re: #616 nikis-knight

So why not just cut taxes and let people invest or donate themselves? Let scientists make the case and people allocate their money willingly, instead of other people’s?

Exactly…

re: #609 ludwigvanquixote

Your arguments are heartfelt and well written.

However, I must completely disagree with your business model for science. The research that will lead to the next giant breakthrough is not something that can always be packaged and sold to a board-room. Almost all of our modern technology is based on understanding Quantum Theory. In the old days, pure science was less expensive, and private funders gave it money as a sort of public charity. Funding science was a sort of noblesse-oblige. No one expected that QM would make them money. Later on, trillions of dollars were made because of understanding QM, but that could never have been predicted or sold as a viable business venture. In today’s corporate culture, no such sense of noblesse-oblige exists.

Pure research is not something that is directly profitable. It is rarely a safe bet economically for an individual company. Bell Labs is gone because of market forces. If you want breakthroughs, you have to be willing to fund the science and let it go where it will. You can not tie it to a short term bottom line. You have to think long term investment. Frankly, that is not the market culture we have anymore. Therefore, science can not be forced to marry short term interests. Simply put, the thing that would be the next breakthrough could never be sold to the MBA who makes the call with the money.

Your response is polite and thoughtful, which is more than I can say for freetoken’s. I completely understand your argument, and I in fact used to subscribe to it myself.

The fact of the matter, though, is that such line of reasoning can ultimately be defended only through totalitarian premises. If the masses cannot be coaxed into privately supporting scientific research (via charities and investment) because agents in charge of making resource-allocating decisions in the private sector (MBAs, execs, board members, etc.) are insufficiently sensitive to the uncertain/long-horizon benefits to result from basic research, then what? Will we need to have “science czars” to mandate those choices for us? If the general public is scientifically illiterate, can it be trusted to elect such far-sighted competent dictators of scientific policy?

There is a fundamental schism between lamenting the inhospitable intellectual climate of America toward scientific funding, and then demanding amends through legislative order, which can be reached only through the workings of a representative-democracy system. If voters are too ignorant to know any better as private citizens making investment decisions, they ought to be too ignorant to elect someone who does.

Also, there are sensible reasons for the uncertainty and long-payback horizon inherent in basic research to act as inhibitors to private investment. We know via hind-sight bias of the enormous monetizeable benefits from some basic research. But we have no reason to believe every effort into basic research, or even a statistical majority of research avenues, will yield the kind of results needed to justify the enormous fixed costs involved. In the meantime, those resources could be employed to more modest bust more certain and concrete outcomes in other fields.

Unless we are to argue that there is some inherent value in scientific breakthroughs, divorced from their benefits to human life and prosperity, then the market is right to discount the value of basic research for uncertainty and for extremely long payback horizons.