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I agree with everything you said. At the risk of being pedantic: > A feedback loop of profits from industry to universities. Right now when technological advan

I agree with everything you said. At the risk of being pedantic: > A feedback loop of profits from industry to universities. Right now when technological advancements happen at universities, those flow out to the general public, then to companies, who figure out how to monetize them. The profits generated by that monetization are captured entirely by private corporations, even though the foundational innovations on which they are based are funded by Universities and by extension the public. If some of this profit were diverted back into Universities (maybe through increased corporate taxes), then this would help. This isn't ENTIRELY true. Universities "own" research IP and they do have tech transfer offices which at least theoretically help them monetize their largest breakthroughs via researcher startups. Many large, well established labs will also perform collaborative industry research, effectively acting as a CRO, which they can charge a lot of money for (and the Universities can subsequently take overhead from). The huge, field leading labs with well known PIs will have multiple R01s and various grants but the vast majority of their funding will come from industry.

ModernMech 5y ago
Yes, this is true. But I was thinking more along the lines of fundamental research. For example, DARPA spent a lot of money investing in transistor research in the 50s, which begat microcontrollers, which begat companies like MS, Apple, and Google. Those companies together are worth multiple trillions of dollars, yet wouldn't exist but for the publicly funded sector research that preceded them. Harvard's $40 billion looks piddly in comparison. And what kind of research does MS/Google/Facebook fund in the University? They'd like us to figure out how to optimize ad placements on their search engines and social media sites. I've seen far too many promising researchers swallowed by that kind of work, only to quit after realizing the direct application of their research is simply to make those companies more profitable while they are paid $25k per year and eating ramen 3x a day. We see the same thing happening right now in robotics. DARPA spent a lot of money jumpstarting driverless cars with the DARPA grand challenge in 2005. The researchers I know who were involved with that have left academia and are in the private sector now because that's where all the money is. There's no money flowing back in the academic direction even though there's a direct line from what they were doing in 2005 to what Toyota, GM, Google, Tesla, etc. are doing today. I'm not saying they shouldn't make profits and be worth a lot of money. They provide a lot of value. But the outcome definitely seems lopsided to me.
- OminousWeapons 5y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. I agree with you.

ModernMech 5y ago

Yes, this is true. But I was thinking more along the lines of fundamental research. For example, DARPA spent a lot of money investing in transistor research in the 50s, which begat microcontrollers, which begat companies like MS, Apple, and Google. Those companies together are worth multiple trillions of dollars, yet wouldn't exist but for the publicly funded sector research that preceded them. Harvard's $40 billion looks piddly in comparison. And what kind of research does MS/Google/Facebook fund in the University? They'd like us to figure out how to optimize ad placements on their search engines and social media sites. I've seen far too many promising researchers swallowed by that kind of work, only to quit after realizing the direct application of their research is simply to make those companies more profitable while they are paid $25k per year and eating ramen 3x a day. We see the same thing happening right now in robotics. DARPA spent a lot of money jumpstarting driverless cars with the DARPA grand challenge in 2005. The researchers I know who were involved with that have left academia and are in the private sector now because that's where all the money is. There's no money flowing back in the academic direction even though there's a direct line from what they were doing in 2005 to what Toyota, GM, Google, Tesla, etc. are doing today. I'm not saying they shouldn't make profits and be worth a lot of money. They provide a lot of value. But the outcome definitely seems lopsided to me.

OminousWeapons 5y ago
Thank you for the clarification. I agree with you.