Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? 552
theodp writes "Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years, challenges BusinessWeek. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem. So what's the answer? Basic research can repair the broken US business model, argues BW, saying it's the key to new, high-quality job creation. Scientific research legends like Bell Labs, Sarnoff Corp, and Xerox PARC are essentially gone, or shadows of their former selves. And while IBM, Microsoft, and HP collectively spend $17B a year on R&D, only 3%-5% of that is for basic science. In a post-9/11 world, DARPA's mission has shifted from science to tactical projects with short-term military applications. Cutting back on investment in basic science research may make great sense in the short term, but as corporations and government make the same decision to free-ride off the investments of others, society suffers the 'tragedy of the commons,' wherein multiple actors operating in their self-interest do harm to the overall public good. We've reached that point, says BW, and we're just beginning to see the consequences. The cycle needs to be reversed, and it needs to be done quickly."
One Research Lab is Still Hiring... (Score:5, Funny)
Check out their website and apply if you want to turn this trend around! [go.com]
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Replying to undo accidental moderation.
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They're looking for talented engineers and scientists with LOTS of imagination to take important projects from concept to reality!
Check out their website and apply if you want to turn this trend around!
Having met many IT people who worked for Disney, I assure you that they are some of the brightest people around.
You sometimes hear a remark like "it's a Mickey Mouse operation" intended to suggest that something is a crappy operation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Disney employs many many bright peo
Re:One Research Lab is Still Hiring... (Score:5, Informative)
They're looking for talented engineers and scientists with LOTS of imagination to take important projects from concept to reality! Check out their website and apply if you want to turn this trend around! [go.com]
Back when I was doing my undergrad, Disney send some recruiters over to try to get people to sign up for summer internships. They sent fliers around that included that "free access to disney parks" crap and said they were giving a presentation to explain the details. I thought, "summer internship at disney. Could be kind of cool." I convinced my roommate to go with me to check it out.
Well, I'll say one thing for them: they're not liars. I listened to their presentation while they gave everyone there every reason not to apply. The most important one being, "we don't really pay you enough to make any money. You probably can break even, but you'll most likely end up spending more money on rent and food than you'll get paid." Then they told us all how awesome it was because it was Disney! And you had free admission to theme parks and discounts on merch! And all you need to do to apply is fill up this form!
My roommate and I both essentially said, "fuck that," but it was a lesson on the advantages of being a huge and famous company, especially one in the entertainment business. There were no lack of other people filling up those forms and disney gets some seriously cheap labor.
Re:One Research Lab is Still Hiring... (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my best friends did that long, long ago. He had horror stories of the dank, dark, dangerous underground secret base beneath Disney...
You see, the workers aren't allowed to be seen in the park. They aren't allowed to be seen out of costume. EVER. So the park has a massive underground network to get them from one part to another.
Sex, drugs, and violence, in a secret underground network, beneath the shining face of Disney above. It's a fantastic metaphor for the company itself.
Want to get more basic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a really simple idea on how to get more basic research... PAY MORE!!!
Seriously, in a world where artists, movie actors, athletes get completely outrageous salaries (let alone wall street and executives) the answer can be easily found.
It used to be in the old days that you should learn a profession before becoming a professional athlete, actor, etc. Now the payoff of these fields far outweigh learning a "real" field. Look at MTV and this weird chick who thinks that she has talent. In fact want to see what the youth has become look at MTV reality in general...
What do I do? I work in a hedge fund, even though I am a professional mechanical engineer who used to "build real things". I can actually build robots, and industrial production machinery. Because of my upbringing (German) it was ingrained to me to build "real things". I moved to finance because I am of the motto, "if you can't beat them, join them... Your life is too short..."
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Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am really tired of hearing whining about how exorbitant athletes' (et al.) salaries are. For crying out loud, it's not as though there's a government panel that decides how much they are paid and for what reasons. They're paid what they are for the simple reason that people pay a lot of money (or in the specific case of sports, a lot of people pay a small amount of money) to watch them do what they do. That's the value they're creating. You could certainly argue that basic research "deserves" more money,
Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone is saying that athletes should donate their money to science, or that the government should take it all, or whatever. However, the fact that athletes make SO much money shows how warped our society's values are. People don't want to spend 1 cent extra for something with long-term value (like scientific research), but they're perfectly happy to spend $2000 (no joke) on seats at a football game, or to waste their time and money watching a football game on pay-per-view TV. The huge demand for this brainless sports industry, and the consequential enormous amount of money flowing through it, is what allows them to pay athletes so much. So it's not like the athletes are taking it wrongfully; the individual citizens in our society are willingly forking it over. So again, this just shows that our citizens are idiots and don't spend their money wisely.
But whining for more dollars to be funneled from rich folks' pockets into whatever project the government body in charge of spending their money thinks is worthwhile this week isn't the way to encourage it.
No, that probably won't work either. Has the American government spent our tax dollars wisely in the past 10-20 years? I don't think so. Useless wars in foreign countries, a failed "war on drugs", a road to nowhere, bailouts of failed companies amounting to rewarding failure, and on and on. Meanwhile, they've cut NASA's budget over and over and over. Taking more money from American taxpayers (rich or not) isn't going to result in significant positive effects in science, because our government is so corrupt that the money will be wasted. It's like giving money to the Mexican government and expecting improvement; their government is so blatantly corrupt that it's impossible. Our government is just as corrupt, it's just not so obvious and no one wants to admit it.
So what's the answer? I have no idea.
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Highly-paid artists, actors, and athletes deliver a small value, but they deliver it to millions of people at once, and they can do it over and over. The total amount of value is huge. Hence their compensation is huge.
I can remember people whining about performers' pay since the 1980s. It's been 25 years now and people like you still don't understand the way mass media multiplies value. Maybe you just don't care to understand it because you prefer whining. Who knows?
I'm not going to address the rest of
Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm. I don't think finding people to do R&D is the issue. It is funding the R&D that is an issue. How do you justify paying for R&D as an investment as what normally happends with R&D is you spend a lot of money for a new Idea. Now with that Idea the following can Happen...
1. You Create a new product then in a few months 3rd party knock offs come up as they are cheaper start to chew away your market share. Your company image looks like a snotty over priced greedy company. Although the reason the competition is cheaper is that they didn't spend millions in R&D.
2. You Create a new product but it is to far ahead of its time. Thus fails miserably. Being so far ahead of its time any minor glitch is magnified as the culture isn't ready to take such tradeoffs. You loose money from the product and your reputation is lowered as people who didn't like the tradeoff will assume you are out of touch with what they want.
3. You Create a new Idea you didn't think it was worth while. Give/Sell it to an other company and they make huge amounts of money from it. And you just get mocked for not having enough foresight.
4. You Create a new idea you don't think it is worth while but you hold on to the rights. Someone want to use it but you say now and you look like a patent troll.
5. You put money in an Idea and it was not worth while but you try to market it. You loose money
6. You put money in an idea and not worth while and do nothing. You still loose the money for the R&D.
Oddly enough Monopolies or near monopolies really help large scale R&D while a world of open competition will prevent such large scale R&D and only allow for incremental changes. But to say you can't find people to do R&D i would say would be false. A lot of people would prefer to do R&D even if it paid less.
Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic science research != product R&D.
If you don't understand the difference, you're probably part of the problem in why we aren't doing it.
The transistor is probably the best example, but there's plenty of others. It didn't make AT&T the richest company or most powerful company on the planet, but it changed our world. And that change was mostly led by American companies, so even though AT&T didn't reap huge rewards (though they have done quite nicely for themselves up until the dot com bubble burst -- or should I say till they gutted Bell Labs which was pre-bubble) we as a society did.
Basic science research leads to product R&D, but it does so way down the road. Corporate America (and the public at large, since the public at large is science-stupid) has lost the will to go there because of wall street and the public demand for "more profits now!" Does all basic science pay out? Heck no. Will it pay out in 10 years? Maybe. When it does pay out it can be huge. Figure the impact 50 to 60 years down the line by counting the household brands tied to the transistor: Microsoft and Dell come quickly to mind as huge companies built off that research. I'd put IBM, HP, Google, Yahoo and lots of others in the same boat, but nobody says huge and wouldn't exist without the transistor like MS and Dell.
Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:5, Insightful)
When it does pay out it can be huge.
What the BW article misses is that even a 'huge pay out' isn't going to translate into huge numbers of jobs. In fact, the whole purpose of most 'breakthroughs' is to reduce the amount of human labour needed to reach desirable goals.
There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create industrial jobs; robots and Chinese do that now. There aren't going to be any breakthroughs that create information work; computers do that now. Nanotech, biotech, AI tech, they're not going to create a demand for labour, they're going to reduce it.
Of course, that may seem like a problem if one is stuck in the belief that 'jobs' are desirable in themselves. They're not, of course, jobs are what you don't want to do. The whole point of the free market economy is to reduce the amount of undesirable work needed to produce the desirable wealth; the ideal state and end-game of economy would be that no more work would need to be undertaken to obtain any particular expression of desire: the economy where all undesirable work is fully automated. The fact that jobs are disappearing means that we're approaching the goal; production capacity starts to outpace demand (in relation to the value of free time).
The fact that we have an uneven distribution of the actual labour that does still need to be accomplished, now, that is a different thing. But the problem that some sit on their asses while others work too much isn't productively solved by trying to find pointless work for the ones sitting on their asses, but by biting the bullet and doing some basic science research in the field of economics and working out how to play out the end of the era of scarcity.
Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not too surprising. (Score:2)
Researchers have been sounding this alarm for years, if not decades. But what makes this significant is hearing it from the likes of BusinessWeek. If the Wall Street Journal ever catches on, we might be close to some real change.
That's a good point. The Wall Street Journal's approach would probably be a bigger R&D tax credit.
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Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Wall Street Journal ever catches on, we might be close to some real change.
No, we'll just be in for more bullshit articles about how government regulations are stifling innovation.
What we really need is some basic R&D into why conservatives hold on to the mantra that the free market cures all ills when it's been shown time and again to fail completely in so many areas.
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Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
False dichotomy AND strawman in two sentences.
I am old enough to remember when this country was under a real external threat (thermonuclear attack) and our response was to encourage creativity, research and learning to outproduce the "other side". Now we have a new set of problems on the horizon and we need to adjust our basic priorities: to include basic research as a source of economic competitiveness.
Unfortunately significant advances generally upset the status quo. Recently Movement Conservatives seem afraid to lose the security of the existing status quo.
For example, I cite the power of extractive and fossil energy interests in discouraging broad funding of research in distributed and/or alternative energy sources over the last 40 years. They roll out their conservative protectors, screaming "socialism!" every time anyone brings up economic opportunity cost of preserving access to oil by military means, or the strategic loss of control of economic production due to the contribution of petroleum-based energy costs as a major part of our trade deficit. These factors affect our national security in significant ways, but fail because they threaten entrenched and very very wealthy interests.
I have been watching as a working software engineer during the last 33 years. Fear of a future that does not look like the past has caused significant delays in many areas of research and development. I hope it's possible to recover.
Thank conservative think tanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are liberal think tank, however, they are mostly concerned with environmentalism and social justice
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Who is this "we" and "our"? And, how did "we" encourage creativity, research and learning?
Basic research is a source of economic competitiveness, which is why "we" don't need the government trying to direct economic competitiveness. Why should we believe that the government will do a better job of figuring out what needs to be developed than the free market? This is the same government that thought "Cash for Clunkers" was a good idea -- allowing people to turn in a 5-year-old car that gets 20 mpg for a n
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Re:Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Let me introduce you to the concept of eloquence [merriam-webster.com] (2nd half of def 2). Very few pedants have any hope of eloquence. That said, GP did a nice job creatively making his point while using the word "cite [merriam-webster.com]" in a pedantically pure manner (see def 4). You simply are not fully aware of what "cite" means.
... he's at +5 anyway.
As for this post -- I'm being pedantic myself so do not look for it to be interesting or eloquent. This post is snarky -- something we have enough of in the world as it is, but I am posting it anyway because I don't have mod points to mod GP up
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I don't have access to the soviet leadership during the 1961-1969 time frame, so I cannot ssay for certain what they were thinking.
I am mostly responding to the fact that all the children in our schools (Pittsburgh) were issued dogtags, and the reason given was that they might be necessary in case of "emergency".
One would hope that nobody in either government was *that* stupid. But at the time all this was happening, the second world war was only 16-23 years in the past, the memory of all-out war was much m
No, Completely Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Much regulation is either WRONG, or INADAQUATELY ENFORCED, particularly in the finance sector, eg:
(a) Naked Shorts
(b) Incorrect MARK TO MARKET
(c) Capital Adaquacy
(d) Insure un-owned asset
(e) Late transaction settlement
you need the above list fixed before the next implosion or down turn.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget the Wall Street Journal. This needs to resonant with the Dicks and Janes that walk main street USA. The US is racking up record deficits and debts, a huge chunk of which is borrowed from foreigners. It's economy is still reliant on important strategic resources like oil. There is only so long it can go on doing this. At some point, the US must produce goods and services for the global marketplace that are competitive enough to generate the tax base to not only stem future deficits, but also pay down some of the accrued debt. When I put what this article has to say together with some of the more recent studies on US literacy and numeracy, the picture is pretty scary. There is some life to the US economy right now, but what happens when all the stimulus money dries up, and foreign investors realize that US T-Bills, savings bonds, and even US currency potentially isn't worth the paper it is written on? The financial turmoil of the last 12 months is going to look like a cakewalk then.
Basic research in Ireland - billions spent (Score:5, Informative)
We've invested in basic research here in Ireland, and the government is being criticised for it (link to Irish Times opinion piece [irishtimes.com]).
Certainly there is a problem here in Ireland that there are a lack of opportunities for those who've acheived a PhD qualification through basic research. Already a lot of even ordinary degree graduates in science and technology have emigrated from Ireland, and the number of entrants into such undergraduate courses is dropping year by year.
However, possibly there's nothing inherently wrong with investing so much in basic research and the issues arise merely from the ineptitude of those running this country and the blind voting that such a section of the populance do for the current ruling party - who've throughout Ireland's history acheived lots of public support but attempted to ruin the country at various stages (starting with the Civil War, continuing with the economic war with the UK in the 1930s, going crazy in the 1970s even abolishing car tax to win votes as the country went bankrupt, deliberately facilitating a property bubble after the dot-com crash, attempting to have the taxpayers continue to pay into the Ponzi scheme with a unique Irish version of the bad bank - i.e. pay speculative amounts to banks for bad loans and attempt to keep prices up until a new bubble is created).
Socialism (Score:5, Insightful)
Government spending on R&D? That's socialism! I thought everyone knew that taxes are bullshit. It's not like government funded basic research ever gave us anything useful like the transistor.
Re:Socialism (Score:5, Funny)
well, of course, the transistor. I didn't mention the transistor because it goes without saying. But other than the transistor (and the aqueduct), what have we ever gotten out of government funded research?
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Amazing that nobody got the reference.
NOBODY expects the reference.
Yeah so... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of you Genetisists with your fancy degrees start discovering stuff, but remember if you start playing god again we are going to complain to the governement...
All of you Nuclear Physists start making your reactors and glowey things, but not in my back yard! I don't want that nuclear waste making my McDonalds Double Cheesburger unhealthy!
The same for all of you green energy people with your wind turbines you need to start building this renewable energy! but not in my neighborhood you're destroying the value on my now worthless house!
Clearly this is everyone's fault except for mine, now if you'll excuse me I'm late for second job delivering pizza's I'm glad I never went to college otherwise I might be expected to do something about this! - The American Public
Greentech! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greentech! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years", challenges BusinessWeek. The obvious answer is Greentech...
Actually, that's moderately insightful. There's a persistent stereotype that "green" meaning a step backward in technology, but, realistically, it's exactly the opposite-- true green means high technology. Family-farms and kerosene lanterns won't cut it in the 21st century. There's a lot of technology improvements needed-- both in power production, and in improving efficiency, and materials science improvements needed to implement recyclability-- and this represents real market value.
Re:Greentech! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that's moderately insightful. There's a persistent stereotype that "green" meaning a step backward in technology, but, realistically, it's exactly the opposite-- true green means high technology.
The true story is that we are far underutilizing the technology we have. We could have more small, local generation of power from wind and solar; the wind stuff can be made from recycled materials, and solar panels were able to pay back the energy cost of their production in less than a decade back in the seventies. It could probably never fill all demand, but we already use multiple forms of power.
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Most assessments of microgeneration I've seen show that it's inefficient...
Wind energy scales well to large sizes, which means it's a poor choice at small sizes-- in fact, this link [lowtechmagazine.com] was on slashdot a few months ago.
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You're confusing the issue. The "eco-hippies" that want less pollution also ask for simpler lifestyles, "organic" food, and other impractical ideas.
Fail. AIWPS [sdsu.edu] or similar technologies used in place of "conventional" wastewater treatment would allow us to produce more than adequate supplies of organic fertilizer, and if we planted crops in guilds instead of monocultures the production of food per acre would rise substantially. This would of course eliminate the ability to harvest mechanically, but since most people are not really getting good nutrition under the current system (which requires that the crops be shipped long distances, so they are grown f
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We seem to be talking about different things. I am saying that "green" concepts are in fact high tech, while you are talking about the people who embrace green energy. I have little interest, actually, in your views about environmentalists, since I see no reason to think that you've ever actually talked to one in the current decade, or, at least, no reason to believe that you actually listened to what they might have said.
So let me repeat what I said. Green energy is inherently high technology, despite
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We seem to be talking about different things. I am saying that "green" concepts are in fact high tech, while you are talking about the people who embrace green energy.
Fair enough.
I have little interest, actually, in your views about environmentalists, since I see no reason to think that you've ever actually talked to one in the current decade,
Greenpeace assaults me on the sidewalk every day with their anti-nuclear message. Unless I'm living in some kind of time-warp, they still have the views I pointed out
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Are the science and money there to make it happen in a paradigm-shifting way? Or is it just a bunch tweaks on existing industries?
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It's not obvious at all. While it's true, Green tech can produce a few high paying jobs in research, development, and management... The bulk of the jobs are going to be [relatively] low paying grunt work out in the field installing the things.
Individual (Score:3, Interesting)
as corporations and government make the same decision to free-ride off the investments of others, society suffers the 'tragedy of the commons,
How about the individual? You know, the type that parrots around here against the patent system (or at the very least, software patents), and screaming how they use Pirate Bay to protest them? How about the individuals who demand our government buy price-controlled medicine from Canada to deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor, and the ability to recoup their investment?
Creators and inventors see a hostile environment for profiting off their works, so they stop investing in creating and inventing. Film at 11.
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Re:Individual (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not exactly true. The fact is that the drug industry is making handsome profit at the prices they sell in Canada, Mexico or Europe. They easily recoup their R&D costs. Besides, R&D expenditures in the pharma industry are relatively small part of their budget. For example marketing costs are about 3 times as much (can you turn on TV and not see an add for a prescription drug?) . Even manufacturing costs are higher. The reason for this is that all the basic research as well as some of the drug development is done by universities and payed by grants from the government (NIH, DoE, DoD, NSF) and non-for-profits. Creators and inventors see a hostile environment for profiting off their works, so they stop investing in creating and inventing.
Creators and inventors do what they do because they enjoy it. Making money is a second or third motivator. If it was the primary goal they would be in marketing selling you stuff from China that you don't need.
Re:Individual (Score:5, Insightful)
deny the organization who discovered it the fruits of their labor
Call it anecdote, but I find that the people most likely to use the phrase "fruits of ... labor" tend to be the people least likely to have ever performed an hour of true hard labor in their lives.
Like the Rugged Individualist(TM) who goes on and on about how he shouldn't pay taxes and should be able to keep the "fruits of his labor" when it turns out he resets people's passwords and reboots servers for a living.
Re:Individual (Score:4, Interesting)
How is your typical tirade of class envy rated 5? Yeah, the only people who defend the idea that people should keep what they make should be the rich. Everyone else should vote with their caste! Poor? Vote for the party of free money, don't work to advance yourself!
This kind of attitude is a big reason we are in the debacle we are in now.
Who mod'ed that "Interesting"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pirate Bay is more about copyright. Not too many people go to Pirate Bay to find a torrent of the latest metallurgical advancements.
That depends upon what you mean by "recoup". Are you talking 1=1 where they make back the money they spent only on that project? Or 10x the money? or 100x the money? or where they can keep turning a profit on that research forever just because they were the first ones to get it filed?
No. The "hostile environment" for real research is from patent trolls.
The "hostile environment" for copyright is from one company that wants to keep turning a profit off of a cartoon of a mouse.
Just look at the salaries that are paid in those industries. And the multi-million dollar awards given them by the courts.
How I think it all started, and more (Score:5, Interesting)
The combination of the higher ups wanting short term profits due to changes in tax law, along with many fewer R&D companies (HP for example) having engineers and technical people making decisions has decimated R&D.
I remember when HP meant test equipment and awesome calculators, not lousy consumer based computers (Thanks Carly). Another example, don't laugh too hard, is Radio Shack. I used to work for Radio Shack in the late 80's and the early 90's. When I started, they actually had R&D (they had a dye based CD-R technology they were working on, but had RIAA type problems with), manufacturing, a lot of electronic components, etc. When the founder of Tandy died, the MBA style management came in. They started off selling manufacturing, as that was not part of the "Core Business", sold off the credit card division, which made a nice one time profit, that then really made customers made because of lack of customer service, and lowered sales because of tighter credit requirements. They stopped carrying a lot of small parts, because of the low dollar value, regardless if they were high profit. In short, Charles Tandy, the leather salesman, ran it better and more profitably than the "business school" people that were bought in because he understood the business. We need to find a way to encourage the people who know the business they are in to get higher up and make decisions, rather than feeding the orgy of MBA's and people with business degrees that now rule most companies. As to how, I have very little in the way of ideas, but I think some tax law encouraging long term and pure science R&D would be helpful, if it could not be bastardized for other purposes (yeah, I know, a pipe dream).
Re:How I think it all started, and more (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense. Congress decided they wanted to tax high salaried people. Therefore companies found ways around those laws. In comes stock bonuses and stock options. The problem with that is that a highly paid employee (most likely a decision maker) will do what is best for them, which is kick up the stock price so that they get higher effective pay. Easy way to do that, kill long term R&D.
In a capitalistic society management (decision makers or highly paid employees) serves the interest of the stockholders... And most stockholders want money on a short term... Not long term risky investments...
I doubt higher taxes on high incomes has much to do with this...
The solution is not necessarily communism... - But government investments can be a part of the solution... subsidizing certain industries might be an idea too... In Denmark the government subsidized every watt produced using wind energy, thus driving research in this area... In Germany it was solar energy...
Re:How I think it all started, and more (Score:4, Interesting)
I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense.
This sounds fishy to me. Can you cite the change in the tax code? I am not a tax accountant, but it's my understanding salaries are in fact still "deductible" in the sense that they count as an expense against profits. Are you saying they used to be deductible against gross revenue? And how does this fit in with the large "bonuses" that are essentially high salary compensation?
I'd agree that regardless of the tax structure, though, the principal-agent problem [wikipedia.org] and short-term thinking is... well, a problem.
I remember when HP meant test equipment and awesome calculators, not lousy consumer based computers (Thanks Carly).
The interesting thing is about Carly's reign is that even by short-sighted Wall Street analyst standards, it should serve as a pretty bright warning sign for suits looking to dismantle an engineering company. HP's value dropped "down two-thirds from its peak" [msn.com] while she was running the company and jumped up over 10% at one point the day the news of her ousting broke [cnn.com].
(Now, of course, she's going into politics. For some reason McCain took her on as an economic adviser for a while, despite her track record. Which she appears to think qualifies her as a brilliant candidate for the U.S. Senate.)
The money AT&T didn't make from Bell Labs (Score:2, Interesting)
It's incredible how successful other companies were at commercializing the amazing basic discoveries or inventions that came out of Bell Labs (transistor, laser, Unix, etc. etc. etc.), and somehow AT&T never was all that successful at commercializing these discoveries, and ended up spinning off Bell Labs and selling out to SBC.
Bell Labs held many, many patents from all this basic research, that ultimately weren't nearly as profitable as the inventions that used them. Lessons for those who insist that
Re:The money AT&T didn't make from Bell Labs (Score:5, Informative)
Bell Labs was a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone company. Since the telephone company was a regulated utility, and a monopoly, the US government did not allow it to commercialize many of its discoveries and inventions. UNIX for instance was "given away" with a license to universities (e.g. UC Berekely), companies, and the government.
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The money AT&T didn't make from Bell Labs (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
Indeed. And the same point should probably be made about Xerox PARC; a lot of really good basic research went on there, but the management of the company had little clue what to actually do with it. The graphical user interface, the WYSIWYG word processor, object-oriented programming -- all of these were PARC innovations, and Xerox did almost nothing to commercialise them. In the end, Xerox was simply content with being a photocopier manufacturer. Laser printers were close enough to that core business to fit in; graphical networked workstations, operating systems and programming langauges weren't.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No. (Score:2)
Research in the sciences usually requires a Ph.D level education. We (US) don't have nearly enough Ph.Ds to answer that challenge.
Plus, people who hold a Ph.D in the sciences aren't exactly unemployable, even in "this economy..."
Re: (Score:2)
"Research in the sciences usually requires a Ph.D level education."
Is that a bureaucratic requirement or a practical one?
Re: (Score:2)
Practical. Basic research requires quite a lot of specialised knowledge, training, and practice.
Where have they gone? To the ether... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime in the late 60's/early 70's, economists and politicians began to see honest growth based on adding value and fair trade as something that would slow the growth of the US economy, and leave the country unable to pay for the massive military and social programs that we are committed to. How many trillions of dollars were invested in ICBM silos? Strategic Air Command bombers and tankers that are still flying today by the grandchildren of the original pilots because they were never needed in the first place?
We made the switch from scientific and industrial powerhouse to empire. Instead of building factories, we build relationships with dictators. Instead of employing citizens in manufacturing, we exploit peasants in East Asia. I live in Albany, NY. Thanks to government, this area is pretty prosperous. But as you drive west through once-thriving cities like Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, you are a witness to economic devastation as the region declines to a shadow of its former self.
We live in an age of false prosperity, where our chief export is the wealth of the nation.
Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense (Score:2)
The problems are:
(a) short term-ism on Wall Street,
(b) good and improving engineering education in China and South East Asia
(c) the fallacy that the "
Combination of Factors (Score:3, Interesting)
The first factor that has to be corrected is the entire Education System in the United States because until the many problems (rote memorization favored over critical thinking) is fixed, we simply wont have the bodies needed to do any basic research. The next factor that has to be solved is the Governments continual slide into Mediocracy and illeteracy that's been desired by the Corps and Politico's for the last 30 years. Sorry folks but that's at least 2 generations (not counting the current and future gens) that have been robbed of our Constitutional Requirement for both an educated and armed populace. Instead they've wanted sheep and now they've got them who don't care about anything except where their next fix is coming from (be it telivision, latest hip product, drugs).
Sorry to say but if the founding fathers were to attempt a revolution with our current tranqed populace today, they'd have failed and been executed as terrorists instead of hailed as hero's. In fact, General Orders to HighGaurd. Time to throw a Nova Bomb into Sol's Sun and clear the cockroaches before they spread to the rest of the galaxy.
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want the literal answer to this question, they're part of Alcatel-Lucent now, after being part of Lucent Technologies since AT&T spun them off in the 90s.
There is an answer! (Score:5, Funny)
Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years
Government!
But we don't like monopolies... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to note that most of the top-tier research facilities of the past were backed by monopoly or near-monopoly corporations. Bell Telephone speaks for itself, IBM Labs was supported by revenue of a dominating computer manufacturer, Sarnoff is the old lab facility of RCA, which for a time had sufficient clout to pretty much set the price of vacuum tubes. Xerox was the dominant photocopier supplier in an era of large growth. In today's world, Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders on research, and they have their own cash cow from a software monopoly.
One wonders if the ability to fund basic research depends on having a nearly monopolistic revenue stream. And if that's the case, are we prepared to suffer monopolies to get the research that comes with them?
5+% of revenue on very long term return (Score:4, Interesting)
So firms must find the 5%. This happens through efficiencies and prices. A choice must be made between all those wasteful middle managers that do nothing, or research.Everyone has a useless in law that needs a job, so create another wasteful middle manager position. Or perhaps someone needs external validation, so build another wasteful highrise to stroke someone ego.
The there is profit. The pharmaceutical firms are doing research, but then what happens when they try to pay for the research? Everyone screams, like drugs are an entitlement. It is the pursuit of happiness, but the entitle to it. Is everyone going to be able to afford all drugs in the US. Perhaps is universal healthcare is passed, otherwise it will be the free market deciding that those with money will live, and those without will just have to make do.
Then, of course, on has to convince the stockholders that a reduction in per share profit is a good thing. Not an easy sell when many will buy solely on the basis of net profit.
I am not sure if industrial research labs are going to work in the current climate. Research based companies seem to get clobbered by those who merely derive products from the research. The model emerging over the past 20 years of so, private public research partnerships, seem to be a pretty good job. The reason we see so little of it in the US is that owners of firms are primarily concerned abut their 100 million dollar paychecks, not the long term effects they have on the company, the country, and the world. Why else would the auto manufacturers not use their windfall over the past decade to build the next big thing. Why would oil companies use their windfall to create false document, a la big tobacco, against alternative energy sources rather than develop those alternative energy source. Why else would MS buy a virtualization company, way before MS Vista, a not integrate that technology into Vista to form a transitional compatibility layer, as Apple did between OS 9 and OS X.
Really, research labs are not the issue, cowardice is. When we have leaders that are not scared of their own shadows, when we have leaders that will go out a defend us against the real enemy, and not waste a trillion dollars attacking a fake proxy enemy or create FUD to distract us, then we will have progress.
Is basic research mined out? (Score:5, Interesting)
A real question is whether basic research mines a depleting resource. The issue is not whether more can be discovered. The question is whether basic research is still cost-effective.
The problem is that we've found most of the easy hits in science and technology. Edison's lab, circa 1880, had a goal of one minor invention every three days and one major invention every two months. This was with a rather modest staff, about 40 people. In no area of science is that level of output possible today. Everything that easy has already been done.
One guy built the first IC in two months at Texas Instruments, without much help. Several early microprocessors were designed by teams of about 5 people. It took 3,000 people, in grey cubicles in Santa Clara, to design the Pentium Pro/II/III architecture, the first superscalar IC. (Getting a working design out of 3000 people for something as tightly integrated as a fast superscalar CPU for a complex architecture was an incredible management achievement.)
Xerox PARC, in its heyday, had a nearly open field in which to work. PARC was funded on the concept that if they did things which cost too much now, they'd be affordable later and Xerox would own the technology. So they built things like the Dover (a $100,000 laser printer) and the Alto (a $30,000 single-user computer), and they built enough of them to be useful experimentally. So they were able to make major progress with about 40 people in the computer science section. (PARC seemed bigger, but a big part of PARC was copier technology development. Everybody forgets those people, but they filled much of the building.) Now it takes resources like that to develop a midrange cell phone.
There's a curve here, it gets steeper, and not in a good way. The easy stuff is discovered/invented first, then the harder stuff. Each new bit of progress comes at a higher price. It's like mining lower and lower grade ore as the good stuff runs out.
Those are places I know about and visited at one time or another, all in semiconductors and electronics. I can't speak for biotech, which seems not to be as far up the curve yet. On the other hand, consider aviation and rocketry, where the easy part ended in the 1960s. Look at progress in aviation between 1903 and 1956 (Wright Flyer to Boeing 707), then 1956 to 2009 (Boeing 707 to Boeing 787). Or rocketry between 1929 and 1969 (Goddard rocket to Apollo) and 1969 to 2009 (Apollo to Shuttle).
Re:Is basic research mined out? (Score:5, Interesting)
I find this to be a narrow-minded view, despite the points well-taken about research getting harder and harder in general.
Case in point: mobile-phone technology. How many patents have been generated from that? How many new jobs around the world? You'd have thought the "hard-part" of basic radio research was over long ago.
Sure, the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. However, we have so much more knowledge to build on and such better tools these days with which to do the research that, even though the overall job is harder, it can be done quicker and more efficiently than ever before.
Curves/trends are useful for predictions, until something comes along that no longer fits. And it's impossible to predict when that something will arrive. But if we don't fund basic research adequately, it'll likely take that much longer.
The purpose of patents and role of business (Score:5, Interesting)
In reading some of the comments, people don't seem to understand the purpose of patents.
The true purpose of patents are not so much to act as incentives to innovate, that will happen anyway as long as innovation can produce a profit though the innovation becomes a trade secret.
The purpose of patents is information sharing. The patent holder is given a monopoly for a limited time but must reveal the workings of the innovation. By revealing the information others can study it, improve it and use it to advance the state of the art.
I hope this BW article doesn't lead to the same lunacy to extend patents that happened with copy rights to "incetivize" innovation since that would defeat the purpose.
Also, the short term view that the business school developed in business "leaders" is nothing more than self cannibalization. Tech companies have been devouring themselves, riding on technology they developed years ago and not laying ground work for future profitability through solid basic research.
In addition, by outsourcing and offshoring they have been choking off their own sources of future leadership in personnel. The skilled workers they need are developing their skills working for other companies.
Here's my observations. Many of the IT people of my generation began as help desk (some times part-time while in school or summer jobs), the jr. sys-admins or consulting finally working their way up to senior positions or creating their own companies'. They sometimes were hired internally to a company since they knew the company and the company knew them. That path allowed for slow gradual developed of skill sets, maturation and exploration of interests. With offshoring and outsourcing that path is becoming rarer. And so now companies when they do look for IT/programmers bemoan the lack of skilled workers.
This also creates a chilling effect when people look for careers in the Sciences, esp. when it is easier to get an MBA than a Phd.
I tried to make these points to a Phd in Chemistry who had worked his way up into mgt. in a pharmaceutical company which was offshoring research, but he didn't get it. A bright guy, but he didn't get it.
Globalization changed the rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Today, if a research organization creates something new and exciting, it can generally be duplicated in China in less than a year - often three weeks or so. This eliminates any possibility of the "innovator" reaping any sort of reward for their efforts. What company wants to spend money only to hand a gift over to someone in China?
Today one example is DVD players. We have cheap DVD players because the patent licensing is not being enforced. The license fee per DVD player is $5, which would translate to around $50 at the retail level. There are plenty of $29.99 DVD players being brought into the US for which no license fee was ever paid. And this is just one example I personally know about. There are thousands more.
So while 50 years ago (or even 30) you could create something new and develop a product based on it. This product would be sold and the developer would get paid. Sometimes, for the right product, it might be "knocked off" in China but the cost differentials were not as they are today. So you could still sell the "original" product for a reasonable price.
Today, between the Internet making it all about lowest price, customs officials looking the other way as far as patent licensing is concerned and labor costs skyrocketing developing a product in the US or Western Europe is pointless - as is the R&D behind it. Why would anyone spend the money on R&D when the fruits of their labor is going to be taken by a foreign operator?
Short answer is, this isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. R&D is dead and buried. We will eventually have some R&D again, but not until the current globalization situation sorts itself out.
Re: (Score:3)
Today, if a research organization creates something new and exciting, it can generally be duplicated in China in less than a year - often three weeks or so.
That's an 'Apple' version of research. This isn't hard research, it's repetitive research tinkering with products that have well developed components. The thinking behind calling this 'research' is a kind of buying short-term attempting to turn it into long-term market capture (higher prices) using patent and intellectual property law to maintain mark
Um...NSF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not one mention of the National Science Foundation which pumps billions of dollars into basic science research per year......
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:4, Insightful)
An example: The Army uses mobile PCs with touchscreens that are given out to soldiers in the field. They're made by Toshiba, I believe. What do they run? Windows with some shitty full-screen GUI. Yes, they do crash. The defense budget takes the biggest chunk of the USA's budget. Even with all that money, they still get utter crap peddled to them by "system integrators". How can this be?
Business plan:
1. determine how to maximize profit no matter what
2. repeat indefinitely
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just Bell (Score:5, Informative)
Apple spends 25.24% of total operating exp. on R&a (Score:3, Informative)
It's not all funny ads. Apple's earning their success.
Re:Apple spends 25.24% of total operating exp. on (Score:4, Informative)
Another case: HP (Score:5, Insightful)
It would indeed have been difficult for anyone to screw things up as badly as Fiorina; that does take real talent. When Fiorina came on board, she made it clear that she did not like the company of which she had just taken control. So she methodically set about destroying the "old" HP. The first thing she did was a masterful piece of irony: she ordered that the word "Invent" would become part of the HP logo. Evidently, she thought that "branding" is all that matters; hype can be substituted for the real thing, and nobody will notice. I guess she was right.
This is not just about one bad person; it is a pattern. I think that what has happened is that the corporate managerial and financial class (and it is a sort of ruling class, in the old sense of class struggle) have become destructive parasites that suck the wealth out of our common economy, and transfer it to their own wallets. They destroy things that have value—like a creative engineering corporation—and leave behind an empty husk that only pretends to do what the old corporation actually did: invent.
Re:Another case: HP (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course HP did just recently have a kind of large and significant general scientific breakthrough [wikipedia.org] but hey, its just marketing right?
I'm not coming down on your rant, I'm sure you are right, but its not quite all black and white. My take on all this is these very large and successful research laboratories sunk huge amounts of research dollars into what became other people's successes. They are doing what they need to do as businesses: make money. My point is that this sort of ground breaking research should happen in the public realm, it makes more sense to me that everyone share the costs of scientific advancement through tax dollars. And thus universities and other public research institutes should have funding ramped up in a really big way. It makes economic sense from my point of view.
Its the ideological mind set that is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, so many in business and politics don't see their role as American citizens as more important than their making money for personal gain. The accumulation of wealth has become perceived as valuable than personal sacrifice for the common good. To many, the entire concept of collective government is viewed as the problem not the solution.
Driven by self-serving market forces, its an attitude that has permeated nearly every aspect of our culture. Americans today by and large do not see the government budget as their money, rather they see it as someone else's money. This arises in large part because they continue to elect representatives, who represent corporate interests rather than their own. The decline of our political culture (the decline of our economy and scientific infrastructure are merely byproducts) has reached the point that corporations, most obviously in the area of health care, now actually buy politicians and market their own political agendas to keep the gravy flowing and the current system in place, craftily selling them to the foolish, who then proceed to attack their own self-interest. Corporations and corporate media in our "free" markets tout the evils of socialism and brand any collective action for the common good that may affect their self-interest "socialism". The short-sighted and the ideological rigid (conservative) are more than eager to follow their lead.
Sure, the lip service of cheap patriotism is easily paid, but you can count the number who are ultimately willing to pay either higher prices or more taxes for the "greater good" in single digits. The willingness of many to see any kind of collective activity as a sign of "socialism" only emphasizes that the kind of initiative the writer is talking about will more likely take place elsewhere, China, India, Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada, where they more readily accept and recognize that economic and social realities do not come in easily pigeonholed extremes that can be painted black or white. The transition and acceleration of societies more adept at handling and developing collective action other than our own has been picking up steam over the past few decades, particularly in the biosciences where much of the future lies. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing as the collective effort becomes globally rather than nationally oriented.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:4, Insightful)
... and the ugliest girl was the prettiest of them all. By definition, if they screwed up the most - or even quite a bit - then they are not the best and the brightest. I think you meant that the people whom many mistakenly considered to be the best and the brightest turned out not to be so great or bright after all.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:5, Informative)
mmmmm pie [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't comparing the number against tax receipts a bit misleading because total budget is going to be >100% of tax receipts when you're running a deficit.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
A regulated market that prohibits companies from buying each other out when there are only a few players left, protection from lawyer attack and price undercutting for new players entering an established market and anti-monopoly/anti-cartel legislation to round it off.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:5, Insightful)
I submit that both are broken and for the same reason: They want to have their cakes and eat them too.
Business relies heavily on societal infrastructure for end profits, but thinks that contributing to the support and development of the infrastructure is a horrible injustice inflicted upon them: You'll never, ever find a business which factors in the infrastructure items they depend upon because they are assumed to be there to be used, much like mana from heaven. Someone else is expected to put all the various infrastructure elements in place and maintain them so business can reap profits, but what happens when business controls most of the wealth of the society? Who then plans, builds and maintains the infrastructure items necessary for business to function? No one.
America's wealth owners would re-read the children's classic "The Little Red Hen" and throw Ayn Rand in the trash if they're really interested in seeing the U.S. do well in the future.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually that is cynical and I beg to differ here. Obama is actually right on the mark. The green revolution is important and we need it. Not because of global warming. I really could not give a rats ass about that since it is already too late. Read National Geographic about 4 years ago they had a climate article where they said that they noticed climate change happened like a flick of the switch, but bounced back slowly. They were of the opinion that the switch has probably already been flicked.
So why gre
Re:YES I CAN! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's interesting there where you try to claim that inferior, higher priced forms of energy are more efficient. If they were more efficient, why wouldn't they be less expensive than fossil fuels? Then we'd just switch to them because they're cheaper -- rather than being forced against our will to pay extra for them and to subsidize them.
Or did you mean "more efficient" at delivering subsidies and windfall profits into the hands of the politically-connected ruling class at the expense of the average American?
Re:YES I CAN! (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the price doesn't reflect the costs. If you were actually paying with your dollars for the externalities, things would be very different. But the only way to do that is by some non-market entity forcing against someone's will.
This seems to be a talking point you guys have memorized pretty well. The AC got there before you.
By using "externalities" as FUD, you can justify anything just by pretending they're high on the competitive product.
Spaceship Earth (Score:4, Interesting)
Randomly invoking "externality" is a bad policy. But when you look at oil, unless you are willing to be totally ignorant of modern history, you can see the cost of externalities are extraordinarily high.
How many governments have been overthrown? How much money has been spent in the middle east to secure access to oil or to prevent someone else from getting it? (Don't feed me any lines about freedom or security. I'm not as credulous as as that, thank you.) What has the environmental cost been? And all of this to go into a transportation system in the US that is the most inefficient user of energy probably in world history. (3% of the population using 25% of the world supply). To a consumer system that can't even be bothered to recycle what it's already dug out of the earth.
Now, to the second and more important point, you cannot show me a single study published in the last thirty years that demonstrates that any part of our ecosystem is healthier than it was the year before. Maybe in some extremely local cases there has been progress, but on the whole, every year the earth becomes less capable of supporting life.
If we were all on a spaceship, and every year our oxygen recycling system became less able to do it's job, you'd start to panic once it got below 90% of capacity. If we had 1% less food, and became less able to replenish our supply each year, you'd start to really think hard about that problem once we get to 70% of our original stock. At least I would hope.
Well here's the newsflash. This Earth is the only known spaceship in the universe that can support human life. Every year, it becomes less capable of doing so. Every year, it comes closer to switching it's equilibrium to a state that may or may not kill us off, as it has done for 98% of all the species that have come before us. And though our production is extraordinary right now, our entire way of life is based on the artificially low cost of energy in the form of oil. It's in our pesticides, we use it to produce electricity, transport all food, and the man hours required for agriculture without it is unimaginable. Imagine construction without hydraulic equipment powered by diesel. Imagine creating medical devices without plastic. It's even in every single device we manufacture, and it's not easy to replace. We're going to use the oil produced over 200 million years in 150. That's like saving money for 100 years and spending it in 40 minutes. So the real answer is that oil is very, very valuable, and shouldn't be wasted to make our generation the most comfortable in history, and the next generation the last to have electricity 24 hours a day.
What is the value of having a biosphere that supports human life? What sort of premium would you place on the price of oil to account for that external cost to the people who consume it and the people who drag it out of the earth? Even the staunchest and dumbest libertarian would have trouble answering "zero." At least I would hope so.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now, to the second and more important point, you cannot show me a single study published in the last thirty years that demonstrates that any part of our ecosystem is healthier than it was the year before. Maybe in some extremely local cases there has been progress, but on the whole, every year the earth becomes less capable of supporting life.
While I agree entirely with the rest of your post, I do have to point out that this is incorrect. If you'd like, I can get you some examples and studies later, but there are still a few areas we're doing better in, and many of them are directly due to environmentalist initiatives. London fog, for instance, is a thing of the past. We've had some serious success with the Clean Air act, and many major metropolitan areas have had increasing air quality simply because we're not polluting as badly as we did be
Re:It's all about profit.And there is none here (Score:4, Interesting)
" Doing research now that pays dividends 10 years from now is simply not OK. "
And that wouldn't even be considered basic science which means more of "30 years from now, or maybe never".
Re:that's not the tragedy of the commons (Score:5, Insightful)
It kind of is.
Ok, fine. There are many collective action problems, and the Tragedy of the Commons is just one of them. If we're being picky, I suppose you should only use "Tragedy of the Commons" to refer to scenarios in which individual incentives cause a shared resource to be used unsustainably. I think the argument is that, metaphorically, there is a shared resource here (and indeed there is) -- scientific knowledge. Now, perhaps you can actually "use up" this resource by exploiting all the economic opportunities it affords. But I will agree that the metaphor of the commons breaks down here, because the problem is NOT that knowledge is being "overused" but that it is being "underproduced."
So the phrase "Tragedy of the Commons" is used, maybe, a tiny bit out of place, when simple "Freeriding" would have been a better choice. But I'm ok with that. We can call it synecdoche: The writers are using one element (the Tragedy of the Commons) of the set of collective action problems to refer to the entire set. I can live with that.