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For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. Now Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal that when you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. "It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration," says Ridley. "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." According to Ridley technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do.
It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements. "Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention," concludes Ridley. "They can only make sure that they don't hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Justin Case on Friday October 30 2015, @11:43PM
You have an opportunity to open a gas station near a busy road.
But... across the street will be a station giving away gas for free. Can you compete? Your gas would have to be better -- a lot better.
This is what happens when the taxpayers are forced to fund any industry. Private competition is nearly impossible. Pretty soon the privately owned gas stations are squeezed out of business and the lying bastard idiot statist apologists say "See? We need government to do this, because the free market can't meet this need!"
Would science get funded if the taxpayers weren't forced to prop it up? Well that depends on whether it has value.
If it has value, the people who value it will pay to get it. That is, if they can't get it for free (see above).
So if science has value, somebody will happily pay for it! No violence-threatening bureaucracy needed!
(Score: 5, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:12AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:36AM
The trouble is science has value only in the long term.
Which is not a problem at all.
Besides - are voters seriously going to be long term minded enough to elect people who will be long term minded enough to fund the right long term science? Seriously? The voters in this country? You guys actually expect that to work? Is this some kind of new religious faith with less evidence than the flying spaghetti monster?
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:43AM
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday October 31 2015, @01:51AM
They put a man on the moon that way too.
About that. They did it is such a brute force way that going on fifty years later nobody is interested in repeating the work. If you throw enough billions at something you can get results but other than the propaganda value it was a huge waste. A very good argument can be made that the propaganda value does justify the resources expended but don't confuse that with science.
..United States funded the research into networking technology that led to the creation of the Internet after all...
They were largely funding the project because they needed it, not just as pure research. Nobody should argue that funding shouldn't be invested in needed things. The argument here is more a challenging of the notion that if you steal enough money from taxpayers and let scientifically illiterate (and unfireable) civil servants throw it at basic research (or at politically connected friends.. who can say and they can't be fired...) that the net benefit to society will exceed allowing the taxpayers to keep the money and do whatever they would have done. Or worse, to borrow money and throw it at random science sounding things hoping the return will exceed the interest rate and depressive effect of deficit spending.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Saturday October 31 2015, @02:43AM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday October 31 2015, @04:04AM
Alas we are no longer so rich we can afford to be that wasteful. Of course we aren't rich anymore because we thought we could waste without limit or consequence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:08AM
"We do it not because it is easy... but because it is hard"
(Score: 3, Funny) by jdavidb on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:57PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:16PM
About that. They did it is such a brute force way that going on fifty years later nobody is interested in repeating the work
The 'man on the moon' thing was undeniably a propaganda piece, but it was in response to two Russian propaganda pieces: putting a satellite in orbit and putting a man in orbit. No one has bothered to repeat the trips to the moon that NASA did because there isn't (currently, at least, or really in the short term) any commercial reason to want to go to the moon. A lot of the technology that was developed in the space race was instrumental in giving us cheap satellite launches. Try to imagine what the world would look like now without satellite communication or GPS-like systems.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:49PM
If you want to think things through, a huge amount of the investment in "man on the moon" was designed to show that we could hit anyplace on earth with ICBMs. It was overkill for that purpose. but it did the job WITH public support. Developing overkill weapons systems wouldn't have had nearly the political support.
A lot of basic science got done along the way, but that wasn't the main goal. The main goal was to see who had the largest swinging dick.
(Remember how bad the US looked when Russia had its Sputniks, and all the US had was the Vangard disaster.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:34AM
"going on fifty years later nobody is interested in repeating the work"
The powers that be decided to end it. It wasn't for lack of money. It was all political. We were tossed a bone, to distract us from the fact that the space program was ending. They built a general purpose (jeep) vehicle, and claimed that to be something exciting. A frigging jeep. Oh, let me correct myeslf - they built a small fleet of jeeps, and passed that off as a space program. Those and the ISS made a space program?
When they were revealing their plans to end more aggressive programs, when they announced that their efforts were going into the manufacture of a few piddling jeeps, I wanted to cry. I knew then that it would be a long, long time before another Atlas program would happen.
Finally, SpaceX. Finally the Chinese are reaching for the skies. Finally, India, and even Iran, is reaching for the skies. Yeah, the EU has been a bit player for a long time now, but they've not even achieved what we did fifty years ago. Obviously, their hearts aren't in it.
I feel cheated. I watched the live telecasts (or nearly live, there was some delay built in) of men walking on the moon as a child. We still don't have serious plans to walk on the moon any time soon. We were diverted, for no apparent good reason.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday October 31 2015, @01:38AM
There have been research laboratories like Bell Labs and such but they are a minority.
Bell Labs would not have existed had it not been for the government granted monopoly to AT&T. Without having to worry about the next quarter's profits, they could and did spend millions on research that would never have had a chance of being funded by a profit minded corporation. What corporation today, for instance, would fund the research Penzias and Wilson did to discover the background radiation?
Other than that, your point is spot on.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @07:12AM
Without having to worry about the next quarter's profits, they could and did spend millions on research that would never have had a chance of being funded by a profit minded corporation.
They were profit minded. And the cosmic microwave background needed to be studied in order to understand a significant contributor to noise in communications systems.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:12PM
Western Electric was profit minded. Bell Labs was concerned with spending the budget they got from Western Electric every year. Certainly they had to produce results, patents were expected, etc., but an awful lot of research went on there that never would have happened in a company without guaranteed profits. They could afford to dabble in things that would not have a pay off for many years.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:36PM
Western Electric was profit minded. Bell Labs was concerned with spending the budget they got from Western Electric every year.
Thus, Bell Labs inherits the profit motive. Your argument wasn't worth the effort to make.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:19AM
The trouble is science has value only in the long term.
Exclusively long term thinking can be just as bad as exclusively short term thinking. The trouble here is that science has value in both short term and long term. But we have no way to value the long term thinking nor is it a good idea to do so.
When James Clerk Maxwell first formulated his equations in the 1860s no one had any idea that they would be useful for developing stuff like radio communications and so much else besides.
But they did know that better math equations meant more understanding of the EM phenomena. That increased the value of all present EM research, not just EM research 30 years later.
Is there some sort of private enterprise that would fund something that may or not make a profit half a century or more later?
At that time, you would have had a number of private universities and a little later, Edison's Menlo Park lab.
There have been research laboratories like Bell Labs and such but they are a minority.
And the majority has been university labs which are commonly private.
No private enterprise would have paid Maxwell for such research in the 1860's.
For the last eight years of his life (1871-1879), he was funded privately by an endowment from a relative of Henry Cavendish. So yes, private enterprise would have done so because they did so in the next decade of his life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:42AM
Such private endowments and private funding from universities aren't meant to produce a profit. I don't think William Cavendish was too concerned about the kind of return on investment he would get from the endowment he gave Maxwell, and the people funding university laboratories likewise aren't so concerned about the profits they would get from doing so. At most, they are concerned about the tax breaks such philanthropy would get them, and so such funding probably ought to be properly counted as public spending on science, as this is tax money that the government would have otherwise gotten. If the government didn't offer such tax breaks would philanthropists still do it?
Seriously, read the GP poster I was replying to. Seems to be some kind of libertarian who thinks that any government expenditure on science is cutting into the possible profits private spending on science might make.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @07:09AM
Such private endowments and private funding from universities aren't meant to produce a profit.
Depends what you mean by "profit". The original article only used the word, "profits" once and that was with regard to intellectual property (patents). I think it's clear that no one has been advocating strict monetary profits as the only criteria for determining the value of scientific research. That includes the person you replied to who never mentions profits.
Seriously, read the GP poster I was replying to. Seems to be some kind of libertarian who thinks that any government expenditure on science is cutting into the possible profits private spending on science might make.
Maybe you should read that post again. I think a good example of the actual competition principle is stuff like fusion research. A private entity might be able to offer a few tens of millions of dollars for development of a fusion power reactor. A government can throw billions at it, and you never have to show productive results. Why work for the smaller project, even if it is more productive in the end, when you can work for the big, high status project (and incidentally have guaranteed employment for ten years? This is the sort of competition that happens here. Private enterprise can come up with better, more productive ideas even in basic science, but they don't have the combination of money, status, and job security that a government project has. They can't attract the manpower.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:51AM
Sorry, but that one doesn't make sense. Science isn't like fuel where you can have a full tank and not need any more. Not only that but a lot of science is confirming what others have already done in an effort to verify that something is actually true. Science requires duplicated efforts.
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