Science Spending as a fraction of GDP
The National Science Foundation has an excellent statistics in the appendices to the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators Report.
I used the excel versions of Tables 4-1, Gross domestic product and implicit price deflators: 1953–2007, and Table 4-32, Federal obligations for total research, by detailed S&E field: FY 1986–2007 to produce this chart:
To be clear, I took the constant 2000 dollar values for Physics and Astronomy and Physical Sciences spending from Table 4-32, and divided those into the constant dollars GDP number from Table 4-1.
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According the data, all Physical Science spending in 2005 is equal to Physics spending alone 20 years ago. Grim.
I can’t read the graph. It needs to be made available in a larger format.
Clicking on the graph should make it larger. The small image is linked to the full size version. In the latest versions of IE, Firefox, and Safari the image should zoom out when you click on it.
The title on this post should be changed from “function” to “fraction”
It seems like the big drop happened in 1992-1995. That’s around the time the SSC was cancelled, so I suspect that plays some role in the drop, but were there other factors involved then? Funding as a percent of GDP has been pretty constant ever since, so the picture is perhaps not quite as grim as all that. One big drop in the past is bad, but it’s far less bad than a constant and slow erosion would be.