Absolutely. Thanks for saying what nobody likes to hear. Markets consistently undervalue research in the utilitarian sense, but I'm pretty sure they don't under

Absolutely. Thanks for saying what nobody likes to hear. Markets consistently undervalue research in the utilitarian sense, but I'm pretty sure they don't undervalue it in the economic sense. To be clear, I think this is a shortcoming in the economic notion of value, not in research. > sure, might have some kind of long-term payoff, but not necessarily one captured by Google That's the crux of it. It's not about unwillingness of companies to "think big" and "take risks", it's not about a shrinking horizon of shareholder ROI expectations, it's about the difficulty of capturing the value that gets created. Economic value that can't be captured isn't economic value. Maybe (probably, in this case) it's utilitarian value, but it's not economic value. The notion of intellectual property was a valiant attempt to turn things around, but it introduces so much friction and so many routes of exploitation that it really hasn't changed the fact that on some level markets are fundamentally incompatible with basic research -- which is why fighting to fund it through the government is so important.