This is Prof Edgerton’s introduction to the lecture from the R&D Society web site:
“One of the great problems we have with science and technology is that elite discussion (let alone public understanding) is based on sometimes dubious assumptions rather than on the basis of evidence. A good example is the underlying assumption that national R&D spending correlates with national rates of economic growth. It does not, as I will show. But this is not an argument for the unimportance of R&D. Rather it suggests that R&D must be thought about in less nationalistic ways, for which there are other compelling reasons. Avoiding the naïve economics of R&D is essential to good policies for R&D. At the same time we need to recognise more clearly that doing R&D is far from the only way of changing either the world, or the performance of the British economy.”My very short synopsis of his hour long talk is:
Essentially he said that there is and never has been a correlation between R&D spend and growth - and that the concept of targeting a R&D to GDP ratio spend was nonsense. He is not anti-R&D, just that it does not equal growth; it may equal enhanced productivity. It may be that the observation that high income per capita equals high R&D spend is more effect than cause.
He said that the ideas have been well known to government for forty years; they originated with Bruce Williams, the economic advisor to the Ministry of Technology in the time of Zuckerman and Blackett era in the 1960s. (David Edgerton expands on the theme in his book “Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970”; the key page is 253 and this can be previewed on Google Book search).
This makes rather a mockery of the EU’s 2000 Lisbon agenda objective to raise EU wide R&D expenditure to 3% of GDP. Why?
He applied his thesis to climate change. If government really wanted to make a change it could regulate a maximum car engine size, ban high energy light bulbs etc, in fact do a huge number of things with current technology and processes, but these are politically unacceptable, so promising to spend on R&D definitely delays anything happening for decades - masterly inaction.
… thought provoking stuff.
Some of my thoughts:
One reason why increased R&D expenditure may not be good for the paymasters is that there may only be so many people in any one economy who can do research and understand how to apply it successfully. If too many of these people are doing R&D there will then not be enough left to exploit it, hence no positive impact on economic growth. If the economy applies relatively less people to R&D and more to commercialization of the knowledge generated from what R&D is done, then the economy will benefit and grow.
Just after hearing this talk I heard a radio report of recent findings that the UK's cancer cure rates were at the bottom end of the Western world outcomes. An interview with a medical academic on the reasons why followed; the academic repeated the mantra about every other sentence (or so it seemed) that of course we need to do more R&D to solve the problem - my immediate response was "no, no, no - other countries have the answers, all we need to do is to find out what works and do it. More R&D is not the answer to this problem - it has already been done". So while I am all for doing R&D on cancer cures, in this case we need to make better use of what R&D has already been done by others. Using the idea that "R&D turns cash into knowledge and innovation turns knowledge into cash" what we need in this case is more innovation to turn knowledge into better cancer outcomes.
Perhaps wealthy countries can afford R&D and offer the results as “a gift to the world”.
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