GOVERNMENT FUNDING of basic research has been astonishingly productive. Over the past five decades it has led to the development of the Internet, lasers, global positioning satellites, magnetic resonance imaging, DNA sequencing, and hundreds of other technologies.
With the end of the Cold War, Americans stopped worrying about the Soviet threat and, as a result, Research & Development funding for applied science plummeted, dropping 40 percent in the 1990s. It has picked up since then, but the government’s share of overall R&D spending remains near its all-time low. And while CORPORATIONS still spend on R&D, they DO NOT FUND THE KIND OF BASIC RESEARCH THAT LEADS TO BREAKTHROUGHS.
China has declared that 60 percent of its GDP will be related to science and technology within two decades.
Can abstinence only and creationism education save us from a bleak future?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/222836/page/1
America’s decline is most evident in the one realm of high technology where the U.S. government has, until recently, seemed most uninterested: energy. The three most important areas where current technology could yield big results are solar, wind, and battery production (the latter because the energy has to be stored somewhere). According to the investment bank Lazard Frères, the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer (by revenue) is a U.S. company: General Electric. But the other nine companies among the top 10 are scattered around the world, including Germany (Nordex), Denmark (Vestas), India (Suzlon), and Spain (Acciona).
The situation in solar is similar: U.S. companies take up two slots on the top-10 list (First Solar at No. 2, and SunPower at No. 7), but Japan and China both occupy three slots.
