I'm honestly not qualified to know which data set is most accurate; certainly the increase is less dramatic using this data set, but it still shows an increase in $$ spent over time - vs the decrease that was the foundation of the original comment.

I'm qualified. Acid test: do you really think we were spending 1/17th of research money in constant dollars in 1970?

Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in 1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has declined as well.

This is a bad thing.

Also, I think the point of the paper is that growth gets harder, not easier. From that perspective R&D spending should have increased massively in constant currency to keep pace, not decline even slightly.

Looking at it from the other side of the mirror, there's probably some other suite of factors that causes both things. Taken as a prisoner's dilemma, defecting from R&D may be perceived to have a payoff ( those engineers talk funny and cost a lot ) which saps R&D and also slows growth.

I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.

Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in large companies.

The use of the term in corporate spheres is also diluted.

According to the "best and brightest", R&D is now nothing more than patent pursuit. If the systems used for production are old and buggy, fixing that ( including significant new development ) is not considered "R&D", no matter how proprietary said systems may be.

That's WorldBankData. I'm fairly certain that Current US$ is unadjusted. If you use their constant 2010 dollars you get: 96 billion on research in 1970 and 126 billion in 2014