陶氏杜邦合并案揭示出美国衰落的真正原因

化工业巨头陶氏化学与杜邦的合并新闻，令外界对美国公司的状况及其与华尔街的关系产生了许多疑问。其中最紧迫的问题是，此次合并对于那些在基础研究领域投入巨资的公司究竟意味着什么。

《财富》杂志编辑艾伦•默里发表文章表示，此次交易很难令人感到开心，“除非你是投资银行家”。据报道，此次交易将把合并之后的公司拆分成三个新的业务部门，经营的领域分别为农业、材料科学和特种产品。他写道：“股东或许能从这种大规模的公司改造工程中获利，因为在消息传出之后，两家公司的股票均出现小幅上涨，但最终的结果必定是裁员和研发预算缩水。请原谅我的语气听起来像特朗普，但不难想象，中国中化集团的人肯定在弹冠相庆。”

事实上，在杜邦前任CEO柯爱伦与维权投资者尼尔森•佩尔兹争夺公司控制权的过程中，杜邦的基础研究投入一直是双方冲突的焦点。《财富》杂志之前曾报道过杜邦内部的权力之争。佩尔兹批评公司庞大的开支，而柯爱伦却在努力维护她提出的公司愿景——让杜邦成为少数几家借科技之力解决世界大问题的大公司之一。

但柯爱伦最终于10月份辞职，而此次关于两家公司合并的消息，成为另一个坊间证据，进一步表明美国公司正在放弃柯爱伦生动阐述的科学雄心。

但这些传闻是否有统计数据为依据？《财富》杂志梳理了“《财富》美国500强”的财务数据。结果发现，仅有95家将研发开支作为一项单独开支，但去年，这些公司的研发支出在总销售额中所占的比例仅有1.5%。不过，这个数据在过去25年间一直保持不变。

此外，最近研发支出的增长速度开始放缓。去年，研发支出仅增长了8%。而在过去25年间，平均研发支出增长速度为10%。

即便对于那些将研发支出作为独立分类的公司，我们也不清楚这些钱都花在了何处。杜克大学富卡商学院的经济学家阿西施•阿罗拉也一直在关注这一趋势，研究美国公司是否确实在减少科研投资。由于多数公司没有公布研发支出，他与同事转而选择研究公司聘用的科学家在科研期刊上发表新研究成果的速度，结果令人震惊。

The rumored merger between chemical giants Dowand DuPonthas raised many questions about the state of Corporate America and its relationship to Wall Street, and none more pressing than what it will mean for firms that invest heavily in basic research.

As Fortune Editor Alan Murray argued it’s hard to feel good about the deal—which will reportedly split the combined company into three new units that focus on agriculture, materials science and specialty products, respectively—”unless you’re an investment banker.” He wrote:

Perhaps shareholders will make money from this massive act of corporate engineering—both stocks rose modestly after the announcement—but the end result is sure to be fewer employees and shrinking research budgets. Pardon me for sounding Trumpian, but it’s hard to believe the folks at Sinochem aren’t cheering.

Indeed, disagreements over DuPont’s spending on basic research were a point of conflict during the struggle between former DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman and activist investor Nelson Peltz to control the company, which Fortune documented in May. Peltz has criticized the firm for its bloated spending, while Kullman defended her vision of the company as one of the few in the world that was large enough to solve the world’s big problems through science.

But Kullman stepped down in October, and reports of the merger are another piece of anecdotal evidence that U.S. companies are abandoning the scientific ambitions that Kullman articulated so eloquently.

But are these anecdotes backed up by statistics? Fortune combed through the financials of Fortune 500 companies, and found that, for the companies that breakout R&D as a separate expenditure, which was only 95 companies of the 500, research spending is small as a percentage of total sales, just 1.5% last year. But that figure has remained constant over the past 25 years.

Still there has been some slowdown in the growth in R&D spending recently. It was up just 8% last year. R&D spending growth has averaged 10% over the past 25 years.

But even for the companies that break out R&D spending, its unclear what they are spending their money on. Ashish Arora, an economist at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, has also been looking at this trend, trying to figure out whether Corporate America is indeed investing less in scientific research. Faced with the problem that most companies don’t report R&D spending, he and and his colleagues Sharon Belenzon and Andrea Patacconi studied that rate at which company-employed scientists were publishing new findings in scientific journals, and the results were striking.

如上图的红线所示，在1980年至2007年期间，发表新科研成果的公司比例减少了三分之二。至2007年，在阿罗拉研究的2000多家上市公司中，这一比例仅有10%，而在25年前，这一比例还是30%。

是什么导致了这种下降？部分原因来自公开市场和投资者。公司没有从研发投入中得到回报。阿罗拉发现，重视研发的公司，在公开市场的估值更低。他指出，相比35年前，“私人公司对基础科研的重视程度和需求在不断下降。”

对于造成这种现象的具体原因，以及我们是否应该为此感到担忧，经济学界仍在争论不休。而陶氏杜邦的合并新闻则是另外一个数据点，证明了美国公司放弃基础研究是一个长期趋势，但市场似乎对此并不关心。（财富中文网）

译者:刘进龙/汪皓

审校：任文科

As you can see from the red line in the chart above, the share of companies that are publishing new scientific research has fallen by two-thirds between 1980 and 2007. By 2007, it was just 10%, down from 30% more than two and a half decades earlier, of the more than 2,000 publicly traded companies Arora looked at.

What’s driving the drop? In part, public markets and investors. Companies are not getting rewarded for their research efforts. Arora found that corporations that do engage in scientific research are less valuable in public markets. As he says “private corporations value basic science less and demand less of it” than they did thirty-five years ago.

Why this is, exactly—or whether we should be concerned about it—is still being debated by economists. But Dow-DuPont merger is another data point in what appears to be a long trend of Corporate America turning its back on basic research, and the market not minding.