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How much countries spend in R&D
- siruncledrew 8y agoI was excited to see such a fresh UI from the UNESCO site when the page first loaded, then as I started reading I realized the right half of every sentence is cut off in Safari on iPhone 6/7/8.
- tshoaib 8y agoSame with Chrome on the OnePlus 5T
- sbmthakur 8y agoOfftopic but another bad thing I noticed was that the page was being served on HTTP.
- jasonvorhe 8y agoI'm having the same issues with Chrome on Android. Too bad. No TLS with LetsEncrypt being around is pretty shameful as well.
- 131012 8y agoMay I suggest you get access to a monitor? In all seriousness, data visualization requires all the space it can get. I agree the graphics are not that fancy, but displaying them on mobile would be rather uninteresting as everything would be tiny. Hence the minimal effort put on responsiveness.
- nojvek 8y agoUsability. They tried to do all sorts of fancy charts when a simple one could have sufficed. I’d bet HN has more mobile viewers and desktop. So in this case all that expensive money spent making that page isn’t really worth it since a large part of internet wouldn’t even be able to properly read it. Worse is they half arsed responsiveness. Could have left safari to browse the page like a normal desktop page but their width metadata gives a very poor experience.
- perfunctory 8y agoIf you click on the country it shows you the "R&D spending by sector of performance" where sectors are Business, Government, University. For all big spenders (right part of the chart) the business share is the biggest.
- tw1010 8y agoImplicit in this is the idea that if country X invests a significantly larger amount in research than country Y, then X will have significantly more output than Y. I don't buy this. And the reason I don't is because my own country, a small one, gets so much of its input from the US, that a doubling of research spending probably wouldn't do much of a corresponding difference (not produce many more Feynmans, I'm afraid). Culture within the country (e.g. attitude towards disruptors) and how the institutions are set up matters a huge amount.
- early 8y ago% of GDP can be a bit misleading as rich countries easy fall to the left of the graph. I would rather see $ spent per person
- t- 8y agoThe graph seems to indicate that rich countries are spending a lot on R&D as a % of GDP. $ per person would be great though. Edit: What's interesting to me is just how dominant business R&D spending is for the larger economies. The top spenders in nominal terms are all large diverse economies. The main industry that came to mind for me is the auto industry. The top countries all have massive auto industries.
- PeterStuer 8y agoYes, GDP. I always think of a toy-world example of a circle of 10 people cooking their own dinners. The GDP of that circle is 0$. Now if every person in the circle cooks not his own dinner but sells his dinner to the person on the right of them for 100$, suddenly the circle's GDP has shot up to 1.000$, while in fact nothing has changed. Now I know very well that this is an oversimplification, yet it is not so outlandish and illustrates quite well how our economic ideology relentlessly pushes 'financialization' of service activities that used to be non-commercial. You need a job, and when you have one then you need to spend the money you earn on others to provide daycare and school lunches and house & garden maintenance ... Financialization is key because it not just allows 'profits' to be made, but is essential to the 'rent seeking' economy as they can only exist by the nature of intermediating on transactions.
- baddox 8y agoEven your example doesn’t seem that pathological if you assume that the individuals are actually pursuing their preferences rather than deliberately trying to inflate their group GDP.
- philipps 8y agoWhich is why a more exaggerated comparison would be this: a person who walks home after finishing work to cook dinner with the family using vegetables grown in the backyard vs a person who eats out in a bar, drives home drunk, gets into an accident, ends up in hospital, and creates a huge increase in GDP. The example downplays the positive impact of the increase in GDP (eg the drunk driver creates jobs for car manufacturers, police officers, and doctors) but it shows how our narrow focus on GDP rewards behavior that may not be desirable.
- antome 8y agoHow much does Taiwan spend on R&D? I would guess that they are similar to South Korea and Japan, but they are nowhere on the charts.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI imagine they're not on the chart because they're not in the United Nations.
- friendstock 8y agohttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation-race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...
- sremani 8y agoGiven the expansive definition of R&D esp. given the tax rebates companies get in their respective countries even a website using a new framework can be categorized as Research and Development. So that begs the question how do we qualify real "R&D" from fake R&D ? what are the markers a curious investigator should look for in this pile of data ?
- tragomaskhalos 8y agoAbsolutely - in the past I've been asked to review past work to see if it qualifies as R&D for tax purposes; this was all bespoke client stuff really, but the retrospective criterion was a vague handwave about reusability.
- tomxor 8y agoYes I had exactly the same experience! it seems like the people reviewing what qualifies have absolutely no technical understanding. Even when trying to be honest, the questions are posed so vaguely that they are really relying on you taking the moral high ground when choosing what _you_ think qualifies as R&D, even then it becomes an internal battle of definitions.
- PeterStuer 8y agoAs one of those reviewers I beg to differ on the non-understanding part :). You have to understand that the reviews happen in context. What isn't always understood by the layman is that countries/regions etc. aren't reluctant to grant subsidies, but actually want to subsidize as much as they can get away with. The break on the system is international treaties of mutually agreed limits on what you are allowed to subsidize. But the agreed budget will be spent. The distribution strategy and selectivity are often set by the political factions that hold the office at the time, and the administration is bound by the strategy laid out. This can vary from being realy critical and looking for true R&D high potential high-risk/high potential risk taking, to lowering the bar and just give everyone a little bit of the budget with few questions asked. Reviewers are always allowed to be very honest in their assessments, and have more than enough experience in seeing through all the shady hand-waving. They also usually look into the potential of the company/team beyond the strict letter of funding proposal dossier as submitted. How the expert advise is taken into account in a funding decision is up to the administration. The reviewer is paid for the review, and is not even informed of the final decisions.
- cryptozeus 8y agoGreat interactive site
- PeterStuer 8y agoA large proportion of the so-called public R&D spending is actually backdoor subsidies to company's normal production activities. Here in the EU there has been a relentless lobbying push by industry to redefine 'Research' to include the higher 'Technology Readiness Levels' [1]. Traditionally 'Research' was deemed to be up to TRL-3, and 'Development' up to TRL-5. The distinctions are important as there are far stricter subsidy percentage limits on public funding of 'Development' then on 'Research'. Now industry lobbying is trying (successfully) to have everything up to TRL-7 be labeled under 'R&D'. Sad times for the real research in the EU, as overall budgets aren't increased and the higher the TRL, the higher the investments that can now make a claim on the money. A single car factory production line development subsidy can eat up a region's whole yearly R&D budget if left unchecked. It's not private enterprises aren't already swimming in public money, but this is a further land-grab on public funds. An example: at the same time VW got fines for diesel-gate in other parts of the world, Belgium (which holds the dubious honor of being both a 'tax heaven' for companies with rates in practice close to 0%, while at the same time being the world record holder for taxing workers pay of around 54%) was cutting VW new deals and funneling VW millions of € in subsidies). [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
- nickpp 8y agoThose fat governmental hand-outs keep being abused, yet they keep existing. It's almost like someone is gaining a lot from them.
- flipp3r 8y agoThis. I can see the Netherlands on 2+% of GDP on the chart as well. The Netherlands indeed grants tax cuts if you do R&D (The law is called "WBSO"), however it totally depends on how you word what you're doing towards the tax authorities. Installing Kubernetes & building Jenkins pipelines? Sorry, that's obviously NOT R&D. Oh wait -- someone hired a company to word it slightly differently. Now you're getting an X million tax cut. Source: Worked at a company that got a 10M+ tax cut for moving to Microservices & rewriting a fucking frontend in React.
- 8y ago
- friendstock 8y agoWhere is Taiwan?! Taiwan is one of top countries for patents per capita: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovation-race-taiwan-is-tops-in-patents-israel-leads-in-r-d.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/in-global-innovatio...
- boomboomsubban 8y agoThis comes out of UNESCO, a UN agency. So probably counted as part of China, but might just be ignored.
- virtuabhi 8y agoTaiwan is not a part of UN?
- arteez 8y agovery simplified TLDR - Taiwan was in the UN as the representative of China and blocked People's Republic of China until 1970s when second and third world countries voted PRC in instead of Taiwan and now PRC as the representative of China blocks Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations fun fact, because USSR was boycotting the UN over this issue in the 50s there was no one left to veto US's intervention in Korea, therefore it was okay by UNSC
- corv 8y agoObviously R&D spending is not high enough to make this website scale correctly on mobile...
- throwawayperson 8y agoAnd how much they wasted it
- throwaway_tvs 8y agoIndia's is a sad state. It is partly to do with the fact that the nation maintains (rather proudly IMO) the colonial structure of being a mere 'training ground' for Engineers and Scientists before they move to the US/UK/rem. Anglo-Saxon nations. K Vijayaraghavan, the DBT secretary, and a NAS fellow, has written a piece on the matter. https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-intellectual-colonialism-to-excel-in-science-and-technology/story-wfbhX71Evf9ilqqUKkjAQL.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-must-shed-inte...
- throwaway_tvs 8y agoThat said, I have great respect for some of the Professors who move back to India; working at salaries lower than their RA stipends.
- voltooid 8y agoRespectfully, it seems to me that India (and other countries in the region and maybe elsewhere) has a problem with strictly hierarchical structure, issues with accessibility and availability of resources. There is no investment in improving training for teachers. Typically, people that don't find jobs anywhere else take up teaching. Teaching is also typically a high-stress, low-paid job. It seems to have not a lot to do with language. There are more factors here. Yes the Germans are able to get ahead cause of the use of both German and English. But it seems like lazy reasoning to suggest that this is solely the reason why they do better. How about looking into what else their education system does that is possibly absent in the Indian system? How about comparing the structure, the resource usage, the training for educators and managers in education and research? Surely, language is not the only difference between the two systems?
- throwaway_tvs 8y agoYou might be right to the first order about language, but having a 'colonial' system is very insidious IMO. First it means that a large fraction of the population is implicitly denied resources to develop their abilities. Second it means that people who do make it through the system (as it is) have no real incentives to stay back, neither cultural, nor fiscal, nor institutional. Personally, none of the people I studied with/worked under ended staying in India. It's interesting that British India managed to sustain better state universities, than today.
- throwaway_tvs 8y agoI really admire Israel on the intellectual front. This is a nation that starts using an obscure liturgical language (Hebrew) at the turn of the 19th century, and today has Silicon Wadi which is second only to SV, the highest proportion of PhDs in the population, and a couple Nobels, Fields, Turing and Wolf prizes! I wonder if there are some aspects of Jewish culture than can be incorporated the world over. India on the other hand ... It's interesting how the homeland of the Semitic and Dharmic religions have fared (both historically and contemporarily).
- sanxiyn 8y agoNot Jewish culture, but Jewish genetics.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- iagovar 8y agoBut why does this happen in Israel? They don't benefit from the huge capital flows and single market of the US
- yostrovs 8y agoWhen a B is considered a poor grade by your mother and you are simply expected to be on top of your class, it does wonders. Genetics probably play a roll too, but that discussion is not allowed here.
- dewey 8y agoI could be wrong but from what I read a while ago it's that there's not much traditional resources to export (Farming, Mining,..) and instead there's a focus on R&D and exporting technology. There's probably also a very high amount of R&D in the military sector that's subsidies as they have a very high export rate there (Elbit, Rafael,...).
- 8y ago
- drpgq 8y agoUgh, I can only imagine the amount Canada wastes on dubious SHRED grants.
- uvu 8y agoMy country is not even on the list.
- tanilama 8y agoSo by absolute spending, there are basically 3 centers: 1. USA 2. East Asia 3. West Europe East Asia combined, their spending is bigger than USA and EU. What will be more interesting is to break down those spending on what particular field they are spent on, but I guess that data is hard to collect. Overall, in line with my every day feeling, but kinda unimpressed as well. South Korea is an outlier here, their spending in R&D is absolutely massive in both relative/absolute terms.
- bnolsen 8y agoThis website sucks beyond amazing belief. I couldn't take it and left.
- ainiriand 8y agoSo long for constructive comments... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 'Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.'
- expertentipp 8y agoI am from a country in the bottom left 1/16th of the graph and can confirm. The whole economy is about subcontracting and sucking in money from various EU grants, any offices of global businesses are sad outsourcing and offshoring centers.
- aportela 8y agoWouldn’t it have been a more helpful/useful comparison to show R&D as a % of GDP alongside % of PPP-adjusted GDP? Total R&D spend in PPP$ seems like a not-so-useful comparison since it's still biased by size of an economy, whereas % of total GDP is trying to normalize for that (albeit not perfectly).
- mceoin 8y agoAnyone know how much Taiwan spends on R&D? My dated recollection was quite high (10%?)
- gnulinux 8y agoWebsite is cancer on mobile. Using Materialistic HN APP on Android.