The New York Times

“If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study. “The rates of return are just really high.”

A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II. “It has had a massive impact on people’s standards of living,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an economist at Texas A&M University who was one of the study’s authors. “It fueled economic growth to a sizable degree.”