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Corporations still do invest large sums of money into long-term projects: most acquisitions as well as buildings are amortised over a decade or so, which is abo
by IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Corporations still do invest large sums of money into long-term projects: most acquisitions as well as buildings are amortised over a decade or so, which is about the time-frame I would expect research to have, on average. Airplane and car development also comes to mind.
So I believe the complaint about "short-termism" has become a bit too popular. It's great to prop up your bona-fides as a cynic. It's less good at explaining actual behaviour.
Instead, I believe research has simply become less profitable over time. The decades from about 1920 into the 1980 were a time of extraordinary rapid successes in the hard sciences: the scientific method had been established, and industry, finance, law, transport, and communications all made sudden jumps into modernity, allowing scientific institutions as we know them today to exist.
If you read about the history of physics, for example, you'll see photos of the entire class of 192x at some German university, and every single person on the photo later won a Nobel or had at least some minor unit named after them.
We have continued to improve institutions, infrastructure, and our ability to broaden the chance to get into the sciences. But, unfortunately, it's almost a rule of nature that progress slows over time. That's sort-of soothing, actually, because it means we aren't entirely incapable of prioritising easier thing.
Government-sponsored research can continue at higher prices. But private, for-profit endeavours have a very specific point where expected returns turn negative.
- foobarian 6y agoThis 1000%. In the 40s, you invested a bunch of money into a research lab and you got the transistor. If only that kind of payoff could still happen today.
- nopeNopeNooope 6y agoI don't get this complaint? The leverage for R&D is vastly higher now than ever before: You leave Zuckerberg in his dorm room and you get Facebook. You leave Larry and Sergey in a garage and you get Google. You leave Steve Jobs and Jony Ives together and you get dozens of products in Apple. The money in vs money out in research has never been more absurdly positive in human history. This is why companies aren't investing in R&D, because they don't need to do as much as they used to, because a little goes a lot farther.
- knolax 6y agoNone of those are breakthrough discoveries, hell most of those arguably weren't even the first to market. MySpace existed before Facebook, Search Engines existed before Google, Phones in Japan were just as advanced as the first iPhone.
- nopeNopeNooope 6y agoThe first transistor wasn't really all that useful either.
- Goladus 6y agoI suspect the confusion here is that too much market-centered thinking, while essential for doing good business, can lead you to lose sight of "use value" in the big picture. If Google search and Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, my life would barely change at all (it might even improve). Contrast Google and Facebook with: packet-switched networks, the internet, cellular and wireless networks, sattelites, DNS. These things disappear and your life changes dramatically. So in terms of market, yes, you can get some good ROI for research, but you're not getting flying cars (or various other technologies with such intrinsic potential to be life-changing) without a LOT of effort.
- bsder 6y ago> Instead, I believe research has simply become less profitable over time. Every era says this and every era is always wrong. However, if you insulate businesses against monopoly prosecution and allow them to buy back their stock to manipulate the price, that's a LOT easier to manage than a research lab. It also didn't help that stock became a "lottery ticket" rather than a "dividend source".
- eru 6y ago> [...] and allow them to buy back their stock to manipulate the price, that's a LOT easier to manage than a research lab. You know that economically buying back shares and paying dividends is exactly the same thing?