Where the U.S. is Building Knowledge Capital

I’ve been posting about knowledge capital writedowns, so now it’s time for a post on where the U.S. is building knowledge capital.

Let’s start with research and development: R&D is not the only type of knowledge capital investment, but it’s one of the more important parts. In my upcoming paper “Biosciences and Long-Term Economy Recovery” ( to be released in January 2011 by the Progressive Policy Institute), I wanted to compare biosciences R&D in the U.S. with infotech R&D. (Biosciences, by my definition, includes pharmaceuticals, medical equipment makers, and biotech).

Now, these numbers are not published by the government, but I was able to take a decent shot using NSF data. Take a look at the chart below:

By my calculations, the U.S. R&D effort, outside of defense, is divided into thirds–one third biosciences, one third infotech, one third everything else.

I estimate that biosciences accounts for approximately $100 billion a year in domestic R&D spending. This includes domestic business spending, nondefense federal spending and nondefense academic spending.

U.S. domestic infotech R&D totals roughly $95 billion, outside of defense. However, my calculations don’t pick up the portion of the government defense R&D that goes into IT-related projects, which would gross it up to $100 billion. For all intents and purposes, domestic IT R&D is roughly equal to biosciences R&D.

In these two areas–biosciences and IT–it’s likely that the rate of U.S. knowledge capital creation exceeds the rate of knowledge capital writedown., Other areas of R&D? Much dicier.

Note: These are preliminary estimates. I will likely update them in the full version of the paper.

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About Michael Mandel 126 Articles

Michael Mandel was BusinessWeek's chief economist from 1989-2009, where he helped direct the magazine's coverage of the domestic and global economies.

Since joining BusinessWeek in 1989, he has received multiple awards for his work, including being honored as one of the 100 top U.S. business journalists of the 20th century for his coverage of the New Economy. In 2006 Mandel was named "Best Economic Journalist" by the World Leadership Forum.

Mandel is the author of several books, including Rational Exuberance, The Coming Internet Depression, and The High Risk Society.

Mandel holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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