Bell Labs was more or less a government-approved monopoly, but the positive end of that arrangement was that the work being done was aimed at serving the long-term interests of America, and eventually, the world. For decades, there’s been a shift from federal investment in R&D to private enterprise footing the bill. That can promote myopia, as corporations have to focus on the next quarter rather than the next big thing.

To their credit, Alphabet and other ambitious U.S. companies aren’t just pocketing huge profits but investing heavily in the future as a hedge against entropy. If Google, for instance, is still just a search giant and fails to hit on any of its moonshots over the next decade, it’ll likely be headed for a well-appointed dotage, which isn’t what Larry Page wants. Such unicorns, however, can dream the way more mundane creatures cannot, with most modest outfits trying to survive the future rather than create it.

In a smart Wall Street Journal column, Christopher Mims wonders if shortsightedness is inevitable when the public sector recuses itself from the business of the future, no longer willing to subsidize the risk that can produce reward. The opening:

This is a special time for technology. Five of the world’s seven most valuable companies are U.S. tech firms. But the core innovations underlying Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. are decades old.

The transistor was born in the 1940s at AT&T’s Bell Labs. The internet was nurtured by the U.S. Defense Department in the 1960s. Many important, but less foundational inventions, such as GPS, were products of the Cold War.

Since then, the funding of research and development has shifted dramatically. Support from the federal government has waned, from nearly 2% of gross domestic product during the 1960s to about 0.6% today. Over the same time, corporate R&D has grown to nearly 2% of GDP, from less than 0.6% of GDP in the age of the Apollo program.

For U.S. taxpayers, that carries a benefit; the costs of innovation are being borne by the shareholders who will reap the benefits. But such broad statistics mask a more-complicated reality: Not all R&D is created equal.•