NSF study raises serious concerns about US investment in technology

The National Science Foundation (NSF) just released a bevy of reports detailing American investment in science and technology, and the picture's grim.

While the size of the U.S. science and engineering workforce grew 24 percent between 2000 to 2010, to reach 6.65 million, the number of Americans working in high tech manufacturing dropped by 28 percent, and it's still headed down. Make no mistake about it, high tech jobs still drive the American economy. NSF's numbers show that "Knowledge and Technology Intensive Industries" in the United States account for 40 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, compared to 32 percent for the EU and 30 percent for Japan. But the U.S.'s share of the world revenue for knowledge-intensive service industries (business, financial, and communications) has fallen from 42 percent of the world total in 2000 to 33 percent in 2010. At the same time, China's world share has gone from 2 percent in 1995 to 7 percent in 2010, largely due to a 20 percent per year growth in China's communications industry. The largest global increases in science and technology output occurred in the "Asia 10" -- China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Between 1999 and 2009, the U.S. share of R&D expenditures dropped from 38 percent to 31 percent of the global total, while in the Asia 10 it grew from 24 percent to 35 percent. Yes, you read that correctly: As of 2009, the Asia 10 spent substantially more on R&D than the United States. That, in spite of the fact that R&D in the U.S. has grown an average of 5.8 percent per year for the past five years.