The problem I have with this sort of line of reasoning is that it views research in an entirely economic light. It opens with a quote about how scientific research is not a public good, and a suggestion that publicly funded research might harm economic growth. But what about research that does not have a direct impact on the economy? What about the Hubble, or supercolliders? What private company would fund those?
Or, the best example I can think of, is about a therapy for panic disorder (a psychological disorder). There is a remarkable effective talk therapy for panic disorder which cures 80+% of the people who have it, and those people stay cured years after they complete the therapy (and there is no evidence it ever returns). The most effective drug treatments cure much fewer than half of the people, and once those people stop taking the drugs, the panic tends to return. The studies comparing drugs and talk therapy are incredibly expensive, and almost all of them come out of England, paid for by the government. What private company would ever want to fund that sort of research? They have an highly profitable drug treatment, which is effectively addictive (if you stop it, the panic returns)? Why would they spend their own money to research a course of therapy that lasts 8-12 weeks and is then done?
I don't think private research is a bad thing at all. But private research is profit driven, and there are some really important problems out there that don't have a big financial payoff once they're solved. Economically speaking, finding a more effective to regrow hair in bald men would probably be a lot more profitable than finding a cheap cure for any number of diseases ravaging Africa. Doesn't mean it's more important.
Economically speaking, finding a more effective to regrow hair in bald men would probably be a lot more profitable than finding a cheap cure for any number of diseases ravaging Africa. Doesn't mean it's more important.
In the long run, there are far more values in curing ravaging diseases in Africa than there are values in curing bald hair men, at least to me.(Less disease ravaging means more time for educations, which might mean economic growth, which might mean bigger markets) For a corporation, it might make more sense to cure bald men instead of people in Africa. But it doesn't make sense for a charity organization to cure bald men instead of people in Africa because of their different aim.
Private research doesn't have to be profit...err money driven, but it can be done for err..noble reasons.
What to prevent billionaire from spending money on non...errr..profit research. Indeed, you would expect millionaires and billionaires to donate money to causes that seriously affect their life, whether it is themselves or a love one.
So what if it is viewed in economic lights? You're only looking at it in one perspective, which is how to make a lot of money. What you did forget is the true motivations why humans pursue money, like being able to live longer, have fun, being curious, have sex, etc.
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters. Which he will be doing because his notion of "profit" is not measured in dollars but in votes. At least the billionaire's motives are transparent. Here in England we are cutting budgets left, right and centre after the last government nearly bankrupted us. The foreign aid budget is ringfenced. The LibCons have come under a lot of flak for this - but they would have if they'd cut it too - it's simple maths at the end of the day.
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters. Which he will be doing because his notion of "profit" is not measured in dollars but in votes.
In other words, the politician invests taxes where "we" want them to. So the proper question is not whether some politician wants to help poor nations, but whether we want to help them.
And that's quite a fair question, which is of a much higher quality than the question whether some individual (billionaire) wants to help them.
(After all, taxes are our money and politicians are "just" managing it for us.)
Well, no, not really. This is another aspect of the last government's spending patterns: they measured "success" or "progress" in terms of how much they spent, not the end result. Jo(e) Voter can be told spending a billion on aid is good; he perhaps doesn't see that half of that goes to well-paid quango employees back home, and the other half into a dictator's Swiss bank account.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on the other hand, is completely focussed on outcomes.
If it is so important to help poor nations, why don't people just vote with their money instead of having to vote in pandering politicians who will nonetheless squander the money?
I mean, at worst, only 51% will get their money spent on things they thought are great noble causes.(Let just assume that every Noble Cause is important) That's not taking into consideration on weather the politicians are managing it wisely.
It would be really great if that was possible. However, we can't simply buy "$1 worth of helping poor nations" in the way we buy products in the supermarket. And that's why we can't "vote" with our money. (The appearance of micro payments might change that, though.)
So we have to trust some organization with the money, and that leads to exactly the same issues of trust.
However, the government is under greater pressure and control than most other organizations. Or, at least they should, in a democracy. So trusting them with the money is not worse than trusting any other help organization with the money - except, of course, when you know the people of the help organization personally. But most people don't have such connections.
With private charities, at least I can move my money around or start my own.
Beside, democracies suck in actuality. Theory doesn't mean much of anything if they don't work in reality. The Californians vote for programs but not for higher taxes. There are whole lot of lobbying that's going on. Who have time to read thousand pages bills made by congressmen?
Instead you would "rely" on a politician taxing his voters.
Well, theoretically with a democratic government, the decision to do things for the public good comes ultimately from the "will of the people" rather than the largess of billionaire. Now whether it actually works out that way is another question.
Still, American publicly funded research has produced a huge number of public benefits while involving a rather small percentage of public expenditure.
> the decision to do things for the public good comes ultimately from the "will of the people"
This is a nice theory, but who is voting on such minor issues, when you have wars, economic turmoil &c.? Absent voter pressure, isn't the reality is that such allocations are determined by lobbying?
> a rather small percentage of public expenditure.
Doesn't the suggestion of crowd-out point to an unexamined cost, which is the opportunity cost of the researchers? What would they be doing if not directed by government monies? If their efforts are being applied sub-optimally, what cost does that represent?
Wall street is one of the largest recipients of government support, via cheap money from the Federal Reserve, bailouts, &c, and is in fact another example of the exact same crowding effect: government money draws bright minds away from more productive pursuits - absent government money, certainly some of those quants would be entrepreneurs or scientists instead.
> contrary to the article, not all goods are private goods
Wall street is one of the largest recipients of government support, via cheap money from the Federal Reserve, bailouts
Not something I support. Basic science is an example of a real public good. "The financial system not collapsing" was only a demagogic pseudo-public good.
No everything the often corrupt US government does is a public good but that hardly proves research is not a public good. The private sector's willingness to facilitate said corrupt government actions doesn't make me believe said private sector would produce more public benefit if a state functions were fully dismembered into it.
-- You are right in the one point, I should have said above, "contrary to the article, public research provides a public good".
Of course, if government had not intervened during the S&L crisis, the precedent of "too big to fail" may never have been set - ignoring for a moment the full ramifications of financial collapse.
The financial sector no longer operates under standard free market rules given TBTF and thus the outsize profits that continue to attract highly educated graduates to Wall Street are secured by fear of total financial collapse.
Under the same rules that all other businesses play by, collapse would wipe out the bad players and free up tremendous resources for new enterprises to start - something that did not occur in the case of Wall Street.
Thus, aspects of Wall Street shape it to appear as another form of government funding/regulation that crowds out real free market enterprises from hiring those brilliant mathematicians.
Absolutely. If I'm honest, though, despite my ideals being that I want a significant proportion of my money to go to charity, actually forcing myself to part with it directly is a real challenge (particularly thanks to the procrastination that I, like so many people, exhibit in such situations). Personally, I find the level of abstraction provided by the government to be helpful: I'm much more able to say that I want the government to spend money in certain areas, even if it means raising my taxes, than I am able to just hand money to a cause.
I'm a much more rational spender of money I've already given to the government than I am of my own. I think the same holds for most people, to be honest.
I'm a much more rational spender of money I've already given to the government than I am of my own. I think the same holds for most people, to be honest.
Frankly, I find charity to be much more meaningful when I give it out of my free will, rather than making the government do it for me. Rather, government spending defeat the point of charity.
I don't agree that the point of charity is the warm fuzzies that I get when I give - it's a means to an end (improving the lot of others) which is more effectively accomplished,in my and many others' case, through the government handling it.
I think doing something for profit - purely for your own good - is the most noble thing you can do.
(When I say for your own good, I mean what's for your own good long-term. Cheating, stealing, lying, etc., is ruled out, because that's not in anyone's self-interest, long-term.)
Altruism, by itself doesn't mean much of anything. I could give 10 bucks to a poor man and than that poor man proceed to squander it. I could have given money to the wrong people(who I thought was nice), who then proceed to buy capitals for criminal activities such as murdering individuals.
Of course, it's easy to sneer at the wal-mart or Henry Ford people of the world. However, remember that they have made it much easier to help people by increasing productivity.
An engineer who built a safe water supply system has saved more people than most doctors in the world. A sanitation company has saved lives by preventing the accumulation of trash and by disposing it safely. All of which are occupations that are unseen to the public eyes.
Doctors, we can see. Doctors who work on charity, we can see. But what we can't see is those profiteers who nonetheless help people but are in the background.
Max's assertion was that there is no nobler thing than doing something for a profit. That's simply not true.
Well, I would argue that everything I do, altruistic or not, goes back to satisfying my selfishness. In that point of view, selfishness is a human condition, not something to be ashamed of.
It is also part of the human condition to have social relations with other human beings. Sometime, that might mean caring for others even if we receive no hedonistic benefits. It's quite essential to our health, really.
Why? Surely making the group rational decision is the most noble thing you can do? Sometimes, sure, that aligns with the individually rational decision, but often it does not.
In my opinion, I would care more about the individuals and then the group, because individuals make the group.
Instead of saying that we must sacrifice one person for the good for the group, people would say that it's deplorable that somebody have to die.
In theory, I would not force someone to die, unless they volunteer to do so.
Of course, it might be different when I am placed in the actual situation itself.
It's like asking the person to make a decision between crashing into a man to save the lives on board the train or make a decision to swerves but endanger everyone in the train.
That's not really what I said, though. The point about an individually rational decision (where it does not align with the group rational decision) is that it is less good for the group than the group rational decision. So if all your individuals in the group make the individually rational decision, the group as a whole suffers (and indeed, each individual is overall worse off than if everyone had taken group rational decisions).
We're not talking here about forcing people to do anything - we're saying what is noble, and what is not. My argument is that nobility is taking the group rational decision. This may sometimes mean sacrificing one's own immediate desires.
I said: "When I say for your own good, I mean what's for your own good long-term. Cheating, stealing, lying, etc., is ruled out, because that's not in anyone's self-interest, long-term."
How does this endorse a lack of moral conscience or antisocial behavior? On what grounds do you judge your morality as better than mine? At the very least, do you think that you have to think about morality rationally, as I do?
The studies comparing drugs and talk therapy are incredibly expensive, and almost all of them come out of England, paid for by the government. What private company would ever want to fund that sort of research?
The way this should work out in capitalistic theory is that those affected by panic disorder should fund the research into its cure.
> Economically speaking, finding a more effective to regrow hair in bald men would probably be a lot more profitable than finding a cheap cure for any number of diseases ravaging Africa. Doesn't mean it's more important.
The problem with this line of reasoning is the implicit assumption that it's your job to decide what's important. (BTW, you could probably send the money you spend on internet access each month to Africa, and save a child/mo. Be sure to reconcile that fact with your world view)
Many of the problems with pure capitalism stem from the fact that in practice, things don't work out as well as in theory, often because people aren't rational and information isn't symmetric. You should still try to understand how it's supposed to work.
You can't access the science of others unless you're part of the game. It is only the molecular biologist who is publishing his own papers, getting invited to the conferences, having the discrete conversations with other fellow molecular biologists, who can capture the work of others.
The problems of access to journals are real. My PhD supervisor and other researchers I knew were making a real effort to work around them by publishing a lot of papers on public online "e-print journals" like arxiv.org
The problems of access to conferences on the other hand, I never saw. If fact, at every conference I went to while I was doing my PhD, there was always a handful of uninvited people who tagged along. Often they were nuts who believed they were close to a proof of something actually improvable and wanted to find a professor to show their work to. Occasionally they were just highly motivated amateur mathematicians. Either way, they were always at least tolerated from what I saw.
I've had the same experience at CS conferences, as one of the tolerated amateurs myself. Most of my idols in the field turned out to be pretty approachable.
This reminds me of two other well-established area where government spending was assumed to the be the only way, but is/was preventing progress. Namely, those are aid to Africa, and NASA.
In both cases, public monies realigned the efforts of those associated to seek and maintain the public monies first, which are not necessarily related to progress whatsoever. That is, building a army of bureaucrats for any space launch, in the case of NASA, and pulling would-be African entrepreneurs away from productive efforts and toward positions in the bureaucracies best-positioned to receive and distribute the aid within Africa.
If African aid money can devastate Africa by pulling the best and brightest into unproductive bureaucratic positions, then it's certainly plausible that research aid can pull the best and brightest away from the most productive pursuits and toward whatever the distributors of public money happen to demand, productive or not.
In the case of NASA at least, I think things are a little more nuanced.
I don't believe we would have made it to the moon if only private enterprise had been involved, nor sent probes to the planets and the outer edges of the solar system. Those are very worthwhile accomplishments.
But, yes, I do believe NASA's time is coming to an end. We do seem to be reaching a point where private concerns are ready to push space exploration to the next level, and that's very exciting!
I think in general the way we fund things shouldn't necessarily be an either/or question. I can think of other examples where something needed to be publicly funded up to a certain point in its development, and then equally needed to be wrestled away from a public-funding model so that private businesses to keep it moving forward.
I don't think your choosing good or typical examples here.
Both are relatively "applied". The "basic science" would be a bit harder to have funded - abstract math research, basic physics research, marine biological research.
Now, I would actually say the government should be spending more on basic research and less on applied research but that's an entirely different question.
Most basic research has payoff sooner or later. It's just fairly clear that the market isn't going to be financing things with a fifty years window.
The question is not whether basic research[1] is good or will it happen[2], the question is, what sort of activity is being crowded out by government money?
You don't even have to go to the government to see the question-ability of the hands-off research bureacracy approach: compare Microsoft Research to Apple's technical efforts, or consider Xerox Park absent a few entrepreneurs to bring their efforts to market.
Research expresses its value in its application, and research funded by private means, for profit or charity, is far more likely to see its result applied to productive ends.
I can't tell you what sort of window for basic research private money would support, but I can tell you that connecting research to a meaningful expression is fundamental to the value of the research, and it would seem, far more likely to happen as a result of private funding.
[1] I'd argue NASA has exactly this sort of 'basic research' nature, in that its efforts pay out in the very long run. Now, this has not prevented them from devolving into what is essentially an inefficient, bureaucratic jobs program for the aerospace industry.
[2] The talk makes the point that basic research in math, science, &c. was funded long before government intervention, as a result of economic activity.
but I can tell you that connecting research to a meaningful expression is fundamental to the value of the research
This is a really interesting point, notably with regards to NASA. From the outset, NASA was at its core a defense oriented expenditure - that is to say that it was imbued with an explicit purpose.
Fast-forward to the creation of the space shuttle and the thawing of space-relations with the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975. It seems that from this point forward that NASA's mission of human spaceflight had lost its way, characterized today by the morass that the space shuttle has become.
An interesting article. That said, I disagree with their arguments relating to public research. Most areas with active public sponsored research are also areas that require degrees to start working in. Thus, interesting research should be comprehensible by those who have studied the subject at degree level and thereby making it accessible to their employer. For example, at work I frequently make use of papers from the ACM. Of course I wouldn't expect the average Joe to understand the papers - but why exactly should they?
I am not sure what arguments you're making. I think the point of the article is that it is not easy at some level to just use some new discoveries and then incorporate them into technologies because of the amount of expertise that is required.
And that's (part of the reason) why we have degrees - to teach people how to understand research so they can turn it into reality. Yes - it's not easy and yes, it might be easier if someone has already done it - but a lot of the time that isn't true (or they aren't willing to share how they've done it with you).
Obviously, in an optimal world, everyone would have equal access to all such knowledge - but there will always be barriers on both sides.
If everyone knows how to conduct scientific research, they will be crowding out other fields such as musics, cooking, fine arts, and more. It's a tradeoff for giving everyone equal access to such knowledge.
It's like saying that everyone should be a programmer, but people waste time trying to learn programs when they can hire a programmer to make a program for them. Then these people will do things that's worth their time such as making musics or cooking food.
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -- Einstein
Or, the best example I can think of, is about a therapy for panic disorder (a psychological disorder). There is a remarkable effective talk therapy for panic disorder which cures 80+% of the people who have it, and those people stay cured years after they complete the therapy (and there is no evidence it ever returns). The most effective drug treatments cure much fewer than half of the people, and once those people stop taking the drugs, the panic tends to return. The studies comparing drugs and talk therapy are incredibly expensive, and almost all of them come out of England, paid for by the government. What private company would ever want to fund that sort of research? They have an highly profitable drug treatment, which is effectively addictive (if you stop it, the panic returns)? Why would they spend their own money to research a course of therapy that lasts 8-12 weeks and is then done?
I don't think private research is a bad thing at all. But private research is profit driven, and there are some really important problems out there that don't have a big financial payoff once they're solved. Economically speaking, finding a more effective to regrow hair in bald men would probably be a lot more profitable than finding a cheap cure for any number of diseases ravaging Africa. Doesn't mean it's more important.