Nicholas Bloom: evaluation

Transcript context

…John Horgan. Yeah, that’s it. The puzzle gets even more extreme if you look globally. Sure, it’s tricky because Europe has become slightly less of a powerhouse, but obviously Asia has completely taken off in the amount of R&D being spent in, say, India, and China has exploded. Has that offset the reduction in US publicly funded R&D, certainly as a share of GDP? It’s not obvious. One reason is, there’s plenty of evidence on knowledge spillovers being localized. There’s a lot of evidence, for example, that you’re more likely to coauthor with your colleagues in your own university or the same firm. I guess the same firm is more obvious, but if that was true, you may think the transmission of ideas from China to the US is less effective than within the US. I also don’t know if the increase in Chinese and Indian R&D by their government sectors is enough to offset the reduction by the US, and whether it’s in the right areas. It may be that a lot of developing countries’ R&D is more, say, defense and national security focused, which I suspect has lower tradeoffs. The nice thing about the US and things like the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health is they would put huge amounts of funding on very basic research that had broad value. An MIT researcher goes to the NSF, gets funding for research. They tend to be focused on very basic things that are of interest to broad science, and that has, I suspect, the largest value in. Apart from possibly giving them more money, how should we improve the NSF and the NIH? How can we raise their productivity?…

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