Take, for example, Pak Solhin, who lives in a small
village in West Java, Indonesia. He once explained to us exactly how a poverty
trap worked. His parents used to have a bit of land, but they also had 13
children and had to build so many houses for each of them and their families
that there was no land left for cultivation. Pak Solhin had been working as a
casual agricultural worker, which paid up to 10,000 rupiah per day (about $2)
for work in the fields. A recent hike in fertilizer and fuel prices, however,
had forced farmers to economize. The local farmers decided not to cut wages,
Pak Solhin told us, but to stop hiring workers instead. As a result, in the two
months before we met him in 2008, he had not found a single day of agricultural
labor. He was too weak for the most physical work, too inexperienced for more
skilled labor, and, at 40, too old to be an apprentice. No one would hire him.
Weiye Loh on 21 Oct 12"The appealing imagery of a scientist who simply follows his curiosity and then makes a discovery with a large societal payoff is part of the core mythology of post-World War II science policies. The mythology shapes how governments around the world organize, account for, and fund research. A large body of scholarship has critiqued postwar science policies and found that, despite many notable successes, the science policies that may have made sense in the middle of the last century may need updating in the 21st century. In short, investments in "basic research" are not enough. Benoit Godin has asserted (PDF) that: "The problem is that the academic lobby has successfully claimed a monopoly on the creation of new knowledge, and that policy makers have been persuaded to confuse the necessary with the sufficient condition that investment in basic research would by itself necessarily lead to successful applications." Or as Leshner and Cooper declare in The Washington Post: "Federal investments in R&D have fueled half of the nation's economic growth since World War II." A closer look at the actual history of Google reveals how history becomes mythology. The 1994 NSF project that funded the scientific work underpinning the search engine that became Google (as we know it today) was conducted from the start with commercialization in mind: "The technology developed in this project will provide the 'glue' that will make this worldwide collection usable as a unified entity, in a scalable and economically viable fashion." In this case, the scientist following his curiosity had at least one eye simultaneously on commercialization."
