By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
A lot of the focus around President Trump’s policies has been on tariffs and rightly so, but there are other policies that economists are sounding the alarm on, including pullbacks and research funding. As part of DOD’s efforts to cut costs, the administration has cut or frozen billions in federal grants to researchers at medical centers and other scientific institutions. Our next guest says analysis indicates that for every dollar invested in innovation, we receive at least $5 in social benefits on average. Joining us now, Benjamin Jones, an economist at Northwestern University. Thank you so much for being here. Uh, so Benjamin, um, we obviously, we’ve talked a lot about tariffs. We do not talk to many economists who have pointed to those cuts to research funding and the effect it could have on GDP, maybe because it’s sort of longer run. How are you looking at that and how should we be thinking about its effects?
01:37 Benjamin Jones
We should think about science and innovation and the American science and innovation system as really the fundamental driver of our long-run prosperity, both in economic terms, our standard of living, but also in terms of our improving health and longevity.
02:07 Speaker A
I’m curious, Benjamin, if you can kind of lay out the numbers behind that. Uh, I I know that you’ve talked about the degree to which economic prosperity can be driven by an investment in science. Can you give us a little bit more color on that?
02:27 Benjamin Jones
Sure. I mean, I think the simplest way to say it is just that, you know, what what is it that makes us so much richer and and and and have greater health? I mean, today compared to say 150 years ago, Americans are 18 times richer on average in real terms, and we live 35 years longer on average. So these are incredible improvements in the quality of our life. And what’s really the difference between now and 150 years ago when we had, you know, wagons to travel in and we didn’t know about bacterial infection and we had no antibiotics? It’s it’s not that we just did more of what we knew how to do back then. It’s that we keep coming up with new and better ways of doing things. That is what makes us richer. That’s what makes us live longer. New and better ways of doing things. So where does that come from? It comes from science. It comes from corporate invention. It comes from entrepreneurship. It comes from people who are trying to try new things, new understandings, and from them, new products, new services, uh, new treatments, and a medical context that make our lives so much better.
04:10 Speaker A
I think this administration will say, wouldn’t disagree with anything you’re saying. They would just say it shouldn’t be funded by the federal government, that that they want this transition to where it’s going to be funded by the private sector. Do we have models for that? Are there other countries where you see this robust pipeline that is privately funded? Can that exist in your view?
04:55 Benjamin Jones
Well, first of all, the US science innovation system is world-leading, uh, and our economy is world-leading. Those things are connected. We lead at the frontier because we are the best at this. And so why would we want to change it is already a is a is a is a risky is a risky proposition to change something that’s working so well and has worked so well for us for so long. Why federal funding? Fundamentally with science and invention, but fundamentally, mostly with science, the market returned to a new scientific idea, say a new understanding of nature, say Einstein’s equations of general relativity, or the human genome project, knowing what genes are in your body and what they look like. The market return immediately to say a a new understanding of a gene or a new cause of disease, and understanding of what causes a disease, there’s no market return to that understanding. The market’s not going to produce investment to figure out unnecessarily what the source of a problem is. What science does is it figures out what is going on and improves our understanding, and then from that, the market can generate, uh, new products and services to try to tackle those problems. If we turn off the science, we turn off this kind of fundamental upstream input into our ability to move forward.
07:02 Speaker A
All right, Benjamin. We got to leave it there. Thank you so much.