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posted by janrinok on Friday October 30 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the chicken-and-egg dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:29PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:29PM (#256948) Journal

    I take it you haven't hard of OSHA or the various equivalents in other countries. The US and USSR were able to put people in space because military personnel don't have the same rights that the rest of us do.

    I like how the argument veered into the ditch here. Before you were speaking of risk. Now you speak of government's immunity to its own willful obstruction of progress. I guess that's the Mafia version of risk. Government involvement or something bad happens to your space development efforts.

    The obvious rebuttal is that we could just not give government that kind of power over our lives.

    Yes, it's easier to make it more cost effective than it is to make the first ones. Notice how this all started nearly 5 decades after the first rocket went into orbit? A lot of the things they're utilizing now weren't available previously, given sufficient time spent waiting for materials sciences to develop better materials, it's a lot easier.

    Note that the key argument of the article was that most of this stuff would happen anyway. I believe that is the case here.

    As far as evidence goes, are you blind? When is the last time you saw a business manage to make something like space travel from nothing? The only things I can recall are things like computers and those were done incrementally. They didn't have to poor billions of dollars into it in order to get a possible positive outcome. When IBM started messing around with computing technology decades ago, they knew what the purpose of the machines was, and they had an idea how to do it. They didn't have to skip straight to the laptop, they started with some very large mainframes with very slow processors and over the course of many years were able to get them smaller and smaller.

    You just gave an example. AIncremental development works in space flight too. That's how they actually did it in the space programs and private contractor projects.