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Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

The real issue here is that there is no economic incentive for many types of research. The more low level the research, the harder it is the reap the commercial benefits from your discoveries. Technological progress is one of the factors that drives long term economic growth, but we didn't find a good way yet to encourage it. (To clarify, this only applies to low level/basic research.)

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The other issue is just how much incentive there is in finance, which doesn't actually create anything of value. I get that allocating capital to where it's needed is a thing that needs to happen and there needs to be incentives to make it happen...I'm not for medieval prohibitions on usury, but if the 20% number quoted in the article is accurate, that seems dysfunctional. Given how often capital isn't being allocated effectively in the US, your example being just one of many, it seems like we're paying an awfully high premium for that function in today's society.

> didn't find a good way yet to encourage it

This is why we have public funding of basic research. Allows resources to be allocated to things that don't have obvious enough commercial benefits to get funding or are too risky for private investment alone to accomplish. Microelectronics are a prime example: http://wvvw.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v024....

(I've never had this thought before) What if it is currently encouraged at the proper level, given its present value -- that is, exponentially discounting the future revenue.

Throw in uncertainty, and inability to judge quality work so far from the future, and maybe that justifies the low pay of many basic research jobs? Would be interesting to see an analysis of this across fields, countries, year, etc.

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