R&D Populism in a Democracy That's Worse Than Communism

Armchair theorizing and inefficient R&D, and the budget waste that comes with them, are among the chronic problems in our society. The seriousness becomes especially clear when you see that the research being pursued is far removed from the technology that ordinary citizens or small business owners actually need. Many specialists focus less on the substance of research and more on securing research funding and maintaining their cartels, and as a result enormous resources are being consumed irrationally.

The current R&D structure is much like a giveaway-style welfare policy. Instead of looking at the need or effectiveness of research, it has fallen into a structure where research funding simply has to be poured out. The PD at a research institution is under pressure to spend the entire remaining budget, and in the process must produce results that look as impressive as possible. This produces an excess of overly complex, over-engineered technology. Because tens of billions of won have been invested, this technology is too expensive to use in the market, or it's been tuned to such a specific environment that it's hard to actually use in the field.

In reality, the field only needs technology that is composite and at an appropriate level - but a structure in which you can only receive funding by being selected for a research project entrenches this inefficiency even further. In a reality where, without research funding, you can't even pay the staff their salaries, research becomes the end rather than the means.

In the end, small business owners are placed in the ironic position of having to change their own operating practices to fit overly optimized technology, instead of finding technology that actually fits their business environment. The introduction of technology, instead of being a way to cut costs, ends up paradoxically producing higher costs.

To solve these problems, an approach centered on appropriate technology - one that reflects the real demands of the field from the very planning stage of research - is needed. Simple, practical technology can in fact create greater value in the field, and R&D should be reorganized in a direction that doesn't lose its social value, but instead leads to real, substantive change.