. Plus treaties like TPP are being pushed. If Silicon Valley profits on the increased spread of information, the TPP tries to tie down information in rules which seem out-of-date. Also telcos (read AT&T and Verizon) are using their last-mile land/airwave monopoly power to redirect bad DNS calls to ads, hijack sessions and place cookies on them, they want to use their monopolies to charge upstreams fees etc. Then there's the Eastern District of Texas patent racket. An example of this discussed recently - in the years after World War II, the transistor was implemented and Moore's Law took effect. As everyone knows, that has slowed down in recent years and soon the current methods will hit a brick wall. If you look at constant non-military R&D dollars coming from the federal budget, they are less this year than they were in 2003. The population is growing, the economy is growing and becoming more complex, but federal R&D dollars are shrinking. Also, you talk as if wasting human capital was not an intention of our current mode of production and economic system. Look at this 1999 Businessweek article, "When is the jobless rate too low?" ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-10-31/when-is-the-jobless-rate-too-low http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-10-31/when-is-th... ). The worry by the people controlling the economy starts when unemployment gets too low, not when it's too high. Of course, if it starts climbing up to 25% like it did in 1932 in the US, turmoil starts to take hold, so in that respect they're against high unemployment on the other end. Why do you assume wasted human capital is the concern of those making the economic decisions? By the people making the economic decisions, I mean the people pressuring Larry Page to cut Alphabet/Google R&D, who pressured Facebook to go public, who beat the drums for years for Apple to have a special dividend etc. Wasted human capital, unemployment - the existence of a reserve army of labor is a cornerstone of the existing economic system.