[washingtonismoney]

I think you're mixing up cause and effect, comnambule. Why would companies spend a lot of money on long-term research when they can socialize the cost onto taxpayers? Professional sports teams do the same thing with stadiums, arguing that they "can't" pay for their own ballparks -- even though until the 1960s, they mostly did -- when all they really mean is, they don't want to and have figured out that local governments will pick up the tab if asked to do so.

I think somnambule is correct--the best examples of long-term research being led by the private sector belong to entities like Bell Labs and PARC, both of which were funded by monopolists in entrenched industries. There are very few monopolists in the U.S. these days with an interest in such R&D--maybe Google is the only example today.

But research is a classic public good, and private companies will underinvest because they reason they can capture the benefits from elsewhere, as your own logic earlier in the thread demonstrates. You think UF can cut its CS program because other states and other colleges can provide CS grads just fine; that may be true at the margin but the more universities follow such logic, it becomes an obvious problem. (Meanwhile, there probably is a dearth of CS grads in this country, as the rapidly escalating salaries in Silicon Valley demonstrate perfectly well. Anecdotally, the number of hospital business folk I've heard complaining about a lack of IT people for various health IT initiatives is very high.)

[washingtonismoney]

I think you're mixing up cause and effect, comnambule. Why would companies spend a lot of money on long-term research when they can socialize the cost onto taxpayers? Professional sports teams do the same thing with stadiums, arguing that they "can't" pay for their own ballparks -- even though until the 1960s, they mostly did -- when all they really mean is, they don't want to and have figured out that local governments will pick up the tab if asked to do so.

I think somnambule is correct--the best examples of long-term research being led by the private sector belong to entities like Bell Labs and PARC, both of which were funded by monopolists in entrenched industries. There are very few monopolists in the U.S. these days with an interest in such R&D--maybe Google is the only example today.

But research is a classic public good, and private companies will underinvest because they reason they can capture the benefits from elsewhere, as your own logic earlier in the thread demonstrates. You think UF can cut its CS program because other states and other colleges can provide CS grads just fine; that may be true at the margin but the more universities follow such logic, it becomes an obvious problem. (Meanwhile, there probably is a dearth of CS grads in this country, as the rapidly escalating salaries in Silicon Valley demonstrate perfectly well. Anecdotally, the number of hospital business folk I've heard complaining about a lack of IT people for various health IT initiatives is very high.)