In sciences people are starting to talk about this a lot. When the government of this country got out of funding research and turned that role over to corporations, there was a shift from the kind of basic research that pays off maybe a decade down the line to the kind of development work that pays off in a year or so. In the short term, that's great for corporations. In the long term it means that foreign reseach institutions are will end up holding the patents to all the cool stuff that they were researching while corporate America refused to look any farther than the next quarter.

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