Sure, it’s easy to argue for the importance of spending on science by pointing out that many of today’s most useful technologies had their origins in government-funded R&D. But this argument ignores all the technologies that received millions in government funding and haven’t gone anywhere—at least not yet. A far more useful approach to quantifying the value of R&D is to look at its return on investment (ROI). If applied broadly to the nation’s R&D funding, the same kind of thinking could help account for both the big wins and all the money spent on research that never got out of the lab. But the new studies provide much-needed details, supplying systematic and rigorous evidence for the impact that R&D funding, including public investment in basic science, has on overall economic growth.