美国科研堕落了：中国正在创新领域赶超

当业界开始盛传化工巨头陶氏化学即将与杜邦将要合并的消息时，显然此次合并并非是投行家们为逐利而一手策划的普通交易。两家公司在美国的历史加起来有331年。在历史最为悠久的《财富》美国500强企业中，杜邦排名第四。

能让这两家公司脱颖而出的并非只是其历史。在当前服务业GDP占全国经济总量80%的美国，这些声名显赫的企业竟然做的是实体经济，而且更为重要的是，它们投入了大量的资金，为的是研究如何才能做出更好、更赚钱的产品。

When rumors began to fly about a merger between chemical giants Dow Chemical DOW 1.97% and DuPont DD 1.65% , it was obvious the deal was not your ordinary fee-driven scheme dreamed up by investment bankers. The two companies have 331 years of American history between them, with DuPont claiming the title of fourth-oldest Fortune 500 firm.

But it’s not just their ages that distinguish these companies. In an economy in which roughly 80% of GDP comes from the services sector, these vaunted institutions actually make stuff—and perhaps more importantly, invest a lot in researching how to make better and more profitable stuff.

然而，在当前美国很多投资人的眼中，像杜邦这样拥有大量研发预算的企业是拖累他们业绩的罪魁祸首。激进投资者尼尔森•珀尔茨今年早些时候便与杜邦首席执行官艾伦•库尔曼有过交锋，而研发支出则是其争论的焦点。在珀尔茨眼中，库尔曼对科研以及解决世界重大问题的执着是杜邦投资者难以负担的帝国大厦。（在争论结束之后，库尔曼辞去了杜邦公司职务。）

且不论杜邦的研究预算是否花的值当，很多人对以前企业做出重大发现的那段时光仍是念念不忘。数十年前，杜邦发明了尼龙和特氟龙，陶氏化学则发明了聚苯乙烯。美国人依然痴迷于往日那些集中式的研究计划，例如AT&T的贝尔实验室或施乐的 PARC研究中心。这些地方的科学家们曾因其工作成果获得过诺贝尔奖，并为世界带来了革命性的发明，例如晶体管和计算机鼠标。

如今，贝尔实验室成为了Alcatel-Lucent的一部分，但是其在新泽西州霍姆德尔镇的庞大园区（早期手机技术在这里获得了突破）已经变成了一个混合用途的新城市地产开发项目。施乐的PARC仍位于帕拉奥托，但该设施已于2002年成为了一个独立的子公司，目前专注于需求研发，而不是开放式的、催生了一批知名发现的基础性研究。

In the eyes of many investors in the U.S. today, however, the large research budgets of companies like DuPont are precisely what’s holding them back. When activist investor Nelson Peltz tussled with former DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman earlier this year, R&D spending was a main talking point. What Kullman defended as a commitment to science and solving the world’s big problems, Peltz saw as empire building that DuPont’s investors could ill afford. (When the dust settled, Kullman resigned.)

Whether or not DuPont’s research budget was well spent, there’s plenty of nostalgia for the days when businesses were making huge discoveries. Decades ago, DuPont invented nylon and Teflon. Dow, for its part, created Styrofoam. Americans are still fascinated by the centralized research programs of yore, like AT&T’s T 0.49% Bell Labs or the Xerox XRX 1.13% PARC laboratory, whose scientists’ work won Nobel Prizes and led to revolutionary inventions such as the transistor and the computer mouse.

Today Bell Labs exists as a part of Alcatel-Lucent, but its once sprawling campus in Holmdel, N.J.—the site of early breakthroughs in cellphone technology—has been converted into a mixed-use, new urbanist real estate development. Xerox PARC still calls Palo Alto home, but in 2002 it was spun off as an independent subsidiary and now engages in R&D on demand rather than the open-ended basic research that yielded some of its more famous discoveries.

要弄清楚企业在研发方面到底花了多少钱并不是件容易事。从研发成本来看，开支/营收比近年来十分平稳。大多数全球500强企业并没有披露其研发开支，即便有95家企业公开了这一支出，但其信息涉及的类目过于宽泛，因此也没有太大的用处。毕竟，研发的内容可以包罗万象，大到贝尔实验室的宇宙背景辐射的发现（这一发现最终导致了大爆炸理论的诞生），小到Twitter全新的“喜欢”键的创造。

为了更好地了解企业在研发方面所耗费的资源，经济学家阿希什•阿罗拉、沙伦•贝伦宗和安德鲁•帕塔科尼研究了学术杂志中发布论文的上市企业科学家所占的比例。这一发布于2015年的调查敲响了警钟。他们发现，在2007年之前，仅有6%的上市企业在科学杂志上发表了研究论文，较1980年下降了近2/3。

事实证明，这一现象对于投资者来说是无关痛痒的。阿罗拉还发现，在其他要素得到控制之后，在研究方面投入越多的企业往往股市市值越小。他说，与35年前相比，“企业对科研的重视程度下降了，对它的需求也减少了。”

我们是否应为此感到担忧？乔治梅森大学的菲利普•奥斯沃尔德表示，近几十年研发开支的下降实际上是对常态的回归，因为二战之后以及冷战期间过多的投资大部分都用在了军事技术方面。

此外，尽管企业实验室获得诺贝尔奖可能为其母公司带来了荣誉，但这些成果不一定都能赚钱。有时候，受益的反而是其竞争对手——例如施乐发明的电脑桌面图标便遭到了史蒂夫•乔布斯的剽窃。将发现成果货币化实非易事，而这也让当前的管理层对大兴基础研究的做法心存芥蒂。

尽管研发投入缩水的负面影响并没有很快地显现出来，但这并不意味着其后果不足为道。企业科研投入的下降与生产率增长的下滑不谋而合，而后者自2004年以来便一直是美国经济的梦魇。从2004年开始，经济学家所谓的总要素生产率——也就是衡量劳动力和资本如何共同推动经济增长的指标——一直只有前10年水平的一半。国际货币基金组织经济学家最近比较了美洲多个国家的生产率增速，他们发现，研发开支排名靠前的国家拥有较快的总要素生产率增速。

鉴于美国的竞争对手——尤其是中国——并未在加强研发方面有丝毫的懈怠。事到如今，我们可能应该抛弃投资者押注短线的意见，并重燃美国对企业科研的激情。科学慈善联盟会长马克•卡斯特纳说：“如果我们不去开展基础性研究，其他国家便会取而代之。”(财富中文网)

翻译：冯丰

校对：詹妮

Figuring out just how much corporate research has waned is surprisingly difficult. Look at R&D costs, and you’ll find that spending as share of revenue has been fairly steady in recent years. But most Fortune 500 companies don’t disclose that spending, and for the 95 that do, the category is so broad as to be not very useful. After all, R&D can include everything from Bell Labs’ discovery of background radiation (which ultimately led to the development of the big bang theory) to Twitter’s sparkly new “like” button.

To get a better sense of the resources dedicated to research, economists Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, and Andrea Patacconi looked at the share of publicly traded corporations whose scientists publish in academic journals. The findings, published in 2015, were alarming. They found that by 2007, just 6% of publicly traded companies were publishing research in scientific journals, down nearly two-thirds from 1980.

That, it turns out, is just fine with investors. Arora also found that after controlling for other factors, companies that engage in more research are worth less in public markets. “Corporations value basic science less and demand less of it” than they did 35 years ago, he says.

How worried should that make us? Philip Auerswald of George Mason University says the decline of R&D spending in recent decades is essentially a return to normal after overinvestment in mostly military technology following World War II and during the Cold War.

Plus, the Nobel Prizes won by corporate research labs may have earned their parent companies prestige, but they don’t always make money. Sometimes it’s competitors that benefit—think Steve Jobs’ appropriation of Xerox inventions like computer desktop icons. The difficulty of monetizing discoveries has helped dissuade a generation of management from spending big on basic research.

But while the fallout may not be readily apparent, this doesn’t mean it’s not severe. Less focus on corporate research has coincided with the decline in productivity growth that has been plaguing the U.S. economy since the middle of the last decade. Since 2004, growth in what economists call Total Factor Productivity—or the measure of how well an economy combines labor and capital to create economic growth—has been half of what it was in the prior decade. IMF economists recently compared the productivity growth in various American states and found that those where R&D spending was the highest also showed faster TFP growth.

With America’s economic rivals—in particular, China—showing no letup in their willingness to boost research and development, it may just be time to stop listening to investors betting on the short term and reignite the American love affair with corporate science. “If we don’t do the basic research,” says Marc Kastner, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, “other countries will.”