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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: 5, Informative) by lubricus on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:51AM
This article is written by a conservative member of the British House of Lords, who is simply trying to justify additional cuts to basic research.
The insults begin even in the summary.
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
Sure, and Franklin probably took notes using commercially produced pencils! It doesn't change the fact that Franklin, Watson, and Crick all performed their work in publicly funded institutions engaged in basic research.
TFA only gets worse. It's full of tortured logic such as this:
The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. It thus qualifies as a living organism, at least in the sense that a coral reef is a living thing.
What ... is ... this ... guy ... talking ... about?
Of course scientific discoveries have a real context, embedded in the thoughts and tools of the times. This does not mean that it should be discarded.
His basic argument is that:
Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention; they can only make sure that they don’t hinder it.
But this misses the point of basic research completely. Basic research is the investigation for investigation's sake. It is exploration without an immediately obvious payoff. It Basic research takes the long view, and its products should be available to all for use by all. Knowledge belongs to all.
Trinkets follow knowledge, not the other way around.
... sorry about the typos
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday October 31 2015, @03:01AM
There are right now thousands of people that are fully qualified scientists who are instead working crappy non-science jobs or are unemployed. It's not like we have to somehow materialize scientists out of thin air, all we'd have to do is hire and supply scientists to do the research they are fully trained to do and want to do. Will 100% of them be the next Turing or Hawking or Wiles? No. Will some of them be, though? Odds are, yes, and the value of those peoples' discoveries will more than make up for the cost of funding them. By *not* funding science, you're throwing away valuable resources, namely the prime years of your brightest minds.
Sometimes, spending money is the least wasteful thing you can do. Conservatives seem to have a really tough time wrapping their heads around that idea.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.