Government R&D, Private Profits and the American Taxpayer

"Radiologists hope this sort of analysis could help prioritize public funding in a tight budget era: National Institutes of Health budgets are almost 20 percent smaller than they were 10 years ago.

But beyond the narrow objective of allocating a shrinking budget, the analysis offered by the radiologists raises another possibility to consider. Taxpayer-financed research can generate large rewards down the road. Perhaps the taxpayer could reap a share? In an era of tight budgets, this could finance the research to power American innovation.

The argument has been made most forcefully by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in Britain who specializes in science and technology policy.

She argues that the distribution of risks and rewards in the American economy looks nothing like the myth spun by free-marketeers, which posits a nation populated by entrepreneurial risk-takers overcoming the obstacles thrown up by an overbearing, bureaucratic state to produce the innovations that spark economic growth."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/business/giving-taxpayers-a-cut-when-government-rd-pays-off-for-industry.html?mabReward=A6&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Sports®ion=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&configSection=article&isLoggedIn=false&src=recg&pgtype=article