Social Science Research Council

Of all the trends that impinge upon Viridiana’s day-to-day activities, this is the one that is treated as obvious by all her peers. The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the Federal government in the US has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal dollar expenditures for R&D have been more or less flat over the last 15 years. Science policy experts know this wasn’t only a matter of tight budgets, but that it involves a dramatic reversal of principles which had become ingrained in the political psyche in the years just after WWII.

The drive to capture all manner of intellectual artifacts, subjecting them to finely-specified formal contractual relations and market discipline is the culmination of all the previous trends covered so far: the creeping objectification of information, fallout from the mechanization of thought by the computer and low-cost instantaneous forms of communication such as the Internet, the collapse of socialism and hence an ideologically bipolar world where politically sensitive areas were kept fenced off, the de-industrialization of the West, and the conviction that economic growth derives from scientific research and development.