The US R&D model

This is the second article in a threepart series. Part 1 is When the US risks being leapfrogged. An examination of the United States' historical experience with infrastructure and government spending on research and development sheds light on what went wrong - and what the remedies are.

Consider the late president Dwight Eisenhower's "Don't Sputnik me" debates in 1958. When asked about overcoming recession then, his answer was: "Let's not just get a Sputnik attitude about everything."

He decided that the $1.7 billion porkbarrel Rivers and Harbors Bill with its 154 projects (when a billion was still a "billion") was not an anti-recession remedy.

The major expenditure in the proposed budget was $7.2 billion for highways. Eisenhower, a Republican, wanted to enhance highway spending by only $2.2 billion over four years, but the Democrats managed to get $1.8 billion for the 1959 fiscal year alone.

History is rhyming again, with now hundreds of billions and trillions planned to be spent on a range of what is claimed to be "infrastructure" investment. So far nobody in Washington has come up with a "Don't Covid me" line, though the debates about the stimulus sound the same as in 1958, when we adjust the numbers for inflation and population.

Part of the motivation to ramp up highway expenditure was the perceived need to allow a quick escape from densely populated cities after the panic over possible Russian nuclear missile or bomber attacks following the launch of Sputnik in 1957. The attacks did not happen, but many city dwellers and manufacturers moved to suburbs.

The highways thus had the unintended impact of leaving poorer people behind (many of them blacks), many now jobless, in what became the disastrous "inner cities" infested with crime for decades. Such longterm impacts were out of sight and mind during the years of massive spending.

The 1958 National Defense Education Act was another reaction to Sputnik, leading to massive spending on universities in the hope for advances in rigorous education. That turned out to be a failure too, gradually bringing academia into the credential-creating institutions many have now become, backed by much jargon and few skills - which will be discussed in Part 3 of this series.

Public debate in the US after 1957 led to major changes not only in domestic matters but major foreign-policy matters too, related to the military and R&D.

The historian Walter McDougall documented how in his book … The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1997), the US having adopted in the decade following Sputnik a Soviet-style "Five Year Plan" to prove to both NATO allies and what was then called the Third World that they should not worry that the US model of society would not prove superior to the Soviets' and that its security guarantees could be trusted.

But as McDougall and many others have noted, in spite of a few successes, the resulting large-scale "technocratic" approach was not a success: In McDougall's words, none of the plans "came to pass. Instead, the dream of limitless progress through governmentsponsored R&D began to fade.…

"By the time Apollo was history, NASA's budget was plummeting, many of its best engineers had left, and the agency had lost the 'institutional charisma' of its early years." Once the "best engineers" left, the outcome was predictable: mediocrity.

Already in 1991, a 400-page book of detailed case studies published by the Brookings Institute, The Technology Pork Barrel, each chapter devoted to a special R&D project, five scholars from Stanford, Columbia and other universities and institutions summarizing extensive evidence, had made observations similar to McDougall's years later.

They concluded (page 365): "On the basis of retrospective benefit-cost analysis, only one program - NASA's activities in developing communication satellites … can be regarded as worth the effort. But that program was killed.… The photovoltaics program made significant progress, but it was dramatically scaled back for political reasons.… The remaining four programs were almost unqualified failures.

"The supersonic transport (SST) and Clinch River Breeder Reactor were killed before they produced any benefits, and Clinch River, because of cost overruns, absorbed so much of the R&D budget for nuclear technology that it probably retarded overall technological progress. The space shuttle cost too much and flies too infrequently.

"The synthetic fuels program produced one promising technology … but billions were spent on another pilot and demonstration facilities that failed."

In 1997, McDougall summarized the politics behind such failures, noting that the belief was that "politicians could mobilize science and technology for the achievement of technical and even social goals without politics itself skewing the process."

Yet the space program, for example, "offended not only the cultural critics of the 1960s, who damned the military-industrial complex, the arms race and the mentality behind the Vietnam War, but also the environmental and feminist movements, which … identified technology with pollution and 'missile envy.'"

The combination of talented staff leaving the institutions combined with the above political/cultural compromises brought about the gradual decline deplored now.