[eru]

Companies have at least as much interest to do research as they have to do any other charitable activity. The private sector does plenty of charity.

Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits.

(Like eg funding education, especially early education. Or perhaps just taxing less, etc.)

One interesting thing to note is that in our world the American and British military funded some of the first computers. A clear example of government funded research. But---if the government wouldn't have paid for inventing computers for the militaries, IBM came up with computers only a few years later. (And in the counterfactual with less government expenditures, the private sector might have had more funds left over to build computers earlier?)

[jamesrcole]

> there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits

I dispute the implication of this -- that there is less certain benefit from fundamental research. There's clear historical evidence that fundamental research has massive societal benefits. We wouldn't have our modern society without it.

It's just that it can only be understood in "statistical terms". If you place bets on fundamental research then in the long term you get big payoffs. It's a bit like investing in the stock market. You can't predict the pay-off for any one particular bit of fundamental research, and its actual pay-off usually isn't obvious in the short-medium term.

From the other direction, there's a lot of claimed definite benefits to more applied work that doesn't actually pan out. Just because it's easier to claim that there's some particular benefit to doing something doesn't mean that benefit actually exists.

[cdancette]

I think charity improves their public image more than fundamental research, that will be known only by specialists. Moreover, they have large tax incentives for charitable activities (not sure if they have for research too)

For the military computers, they had a clear interest in doing so, and the military keeps most of their research hidden, so I think it's not really comparable to public research

[pjc50]

> large tax incentives for charitable activities

People misunderstand how these work. You don't get money by giving away money. What happens is that the charity gets the money as if it were pre-tax, that's all.

(Trying to get the money back into the company from the charity after you've got the tax break is fraud)

[throwawayjava]

> People misunderstand how these work

Perhaps, but that doesn't make their conclusion incorrect.

Charitable contributions, properly structured and carefully targeted, are basically tax-free ad spend.

[pault]

I'm under the impression that it works like this: I make $100,000 this year, donate $20,000 to charity, pay taxes on $80,000 in income. Is this not accurate? My understanding is that it can save you money if you're just over the bottom end of a tax bracket. Not sure if that applies to corporations too.

[nradov]

That's not quite accurate. Charitable donations are (generally) deductible on income tax returns. But tax brackets apply at marginal levels. There is no way to actually "save" money by donating to charity. The only exception is if you donate goods and then cheat by valuing those goods at above the market rate; some charities used to facilitate this by giving out receipts for inflated values but the IRS has been cracking down on that.

[pjc50]

> I make $100,000 this year, donate $20,000 to charity, pay taxes on $80,000 in income. Is this not accurate?

That sounds accurate.

> it can save you money if you're just over the bottom end of a tax bracket.

That sounds like a misunderstanding of tax brackets - if the brackets are (e.g) 20% up to $80k and 40% above that, with no deductions, what do you pay if you earn $80,001?

[pault]

You're right. Obviously I've never given this subject much thought. :)

[eru]

I think it's relatively easy to set up a charity to do your basic research for you, and reap the tax benefits? (I'm not an American, and I assume you are talking about American tax system? Other countries are different.)

Universities are notorious for spinning their basic research into good PR (and often overblown press releases), even if it would only be interesting to specialists normally.

I think companies like Google (and earlier IBM) reap a lot of more specialised PR from their basic research: it helps with hiring to be seen as a cool company at the forefront of technology.

[watwut]

"I think it's relatively easy to set up a charity to do your basic research for you, and reap the tax benefits?"

That would likely qualify as tax fraud.

[nine_k]

This depends on what you do with the results. To qualify as a charity, such an org should probably make all the results public domain, instead of e.g. patenting them.

[eru]

Yep. Lots of eg cancer research charities.

[fjsolwmv]

IKEA does this. Their product design is done by a "charitable foundation"

[pjc50]

> The private sector does plenty of charity

Plenty? How would you quantify that? Certainly in the scientific area it's a tiny part of total funding.

> in the counterfactual with less government expenditures

In this counterfactual the Axis would have outspent the Allies and perhaps won the war.

[eru]

To avoid controversy, take the counterfactual were spending changes after the surrender.

Also I'm talking about basic research funded by the government with no concrete short-term plan for its use. Applied research and development for identified military needs is a different beast. (And might or might not be good, but it's a different argument.)

[eli_gottlieb]

>Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits.

Budgets are finite, but currently, the state leaves both money and economic legibility on the table. The simple system should be: if you build and commercialize technology based on a public research grant, the state owns the patent and can set a fixed licensing rate proportional to the amount of the original grant funding. The state then splits the royalties, with you the developer taking most of them, but some large portion poured back into public research budgets (including from money you make off the patent). As your patent term expires, it begins costing you progressively larger portions of royalties and revenues to renew it.

Eventually, the knowledge you documented to get the patent becomes public domain, or the state basically takes all the revenue from renewed patents.

This doesn't just make money for the public research system, it guarantees legible terms to prospective licensees and rules out patent trolling wholesale.

[fjsolwmv]

How about the government just taxes all income at some appropriate rate?

[eli_gottlieb]

Personally, I really think that fundamental R&D is too important to rely on Congressional or parliamentary largess. If we want to fund research, and hopefully we do, then I think we ought to fund it out of direct taxes on its own products, a direct economic contract that knowledge belongs to everyone.

[s17n]

Corporate charitable donations were under $19B in 2016. The NIH budget alone is about $27B per year.

The idea that corporations would decide to replace federal funding for charitable reasons is absurd.

[lottin]

The problem is private companies generally being for-profit enterprises they tend to fund only those research projects that they believe will have a positive return for them. They also have a strong incentive to keep the products of their research secret and only divulge them when they discover a concrete application that is suitable to be patented. This is all very well, but it's not a socially optimal way to conduct research.

[ThomPete]

They actually dont since a lit of fundamental research has no market application. Its knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Interval Tesearch cut their "to market realization" from 10 down to 3 years. Fundamental researchbis not the same as r&d. Countries and civilizations have an interest in those.