Jarod
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I wonder how much of the huge increases in healthcare spending in the USA over the last 30 years was due to the equipment/services being way overpriced, and the increased burden of chronic illness.
Interesting, Jarod. Thanks. What's the source of your charts?
What does the population growth chart for the same time look like?
The magic figure for demographers is 2.1 births per couple. That, allowing for the fact that some girls die before they reach child-bearing age, is the figure at which a population replaces itself. In Europe the last time that fertility was above replacement level was in the mid-1960s. But now, for the first time on record, birthrates in southern and eastern Europe have dropped below 1.3
The UK seems to have begun an R&D decline about that time too, and Thatcher was criticized for it in the media. I am still trying to get readable data on it though.
In the twentieth century, most science, including most UK science, was done in firms that were responding to market forces. (Margaret Thatcher, an industrial food chemist, is a more ‘typical’ twentieth-century scientific figure than Albert Einstein.)
So the reforms proposed in 1971 by Victor, Lord Rothschild, which called for market forces—government patrons as ‘customers’, research communities as ‘contractors’—to shape government-funded science policy, were in one sense a matter of mere emphasis. Outside, industrial science—most science—would continue as before.
Likewise, an inner pocket of science, variously conceived as ‘basic’, ‘pure’, ‘academic’, ‘curiosity-driven’, or just very cheap, was not called upon to justify its continuation through an appeal to a market. (Note that this is certainly not saying that such research was not shaped by contextual forces, including market ones. Indeed, the category of ‘basic research’ was mobilized by Vannevar Bush in Science: the endless frontier (1945), at the culmination of mid-century militarization of science. By 1959 the case for state funding of basic research was being vigorously promoted by sometime RAND Corporation consultant Richard Nelson.40 Indeed, Mirowski and Sent describe the category of basic research as a Cold War artefact.
Hi Alex
Before accusing Margaret Thatcher of stealing the test tubes from scientists (as well as the milk bottles from babies) this might give a little insight into her rationale whether justified or not. Excerpt :
http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/05/13/rsnr.2010.0096.full
Hi Alex
Before accusing Margaret Thatcher of stealing the test tubes from scientists (as well as the milk bottles from babies) this might give a little insight into her rationale whether justified or not. Excerpt :
http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/05/13/rsnr.2010.0096.full