New at Reason

Chris Potter | May 20, 2008, 4:44pm | #

Good thing the Feds haven't funded embryonic stem cell research, then. Don't you agree, Ron?

Guy Montag | May 20, 2008, 4:57pm | #

Another AGW story? Oh, you used retarded in a whole different context. Never mind, carry on!

Ron Bailey | May 20, 2008, 4:59pm | #

loli: Yes, because the book has not been published yet in the U.S., but you can get it shipped to you via Amazon.uk (as I did). Isn't globalization wonderful!

Dogzilla | May 20, 2008, 5:14pm | #

Of course Government funded research will be inefficient. The most promising line of research will always be the work being done in the home district of the most powerful congressman.
But is there a danger that some research will not be done at all (obscure, theoretical research), because it is so far removed from any potential return of profit? I don't know the answer to this question, and based on the review, I'm not sure the book addresses it directly.
I'm not sure history is an adequate guide here, either. We may have, for the most part, progressed past the genius-in-the-basement stage. The Wright brothers couldn't have funded their own super-collider.

Your Good Buddy Johnny Clarke | May 20, 2008, 5:20pm | #

Of course, it's possible the genius-in-the-basement might be working on something we can't debate because it doesn't even exist yet.

Chad | May 20, 2008, 5:52pm | #

I am a scientist. I agree with the general point of this article as well. We do not need the government subsidizing R&D. That does not mean that the government should do NO R&D - it should just limit its R&D to that which directly supports its Constitutional duties, and no more.

shrike | May 20, 2008, 6:42pm | #

Research produces innovation - period.

Capitalizing on research is a market activity and sometimes the best of them (see PARC, Palo Alto Research Center) bomb commercially but succeed technically.

Chad | May 20, 2008, 7:48pm | #

For instance, how much of the science done in private/industry R&D is done by scientists who were trained at publicly funded University research labs doing publicly funded research?

Most of it. However, what would happen if all of those education subsidies were to disappear? Not a lot, honestly. Scientists would pay for their own education, and then demand higher salaries from their employers to compensate. This can be seen in the medical arena when comparing the US to Europe. In the US, would-be doctors largely pay for their own education. In Europe, it is almost completely subsidized. However, US doctors make much higher salaries in turn, and it more or less cancels. Btw, this is a significant part of the reason that the US spends more on "health care" and less on "higher education" than Europe.

How much of the private R&D builds upon basic research funded by the government?

This cuts both ways: How much public R&D builds upon basic and applied research funded by the private sector? Again, this will more or less cancel. R&D spending overall is roughly 60/40 private/public in the US. Not surprisingly, this is fairly close to the ratio of private and public spending.

Jared Hagan | May 20, 2008, 10:26pm | #

In response to a comment a few lines above. I agree the historical correlations he draws on are tenuous at best. He list several Edison inventions, and let me tell you something, Edison was as profiteering as they come. People like him are the reason people shy away from truly free markets. He was domineering to the core. Research his feud with Tesla and you'll see what I'm talking about. I think state supported research is important because it shields us from this sort of thing.

For one thing, the government is so interested in corporate welfare that the intellectual property system is almost unusable. Government institutions like NIH and DARPA take some of the sting out of a quagmire of a patent system.

I've gotten off the original topic so I'm going to try to get back on. Another reason those historical correlations are specious is that the biggest purchasers of many of these technological advancements made was the government. The wright flyer, all of Edison's and Tesla's electrical grid stuff, etc were all made commercially viable through goverment contracts and purchases.

I'll admit DARPA makes me cringe sometimes with its wastefulness. But gosh darn it if I haven't gotten hooked on living in a world made better through its innovation, eg. arpanet to the internet, gps, etc.

I just think without an efficient intellectual property system, which no is quite sure how to implement so far, without government support of open research, you end up with a tragedy of the anti-commons. The scholarly community, peer review, and openness in general are very important to innovation. If anyone wants to see just how damaging a private firm can be to innovation, make a comparison of the Windows operating system to an open source OS like Linux or FreeBSD. Windows is a broken window fallacy like no other. It sucks so much money out of the economy through bloated and insecure software all because of the closed nature of it's operations.

The article makes a fundamental assessment of public research. Often times its the secretive, distrusting private researchers operating in the ivory towers, not the university scientists, etc. Again, I go back to peer review, it is so important to scientific advancement.

Well, that was a pretty ramble. Nice way to introduce myself to the community I guess.

Chad | May 20, 2008, 11:03pm | #

Hypnos, I believe there is no real meaning to the words "basic" and "applied" research in the first place. The only difference between what I do now working for a major chemical company, and what I did in grad school and as a post-doc largely on government grants is that what I am trying to do today is to produce a specific product for a specific set of customers. I am working on the SAME class of materials, using the SAME techniques, using the SAME instruments as I did as a student. Why is the former "basic" and the latter "applied"? Beats the hell out of me.

Btw, I have seen at least twenty peer-reviewed journal papers out of my company that absolutely, 100% positively and without a shred of doubt are "basic" research. I am sure there are many more. But I guess they must be fakes, because companies don't do that, I guess.

Jared Hagan | May 21, 2008, 12:58am | #

Chad is right. Research is research. I just want to point out that it is my personal opinion that peer review and the general health of the scientific community is a fruit of the best of both worlds system we have now. Somehow I completely omitted this from my first post. With a community of both private firms and public researchers you have a sort of symbiosis, peer review and all that. Public research exists to cover the gaps where market forces would be counterproductive to research goals, and private research exists to take the benefits of public research, and their own, and effectively and efficiently implement solutions outside the government based on positive market forces.

This coexistence is important. Public research enables a great deal of innovation. Taking it away would upset things greatly. Come to think of it, that is probably moot anyways as the government is such a huge consumer of science and tech. NASA, Air Force, etc contracts will always exert some force similar to pure public research, even if we wiped DARPA and NIH.

Joshua Corning | May 21, 2008, 3:56am | #

How much of the private R&D builds upon basic research funded by the government?

Some of it.

How much government funded research builds upon private R&D?

All of it.

Hypnos | May 21, 2008, 4:13am | #

Chad,

I would say "basic research" is for answering fundamental scientific questions, period. If you were synthesizing chemicals for customers, you weren't doing basic research -- doesn't matter if it was funded by the gov't.

Now, i don't know if "applied" stuff that has no profit horizon should be supported by the gov't. Fusion power comes to mind as an interesting case -- big risk, big reward, long timescale.

Hypnos | May 21, 2008, 7:34am | #

I think we can agree that there shouldn't be public funding for what are essentially engineering fields, like materials science. I don't know the funding situation in those areas intimately, but my *impression* was that they got quite a bit of funding from defense, corporations or university endowments anyway. (If you have any references for how funding sources break down in these fields, I would appreciate it.)

However, I argue that there should be public funding for basic physics, theoretical math, zoology/ecology, archaeology, etc. To use a colleague's example, wasn't it a big deal when Galileo demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around? This has no direct practical applications, but changes the way we see the universe. From a purely practical standpoint, basic science has a huge payoff -- just likely not in one's lifetime (Newton's laws, for example).

The funding situation in basic physics (which I know well) is unstable because it's no longer considered part of the US's defense strategy. So, it's difficult to make and meet commitments in large projects like colliders, satellite instruments, telescopes, etc. -- depends on the whims of the president and Congress, who are currently in a cat fight over war funding.

wayne | May 21, 2008, 8:01am | #

The argument, "if it is economically viable, then the free market will fund it" approaches idiocy. The "free market" is risk averse. Basic research without a pay-back of just a few years won't get funded. Period. That last "period" was thrown just in case your Lasik reformed corneas missed the tiny dot preceeding it.

Lasik surgery is possible partly because defense scientists working on aiming systems used in anti-ballistic missile systems had to figure out a way to adjust for a turbulent atmosphere. They invented much of adaptive optics to solve that problem. The free market would not have spent a dime on that. You Lasik guys be reading this through spectacles, or maybe RK enhaced corneas if the free market had its way.

wayne | May 21, 2008, 9:42am | #

Ron, actually the first working laser was done by Hughes Research Labs. As a former Hughes employee, I can tell you that Hughes was an arm of DoD.

Bell labs today could not invent the laser, they have more pressing problems.

Quick | May 21, 2008, 10:24am | #

Joshua, "Most customers are punished for buying shitty products....government is not."

No, just their "stockholders".......us.

Hypnos, "wasn't it a big deal when Galileo demonstrated that the Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than the other way around?"

And Galileo financed his research by marketing his telescopes to Venetian merchants, not through govt funding.

"Quantum mechanics and special relativity led directly to atomic energy (and weapons) and semiconductors (and computers), all in 70 years."

And the most important work in both these fields took place utilizing such high-tech tools as chalkboards, pencil/paper. The human mind was the key, not some trillion dollar racetrack for neutrons.

Hypnos | May 21, 2008, 10:53am | #

* that should read "_corporate_ money for basic research in physics" -- sorry

Neu Mejican | May 21, 2008, 5:46pm | #

For Ron Bailey, in case he hasn't seen it yet...

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080521/full/453438a.html

Hypnos | May 21, 2008, 8:06pm | #

Quick,

Yeah, but you only know who has the superior intuition after the fact :)

In 1905, Einstein was a humble, smart guy with great ideas. In 1920, he was a transcendent genius.

Hypnos | May 22, 2008, 1:14am | #

Mark,

The most famous technology from collider programs is the World Wide Web -- developed simply in order to get a handle on documentation, strewn across various servers belonging to groups working on different aspects of the collider.

Also big are cryogenics (used widely in science and medicine), superconducting magnets (used in MRI), and most recently grid computing (10,000 faster than standard Internet, using commodity hardware). There exist innumerable patents in electronics, detectors, etc. from collider programs.

One might argue that if someone had vision, they could develop these things in the private sector; however, the fact that this tech comes from pure science shows that pushing limits and serendipity are big factors.

Moreover, the knowledge in basic science programs could yield huge technological benefits centuries into the future, or faster: machines, electricity, satellites, atomic energy, semiconductors and lasers all came from basic physics.

Finally, I think simple curiosity is justification enough -- the practice of reason, to understand reality, is its own reward.

Creative Parsimony | May 22, 2008, 1:38pm | #

The average person, having no idea what the "scientific community" is talking about, must foot the bill for what has become science of the completely insane. They are told what amazing progress has been made on some utterly abstract and unfalsifiable concept, the equipment costing billion and billions of dollars. I have no quarrel with government funding of research up to a point, but this whole enterprise has run completely off the rails.

One problem is that because practically all research is funded directly or indirectly by the government, the scientists are virtually all socialists. If you doubt that, just ask one. They just need more and more of your tax dollars. It surprises me that the congress finally quit funding the superconducting supercollider here in the U.S.

An example of how far wrong science has gone is the "discovery" of the top quark. Without trying to bore all you political animals with the details, suffice it to say that no discovery was made. They had to discover it or their whole nutty theory would have gone out the window and they couldn't have made any arguments to their government overseers for more funding.

How this worked was this. I read the paper on this "discovery" and found it was just a consensus opinion of more than a thousand scientists who signed the paper. The confirmation of the existence of the top quark was just a bunch of scared guys signing a paper based on unsound statistical evidence fearing they would lose funding and the end of their bullshit jobs. Who is there to contradict these boneheads? No one.

Meanwhile, ever more money is thrown at projects that have no basis in reality. How can this be stopped?

Derek D | May 22, 2008, 9:18pm | #

It's almost a worthless conversation. Of course private R&D is going to provide more bang for the buck when compared to public projects. They work in total opposite ways. Funded research is a here today, gone tomorrow market in which somebody gives you money, rather than you earning it. It is limited because it usually is not done with in the context of efficiency, or broad application, but rather just simple discovery. On the flip side, for profit R&D efforts are directive, have broader scope and have market creating potential. Public research has no market, just free one time money. This is not even to speak of the potential for bias or coercion when the public funds come from agenda driven special interests. Considering these factors, it would be difficult to believe that funding public research could produce better returns than private.
As a citizen I would like to see the government participate, or lead by example. The first space missions probably couldn't have been done without the government's help. But many missions since could have been. Instead 30 year old space shuttles did the same stuff for 30 years. We have predator drones and we can put up, and blow up satellites with ease. Couldn't we easily have space planes by now. I feel the role of the government in R&D is to direct research guided by the principles of that nation. Support great ideas, contribute great ideas, but for the most part, sit back and let science be a free enterprise. It's the better value.

Tom M | May 23, 2008, 10:23am | #

For further reading on this subject you might check out this article from the Independent Review:

http://www.trincoll.edu/~butos/Pubs%20in%20pdf/B&McQ%20IR%20F%2006.pdf

baba | May 28, 2008, 8:58am | #

I don not understand economy domain much.Yet I remember the quote" scienceneeds and deserves increased support from public funds".The private sector should inject in more money ,I believePrivate businesses are the first to reap the fruits of 100% positive outcome.