No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

Innovation, control, and short‑termism

• Several comments argue that incumbents (companies, elites, nations) see startups and radical innovation as threats to control, so they instinctively suppress novelty.
• This is framed as “short‑term thinking” reinforced by quarterly earnings and election cycles; decision‑makers optimize for extracting wealth now and being gone before long‑run consequences arrive.
• Some see the US as in a leveraged‑buyout phase: strip assets, underinvest, and let future stability be someone else’s problem.

Why corporate labs declined

• One camp accepts the article’s narrative: mid‑century corporate labs (Bell, Xerox PARC, IBM, etc.) were funded by monopoly profits and high tax rates that made R&D a smart way to avoid tax; financialization + stock buybacks shifted surplus to shareholders instead of basic science.
• Others say buybacks are overstated: firms always could return cash (dividends) and the real drivers were:
  • End of regulated monopolies.
  • Antitrust actions.
  • Bayh‑Dole moving basic research into universities via exclusive licensing.
  • Management failures and bureaucracy; research groups as internal power centers that leadership disliked.
• There’s sympathy for the loss of “pure” corporate labs, but also skepticism: many of those firms failed to capitalize on their own breakthroughs, so the model was commercially fragile.

Stock buybacks, dividends, and incentives

• Long subthread dissects whether buybacks inherently crowd out R&D:
  • One side: buybacks are economically similar to dividends, just more tax‑efficient and timing‑flexible; they simply move capital to where markets see better returns.
  • Other side: tying executive comp and investor expectations to stock price makes buybacks a politically easy way to juice metrics, unlike uncertain, slow‑payoff basic research.
• There’s debate over who benefits most (option‑holding executives, frequent sellers, wealthy margin borrowers vs all shareholders) and whether legal/fiduciary norms (“maximize shareholder value”) force short‑termism.

Role of government, universities, and “planned” science

• Many agree that only government can consistently fund long‑horizon, high‑risk basic science; companies and VCs mostly do applied work and optimization.
• Others describe public science funding as a “planned economy” dominated by committees, politics (including DEI fights and “kissing the ring” in grant language), and bureaucracy; they see academia as a status racket often hostile to practical innovation.
• There’s concern that US science agencies are being politicized and that cuts will erode the innovation base; counter‑voices argue the existing system was already misallocating talent and failing to turn discoveries into domestic industry.

Is there still anything to discover? Science vs engineering

• A minority claims “there’s nothing left to research, only optimizations”; most strongly reject this as naïve, pointing to ongoing frontier work in materials, quantum, biology, batteries, etc.
• Multiple comments stress the distinction and interdependence of:
  • Science: generating new explanatory knowledge, generally in universities and national labs.
  • Engineering: turning that knowledge into rockets, LLMs, drugs, chips, etc. (SpaceX, Ozempic, GPT‑4 are cited as engineering atop decades of prior science).
• Some argue recent slowdown in visible “game‑changers” may be real, making science look lower‑ROI and politically vulnerable; others see that as an illusion of perspective.

Incentives and careers in science

• Commenters describe academic science as funding‑driven rather than curiosity‑driven, with harsh career funnels (PhD → postdoc → rare tenure), heavy grant‑writing load, and sometimes misaligned evaluation metrics.
• There’s frustration that PhDs can be treated as hiring “red flags” in industry and that pitch‑deck/VC styles are invading research evaluation.
• Despite all this, several insist that basic science remains essential infrastructure for future startups and national prosperity, even if the return is diffuse, delayed, and hard to measure.