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Ben Reinhardt's avatar

Re: your bubble point at the end. There are two scenarios and I’m trying to figure out which is more true:

1. The work at these corporate labs was incredibly valuable for the world but was hard for the companies to capture the value of, so rationally they stopped doing it once they figured that out.

2. The work these corporate labs was on net not that valuable at all, despite a few charismatic successes.

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Kaleberg's avatar

There was also the matter of tax policy. Corporate income taxes were about 50%, so the government effectively paid half the bill for a research lab. Personal income taxes could be as high as 90%, so shareholders would rather fund research on the long shot chance it paid off big rather than giving the government all but 10%. When they started cutting taxes in the 70s and even more in the 80s, research labs were no longer as good a deal as a company could just zero out research and cut a check to shareholders.

P.S. In the 1960s, Ford developed the first intercalating battery using sulfur and alumina. They even developed a prototype electric car. The downside was that the battery had to run at 450F. There are all sorts of premature technologies like this that got put on hold for decades before making a splash. For example, researchers at Pfizer demonstrated that GLP-1 cut sugar levels in diabetics, reduced hunger and slowed gastric emptying back in 1990, but that family of drugs wasn't rolled out until recently.

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