In an earlier post, The Unexamined Life, Jacob Levy's knowledge of research funding was questioned as part of a larger argument.

Levy is also wrong in his understanding of science research funding. The national currency and The Federal Reserve are nothing like national science research funding because it is not and cannot be The science research funding. National funding of science research is the purely political branch of the science funding stream. It has nothing to do with "the value of getting good science and good research" since that is always available whether nations fund research or not.

G. Paschal Zachary has an opinion piece about terrorism and technology (via Future Now) that quotes some funding statistics that are also relevant to Levy's misunderstanding of science funding.

The figures speak for themselves. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the federal government provided two-thirds of all research-and-development spending in the United States, with industry providing the remaining third. The proportion is reversed today, with industry supplying $180 billion annually and government spending $90 billion, Battelle reports...

But by the start of the 21st century, the government no longer had the power to shift priorities on a grand scale. Although government spending continues to grow, private spending has grown faster, as companies reap substantial gains from their research and development and so invest more. Today the software and semiconductor industries each spend at least $10 billion on research and development annually, about equal to NASA's R&D budget. Chip-maker Intel alone spends more than $4 billion, about equal to the annual research-and-development spending by the National Science Foundation.

Intel alone spends as much as NSF on research. This is chump change compared to the 28 billion that NIH spends, but this may be changing too. Recent advances offer the prospect of a biotech century in which health related products gain mass markets the way computer hardware and software did in the previous century.

Perhaps more importantly there are strong arguments that private research is better, faster and cheaper. The pace of discovery and innovation accelerates when privately funded. For example, many feel that the 20 billion spent on NASA budgets would go much further in private hands and that private space exploration will do a far better job than NASA has done. This is consistent with the history of aviation in which private research and development has been far more successful than national efforts in every area except the big, expensive and foolish vanity projects of no enduring worth. Nations get far more for their money when they purchase R&D from private companies than when they attempt to do it themselves.

The fraction of research spending funded by the national government, and the fraction of that done in non-commercial labs such as universities, will continue to fall as a percentage of all spending though it will grow in absolute terms. Except for the odd period last century when war dominated national consciousness and priorities science research has always been mostly a private affair, especially in the US where basic science, engineering, invention and commercialization worked together to uplift society.

It seems as though many think that the war period wasn't and shouldn't be a temporary insanity that nations recover from. They seem to want to continue that mobilization forever as though it was an advancement of civilization rather than a desperate, wasteful and unsustainable attempt to survive a world gone mad. I think they are completely wrong about that. Command and control approaches are the habits of military madness and are no longer appropriate or useful.

The Zachary piece on terrorism and technology has a different focus but makes a similar point that the wars we have now are very different than the wars we had last century and that the methods of that era no longer apply. Big science is as obsolete as big war in the information age. Everyone seems to realize this but politicians and politicized pundits.