This website is owned and managed by David Hochman as an independent consultant on technology-based (sometimes called technology-led) economic development (tbed).

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I’m a friend of science and of government funding for scientific research (though I do insist that these are not the same thing). I spend much of my professional life explaining and advocating the very economic arguments for research funding laid out nicely in President Obama’s recent speech at the National Academy of Sciences. This is a thematically coherent statement of philosophy, likely to go down as a seminal document in the history of the administration, though in substance it contains little not already embraced on a bipartisan basis and telegraphed in dollars in the stimulus bill, the FY 2009 “omnibus” appropriation, and the FY 2010 budget, which is still in “outline” stage as of this writing.

The headline, I suppose, is a commitment to achieve a “societal” level of R&D of 3% of GDP, up from the most recently measured 2.57% and exceeding the 2.9% registered at the height of the Sputnik-fired space race. Societal R&D means all activities (basic, applied, development), all funders (federal, industrial, state, and philanthropic), and all performers (government, university and industry). As you might expect, there’s a complex interplay among funders and performers, cross-cut by research type. To understand the distribution of funding across these dimensions, see materials available from the NSF Division of Science Resource Statistics, including the masterful annual summary in Science and Engineering Indicators.

Since the government component of R&D is the only one the President and Congress can directly control, and since the thematic emphasis is on civilian R&D, what this comes down to is a theoretical justification for the 10-year doubling of the research budgets for the physical science agencies (NSF, NIST and DOE) — analogous to what was done for NIH in the 1990s and already authorized for these other three agencies in the America COMPETES Act but not until now committed to in a presidential budget.

On the plus side, the president’s speech evinced a clear understanding of the positive externalities of basic R&D that cause industry to under-invest in it, and which leave basic science an obligation of government worldwide: Most of the G8 nations typically achieve a rate of societal R&D of at least 2% of GDP, again with private investments in applied and development work supplemented by substantial government-funded contributions to basic research. However, I grimaced a bit at several elements:

More on First reactions to President Obama’s speech at the NAS

OK, time for a quick “I told you so” moment. Readers will recall that as long ago as November 2007 I questioned whether — with the end of the Bush-era restrictions then quite obviously in view — it made sense for states to be investing their own money in embryonic stem-cell research capacity, especially on economic-development grounds.

Now, with President Obama’s reversal of the Bush policy, The New York Times is out with a story that quite correctly wonders whether the president’s decision “has removed the original raison d’être for the California program and others like it.”

More on State stem-cell programs revisited

As of this morning’s radio/Youtube address, President-elect Obama is said to have filled the balance of his science team. In scientific terms, it is an exceptionally fine group, and the prominence of the announcement underlines that this will be an administration that makes its policy decisions in the context of the best currently available human knowledge. How refreshing!

Not only that, but “science policy” — a discipline which embraces the study of public investments in science and technology itself — is indirectly but definitely in the domain of Science Advisor-designate John Holdren, who currently directs the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at Harvard’s Belfer Center. That means this administration will not only be applying sound science to the “mission agencies” but also it will also be thinking carefully about policy for our science-funding agencies themselves, and about innovation more broadly.

And yet, without being in the least grouchy (as I often am) about all this fine news, there are some things to watch for, from the perspective of technology-based economic development. More after the break. More on Some observations on the Obama science team, and what to watch for