Near the end of the war, FDR asked Vannevar Bush to explore how wartime research efforts could be transformed into peace time efforts to create new technologies and jobs and to increase life expectancy. Out of Bush's recommendations, captured in Science, the Endless Frontier, came the National Science Foundation which has steadily grown since, providing funding for the basic research that is life-changing over generations.
Bush had great insight into the importance of research and how it is best conducted. Speaking of basic research that doesn't immediately translate into a new product, he wrote about how medical research could be supported within medical schools and universities.
Apart from teaching, however, the primary obligation of the medical schools and universities is to continue the traditional function of such institutions, namely, to provide the individual worker with an opportunity for free, untrammeled study of nature, in the directions and by the methods suggested by his interests, curiosity, and imagination. The history of medical science teaches clearly the supreme importance of affording the prepared mind complete freedom for the exercise of initiative.
As the United States acted on recommendations such as Bush's, our country clearly took the lead in the creation of new technology, industries and companies. The National Science Foundation is both reality and symbol of our on-going support for research. Bush saw in research the basis for our economic progress as well:
Where will these new products come from? How will we find ways to make better products at lower cost? The answer is clear. There must be a stream of new scientific knowledge to turn the wheels of private and public enterprise. There must be plenty of men and women trained in science and technology for upon them depend both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes.
As it turns out, support for research is non-partisan. Since its creation, leaders of both parties have steadily increased the amounts they've asked for to fund the National Science Foundation. Until now.
Among the institutions he's trying to erode is this most basic tool for progress. His desire to cut even research funding might be the most baffling of his attempts to retreat from the modern world.
Basic research matters. We rightfully pay attention to the Fed's policy when it comes to setting interest rates because that can change investment and spending. The National Science Foundation doesn't just affect investment but actually is an investment in intellectual capital, which is the basis for new technologies, industries, companies, jobs, and wealth. Research takes longer to work than interest rates, but has a bigger effect. I would argue that a slowdown in research funding results in a slowdown in productivity and wage growth. But of course something with a 20-year lag struggles to get much attention in this world of 20-second attention spans.
The amount we fund the National Science Foundation seems paltry to me. Even at its peak, it never even hit even one-tenth of one percent of GDP and it has averaged 4/100th of one percent of GDP in its lifetime. It seems to me that we could hardly err by making it larger each year. Much larger. But alas, the man who looks at our economy and concludes that the rich are not rich enough and the poor are not poor enough has also decided that we know quite enough already. That hardly seems the case to me.
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