You can't stop innovation across the planet, you will lose control over time as adversaries continue to innovate and subsume antiquated control structures.

Suddenly they had a more lucrative was to spend their money, so they did.

Prior to this, if a corporation wanted to have exclusive rights to basic patents, they'd have to run their own private research labs to generate those patents. Prior to Bayh-Dole, university inventions were patented but there were no exclusive licensing deals. This means no competitive advantage; anyone can use license the patents (I believe any US citizen) before Bayh-Dole.

So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships; on the academic side we saw the rise of the shady enterpreneurial researcher whose business plan was to use government funds to generate patents (not uncommonly based on fraudulent research) which formed the basis of a start-up which was sold to a major corporation.

The fix is simple: patents generated with taxpayer dollars at American universities should be available to any American citizen for a small licensing fee; if people want exclusive rights to patents, they need to put up the capital for the research institution themselves, as was the case with Bell Labs. Practically, this starts with a repeal of Bayh-Dole.

Now consider the choices a company makes when executives hold the Friedman doctrine as orthodoxy. Put money into basic research that might generate shareholder value in some unknown time, or buy their own stock back and pump up the price?

The biggest reason why companies don't seek to emulate "Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE", is probably that it reads like a list of textbox examples of "companies that failed to execute on their research findings", so clearly there was something wrong with this approach.

I think the core problem is that innovators typically only capture low single digit percent of the value they generate for society.

Bell Labs existed in an anomalous environment where their monopoly allowed them to capture more of the value of R&D, so they invested more into it.

This is the typical argument for public subsidy of R&D across both public and private settings because this low capture rate means that it is underprovisioned for society's benefit.

Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. Wall Street did not approve of this position, but Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter. Most CEOs are not going to take such a strong position when they, the stockholders, and every other executive can be guaranteed a financial reward through a buyback.

Stock buybacks are simply a more tax efficient dividend.

if the company has a vision - then reinvesting that money into research or what else is better. it might reap the benefits, it might not.

companies use buybacks if they can't do anything productive with the money - Apple is a recent example.

pretty easily: stock buybacks allow you to directly reward executives and funnel profits back to shareholders (by increasing share prices), making the company appear more valuable (further driving investment)

research brings long-term benefits, and immediate outcomes don't show up in 10-Qs

Only in very rare cases is doing basic science anything but a total waste of money, viewed from a commercial perspective. Companies should seek to be commercial entities, which operate for profit. Anything else is just self destruction.

Look at Bell Labs, it could only exist because some company decided it could use a money shredder. Bell Labs could not survive the dismantling of the Bell telephone monopoly, because ending that monopoly ended the prerequisite that was needed to allow it to exist.

The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat.

Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.

What pays for your leisure time so you can be alive and not starve? Money. Nobody on the face of the earth can just be curious and do science and not starve.

Less snarky: getting funding and making a living in academia, which is the most accessible way to be a scientist, has been cutthroat since long before this administration. If it were more accessible, or if staying alive weren't so damn expensive, I think we'd see more curiosity-driven science being performed.

Also, I don't believe one negates the other. As an engineer, my work satisfies my curiosity / desire to build, and I would do it for $50k, but I'm not gonna take a pay cut to prove how curious I am.

Unfortunately, we've created a system that wears them down to being driven largely by self-preservation.

Many people eager to better the world come of age every second. It's just that once they've amassed enough power to make a dent, most of them have been worn down.

Anybody doing science at a University is definitely doing it at a significant discount to their salary (phds are paid ~$50K at the high end) at a private company.

This could start to change if present US hostility towards all things foreign results in a shift in investment and migration.

When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.

I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.

It is not compelling at all. The difference between dividends and share buybacks are not big enough to explain this at all. The argument is totally absurd, companies could always reward their shareholders with their profits.

Bell Labs did not end because of share buybacks, it ended because Bell was broken up and their free money printer did no longer exist.

>If the US is increasingly relying on universities for foundational research, and corporate R&D is only focused on short-term, applied projects, we're definitely running the innovation engine on fumes.

Why? This is just total nonsense. The only difference is the physical location of basic researchers. And that the government decides what to fund. That is literally it.

Basic university research is still funded by corporations. Only they are paying the money to the government, which then decides what to fund.

Diploma mill universities in my state are consolidating the smaller STEM universities and trade schools to build football and sports programs, gyms, and "lifestyle" amenities.

This university in particular [1] mints basket weaving degrees and has used consolidation to build sports programs [2] and lavish facilities for sports.

It's also been a revolving door of politician to high-ranking, high-compensation executive staff positions.

This university [3] has used funding to acquire properties from the state, such as the 1996 Olympic Stadium [4].

Neither of these universities does real, impactful research. The latter is ranked as an R1, but everyone at the "real" R1s in our state will tell you this is a fabrication. They're diploma mills and extract six figures from their student body. They turn this money into sports facilities and upper level faculty pay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_University

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_Owls_football

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_State_University

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium

And this is just mentioning a sample of admin bloat, never mind the other areas.

This is not true at my state flagship R1 institution. Tuition and fees make up a little over 10% of the institution's total revenue. General funding provided in our state budget provides a larger percentage of the total revenue to the university and federal research funding provides an even larger percentage than the state.

The essential takeaway here is that our state taxes subsidize the actual cost of providing education to in-state students. In-state students are mandated to be at least 80%-ish of students.

The professors in the STEM fields are required to raise a significant percentage of their salary via research grants ("soft" money), teaching, and service work. The non-STEM professors are more often funded via "hard" money - eg, the institution has committed to pay the salary of history professors.

I googled and apparently a little more than 70% of undergraduate students in the US attend public schools. I don't know much about how funding works at the private universities that have the other 30% of undergraduate students.