Yes, and a lot of private sector R&D is just within firms & not shared publicly, because they have an incentive to develop internal tacit knowledge & trade secrets for competitive advantage. The U.S. also makes private R&D tax deductible for businesses, so there’s incentives to count a lot of R&D. - ThreadSky

costasamaras.com • 6 days ago

Yes, and a lot of private sector R&D is just within firms & not shared publicly, because they have an incentive to develop internal tacit knowledge & trade secrets for competitive advantage. The U.S. also makes private R&D tax deductible for businesses, so there’s incentives to count a lot of R&D.

Reposted from Don Moynihan

The private sector will not fill the gaps. The size of the cuts is too big, and the incentives does not align to do basic research or train the next generation of PhD students.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

Comments

smokeygeo.bsky.social•6 days ago

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/commentary-why-trump-is-waging-war-on-colleges-193516539.html

iplayguitarbad.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's really fucked up how the current crop of tech companies believe they and only they should solve problems, while they would literally not exist without decades of massive public spending.

A generational self-own.

bfc.bsky.social•6 days ago

Didn’t the rules change in 2022 to require r&d deductions to be amortized over five years (a rule change from trump first term). This had a big tax impact on small startups who were receiving federal science grants.

costasamaras.com•5 days ago

yeah they changed in the 2017 tax cut bill to be spread out over 5 years, starting in 2022.

jgilligan.org•6 days ago

Back in the 1990s, there was a great article in Physics Today by a former VP at Bell Labs about how, despite patents, externalities made it unprofitable for private R&D to do a lot of important applied research, and it was advantageous to let others do the cutting edge work and then copy them.

jgilligan.org•6 days ago

He quoted a colleague telling him that in the semiconductor industry, "research is essential, but you'd be smart to let someone else do it."

maize2man.bsky.social•5 days ago

applies also to training researchers. There is no way private firms want to train up PhDs, they just want to hire them.

jgilligan.org•5 days ago

It's more complicated. There are great opportunities, and a lot of enthusiasm in some industry sectors, for cooperative Ph.D. training in partnership with universities, but corporate labs are NOT teaching institutions, and can't do the job themselves.

jgilligan.org•6 days ago

jgilligan.org•6 days ago

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881308

v0max.bsky.social•6 days ago

It’s also not basic research that’s happening privately, but instead development of basic research that was already publicly financed.

There is simply no way to fill that gap without massive public investment.

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