Science, technology and innovation isn’t addressing world’s most urgent problems
universiteitleiden.nl
universiteitleiden.nl
As a result, every tech department in the US university system is packed full of scheming federally-funded startup types, whose goal is to get a patent, transfer that patent to a small company which is then bought up by a corporate major, and then the professor gets a small percentage of the royalties. Federally-funded entrepreneurs of this kind and their facilitators are the people who run most university administrations these days. This merger of the academic and corporate worlds is the fundamental reason for the phenomena described in this report.
The solution is pretty simple: eliminate exclusive licensing of university patents, such that anyone can use them for product development for a small flat fee. This would have the beneficient effect of encouraging corporations to move funds back into private research labs, as that's the only way they could ensure an exclusive patent period.
Trying to get the patent attorneys, the tech transfer office, or the budget office to do literally anything is like trying to walk on the ceiling. It would take months just to get a consult with the tech transfer office to even see if they could be bothered to talk to the lawyers. For real, at one school the budget office for patents and the like for the whole university was staffed by one part-time woman very close to retirement who could barely rubber stamp anything with what little time she had in a day.
As for grants, man, again, it's a dog fight out there to even get anything to begin with. Unless your PI has fair/good connections in the grant funding agencies, you're gonna have a rough time. I've been in a few labs that have tried the corporate funding route and it's never really worked out. They all want a result, not a real study that can fail, and they want it in 3 months, and they want it for a tenth of the cost it would actually take, eve with very poorly paid grad students. Industry grants do happen, but man, they almost never make anything 'real' happen, it's mostly just a headache.
However in my (not enormous) experience the licensing offices of the schools below that tier are even more difficult to work with. I imagine it's a combination of not doing a lot of deals and over-imagining the value of the IP.
We need more direct funding from the rich governments for the kinds of research described in the article, which would address the associated problems “on paper”, while still allowing translation of it in startups etc and ultimately benefitting the general public.
So the problem is not so much that companies sponsor some (!) research, but that the governments simply don’t invest nearly as much into public R&D as they need or could (while preferring to pour money into the military etc.).
As a result, academics have no choice but follow other funding sources to survive in the already hyper-competitive scientific world. Hence, we should not put the blame on them, but rather on the public funding sources.
With the second order effect of discouraging would be "schemers" from being entrepreneurial and innovative in the first place. It's not such a simple solution.
These are antonyms in this instance. Corrupt advisors and administrators trying to line their own pockets aren't how you foster creativity.
Often, the future use of scientific study isn't obvious until many years or decades later. Wouldn't this just result in prioritising scientists who are good at writing funding applications that make BS claims about how this area of research will reduce global poverty? We already see quite a lot of that.
It seems to me that the most impactful technology rarely comes from SDG focussed research.
In both the Global North and Global South — and across areas such as health, food or energy — research and innovation funds tend to be spent on technologies that benefit private interests, rather than on those that more directly address social and environmental problems. The research shows that most high-income countries do not prioritise research on the major environmental challenges associated with unsustainable consumption and production patterns.
In fact, your assertion that things like 4G, high density batteries, and tiny low power SoCs, etc. illustrate this well. Those do not specifically help with the issues of sustainability in low income areas. Think of things like sanitation, access to clean water, sustainable food production, etc. Not everything needed for improving quality of life and opportunities has a high-tech solution.
Global poverty like that is the result of lack of resources and poor society/government organization.
Clean water access: shovels, pipes, pumps, treatment processes
Food: roads, shovels, pipes, pumps, transportation
No interdisciplinary approaches needed. Resources, rule of law (so builders don't abscond with funds), a tidbit of path planning, and Bob's your Uncle. Lower the costs and mitigate the risks.
For example, the logistics to provide plumbing to developing nations are extremely difficult because of the instability of these regions as well as the lack of cooperation from developed nations to precisely help in these much needed regards. A lot of the help these places get come in the form of philanthropic pursuit or misguided help that end up either not helping or sometimes worsening the situation.
Not only that, but there are many interests at play that also get in the way of these places developing. For many powerful actors in these countries the status quo is good enough and any form of development actually threatens their position. And yes, sadly, this applies to plumbing as well!
It's very true that we know how to do plumbing, in the technical sense, but in reality we don't know how to do plumbing in these regions because our technical knowledge is not applicable given the socio-political situation. So this does require an interdisciplinary approach, one that involves sociology, psychology, economics, politics, etc.
Pipes, shovels, and pumps solve a lot of core problems for a community. Where and how they get laid down doesn't require sociology or political economy research. You might care about the people displaced by the infrastructure, which a compassionate person will, but don't forget that home construction and legal recompense for eminent domain are also known.
The major difference between your and my approaches: while the interdisciplinarists are arguing about the impact of infrastructure development on endangered plants and relative value of indigenous pottery buried for several thousand years, the pragmatists are getting people out of the bondage of poverty and enabling them solve their problems themselves because they have risen above subsistence.
Note there is value to ensuring the endangered plants are maintained and the indigenous pottery is studied -- as well as the knowledge gained from all fields that might come to an interdisciplinarists table -- but one must recognize the advancement of patron-funded knowledge is a bottleneck when it stands in the way of well-understood solutions.
And that action that's totally appropriate but people are just too squeamish for would be ... what, an armed invasion to impose "better" cultural values?
However, more steelmaned and aligned to my original statement, as well as more common when facing decisions, being okay with the realistic tradeoffs that an endangered plant might have a reduction in habitat.
Because if you are, I have some unfortunate news: metaphysics is woo woo. And if you do not believe me, try doing a survey and see what results you get. Or, if you do not trust the opinion of the general public, try also running surveys within scientific and Rationalist communities, or even here on HN, and see if your results are substantially different.
One of the many things I find interesting about metaphysics, and humans (but I repeat myself) is that "most" humans, particularly those who are more educated, tend to be certain that metaphysics is dumb/useless/etc, yet the fact that they are unable to articulate the reason why this is true (and defend the articulation in a sound manner) seems to have little to no effect on their opinion of the quality of their belief (a behavior that would not be a source of pride or tolerated here when it comes to topics like computing).
But unfortunately, this idea itself is metaphysical, so it can be easily dismissed by the initial belief. It's like a bootstrap problem of sorts.
Your parent comment and subsequent followup are difficult for me to parse. If others had similar difficulty, it could account for the downvotes. I did not downvote your comments.
Genuinely curious: what's difficult to parse?
I think part of the problem is how inconsistently the domain of Metaphysics is perceived by many in general, and then there's also the fact that New Agers have to some degree hijacked it and caused an association between the word and "woo woo" to form in people's minds, so when they hear the word, they believe it IS "woo woo". This is the phenomenon at which my "childish" sarcasm is aimed (what's good for the goose is good for the gander is my excuse).
The countries which are not poor and disorganized did not get there through the benevolent study by their betters.
And I don't mean only Africa or Asia, (before someone calls me racist). Any country has had this problem.
The simplest solution is to instate mandatory community service, preferably in lieu of military service, but it could be a sort of "Subotnik" as seen in the USSR, which would be used for... You guessed it, doing community/public service work. Then you have all the manpower and just need food (some compensation/thanks is good) tools and organization/training (can double as job training).
Not much to ask imo, but of course many people will cry about it. Mostly people from countries with a lot of homeless and unpaid internships, but it's not like most people want to do unpaid work much, either. On the bright side, most people won't raise much of a fuss about it, either.
So that's not happening. Government officials stealing foreign aid is happening. Local production is not happening. Wars are happening. Toilets are not. Etc.
What stops this labour being used in corrupt or self serving fashions just as the money is?
The ancient Incan Empire collected taxes in labor (basically part-time slavery, everyone had to do their 2 months a year or so), and they managed to build enormous infrastructure across the Andes in just a few decades. And in high quality. Many of the roads can still be seen, 500 years after they were built.
How did they prevent capture of this labor by corrupt local officials? I don't know.
What stops anyone from using a kitchen knife to stab someone to death?
If you look at it that way, you'll get nothing done.
Too hard to do experiments.
Innovating cheaper infrastructure is at least somewhat actionable.
This is a political claim made by privileged people that live in the “Global North”. Reducing that “unsustainable” consumption will make some “Global South” countries even poorer, because the little manufacturing that they managed to have set up is now gone.
Thankfully the coming economic global shake-up will drown out opinions like these, which do nothing to help the “Global South” catch up, and will give a bigger voice to people from said “Global South” who really have skin in the game.
We have more complex widgets perhaps, but people seem to be the same.
These days we have a great many more choices of insecticides, and major declines in insect biomass and animal populations. Nailing down the culprit(s) is much harder because while there's a huge amount of spraying, there are far more chemicals to choose from. (The neonicotonoid family of insecticides seems like the best candidate, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid )
and, btw, here's the insect decline follow-up study: https://www.dw.com/en/munich-study-confirms-severe-decline-i... 67% decline in ten years is TERRIFYING. Let's keep in mind that the SDG's include studying and preventing the potential impending collapse of the biosphere...
The economy is just bigger than it used to be, which means it has more room for complexity to live in.
I identify complexity as increased costs due to an increased action space. In 1920, Jim can wake up and sit in the house or go to work. In 2020, Jim can wake up and site in the house (fiddling with a phone) or go to work. In 1920, Royce has to take 2 hours to iron clothes with an iron heated in the hearth. In 2020, Royce pulls clothes out of the dryer and throws them on a hanger, reducing clothing maintenance for presentability by 75%.
Cars in 1970 has simpler systems. Cars in 2020 have more complexity. The additional complexity lets Alice have a higher standard of living, meaning the time traded for maintaining the car herself versus taking to a mechanic is at worst an even trade, at best much less time to drop off.
Just because something has grown doesn't mean the cost of actions have increased. Maybe its harder to corner the silver market due to the internet existing, but that really wasn't a desirable outcome anyhow.
I work with antimicrobial resistance and phage therapy, and everyone keeps complaining that regulatory frameworks aren't adapting to our needs fast enough, there's no funding, etc. That's all true, because there's no urgent need to move faster.
COVID-19 came along and all those obstacles evaporated. If AMR actually killed 10M+ people a year, in Western / wealthy countries, you bet it would become an "urgent problem" real quick.
I consider these "urgent" problems "aspirationally urgent" in the same way that "we should probably eat less red meat and drink less alcohol and go to the gym more" kind of urgent. It's in the pile of things we should be doing... but we put off.
It's not "urgent" as in "step off of the train tracks or I'll get hit" kind of urgent.
You apply a model of reality formed in the western bubble essentially and assume, it applies to the whole planet equally, errors negligible. That is incorrect.
Not "only" do multitudes suffer needlessly because of such an attitude being common where decisions are made, "mid- and long-term" consequences are obviously closing in and mounting to unmanageable levels.
It is not enough to just imagine one's model of reality to be correct and feel confirmed by people in the same bubble, prone to the same errors of judgement.
Gov't funding drives this kind of work, and we spend a lot of time writing grants and getting scant money in this field. I'm a research software engineer making less than I made at my first tech job out of school — is that really what it takes , for people like me to give up making a nice salary at a tech company, to solve these "urgent" problems?
> is that really what it takes, for people like me to give up making a nice salary at a tech company, to solve these "urgent" problems?
after a lot of thought and soul searching I've reluctantly come to think yes, this is at least a start
given pathological incentives some number of people must elect not to be guided by them if anything is to change
The article specifically puts climate change at the top of its concerns, which is a "step off of the train tracks or you'll get hit" problem if there ever was one -- but in slow motion, of course.
The point of the article, as I read it, was that these problems really are urgent, but our brains and our politics trick us into not seeing them that way because they are either (1) slow moving or (2) call for tedious, fat-tail responses (rather than sexy, exciting, silver bullet fixes).
Rather than "yeah, I should get out to the gym more" a better analogy would be: "Okay, it's time to face it -- I'm definitely an alcoholic. If I don't change my ways, it may not kill me tomorrow, but it's definitely going to catch up with me soon enough. So I better start figuring out a way to turn this boat around, before it heads over the edge."
Which is categorically different from the "aspirational" sense of urgency you seem to be describing.
The ability to discern that certain problems are, in fact, "urgent" (despite their being slow-moving or incremental in their effect) is one of the highly valuable traits that enables some genes (read: species or individuals) to succeed, while others fail.
> Changing directions: Steering science, technology and innovation for the Sustainable Development found that research and innovation around the world is not focused on meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which are a framework set up to address and drive change across all areas of social justice and environmental issues.
Is it really an improvement to have the unaccountable UN dictate research goals top-down rather than some private interests?
IMO this sounds incredibly dystopian.
After reading the UN SDG document, I wonder: How did things like mitigating climate change, stopping overfishing, gender equality, and access to education all end up falling under the heading of sustainability at the UN? It feels really broad and mixed up to me. Usually not having a tight focus or a single goal is a bad sign for initiatives. It reads like: "our vision for this initiative is to solve all major problems", which is admirable, but feels ... out of scope to me.
If you take climate change as the impending complete disaster that some people see it as, it would kind of make it hard to sustain any ongoing development when it finally hits.
Overfishing should be clear enough; run out of fish, and civilization hits a major setback that makes it hard to sustain whatever we've been up to.
Gender equality and education access might be a bit more indirect, but at least so far our civilizational development has required a general upskilling of the population as a whole. And if you think that people are being excluded from that, then well a lack of additional people to upskill will turn into a blocker sooner rather than later and again make it hard to sustain that development.
Good science basically requires atrocious amounts of money, to quite a small number of people.
None of the scrabbling for $200,000 grants for a researcher, 4 grad students, and some beakers.
Try 5 million 1970s dollars for a couple of dozen of the best and brightest.
There's no doubt at all. The physical sciences have always been, and always will be, an enabler of income inequality.
Bread needs water, flour, AND yeast to rise. Ain't gonna do much without all three.
> Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Royal_Mint
If he had been successful in turning lead into gold, he might have made his employer obsolete.
[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-did-we-wait-s...
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... slide 13
The unsaid part underlying physics research is "if you fund us, we promise to whip you up an atom bomb in 5 minutes if the Russians invade."
Physics research involves precisely zero cost effectiveness justifications.
99.9% is the government of the day thinking "if we do this,
That claim is the opposite direction of the rest of your comment, which shows income inequality being an enabler of science research.
It's a bidirectional graph edge.
Goes both ways.
For example: what about a new form of think tank, one where people other than the usual suspects (ie: "the" "best" "and" "brightest") like people from "the general public" (perhaps even a few of the "uneducated", and maybe even a few picks from the "freaks and weirdos" category to shake things up for a change) are hired to simply think of new ideas?
"When “What Will It Take?” Seems Beyond Possible, We Need To Study How Immense Challenges Have Been Successfully Dealt With In The Past"
If you look at health related research donations, you'll find a lot of money is poured into breast and prostate cancer. By most measures of overall impact, these diseases aren't all that critical but people care about their breasts and prostates. Funding agencies try to look at things a little more objectively but this is but one example of bias.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/6040435/als-ice-bucket-challen...
Federal funding agencies themselves intentionally introduce bias by largely picking areas to fund that influence direction. Researchers work to spin whatever they really want to do in the context of where the money is but they need to eat and pay rent too.
It was obvious to the authors of the Old Testament that "Doing Well" was quite different from (and far more tempting than) "Doing Good". Moralizing about that fact, for an audience which (mostly) has no historical perspective at all, is plausibly a good strategy for Doing Well in the modern social media sphere.
If any of the people involved with the article are actually doing any bit of good in the real world, the article is careful to omit that detail.
But, in many ways, the field of theology is doing far better! At least Christianity, in the West. With the relative collapse of church membership, attendance, etc. over the past ~half-century, the number of self-serving hypocrite theologians enjoying good social status, pay, and benefits while preaching a moral code which they would never want to follow has been plummeting.
The corresponding trends in science do not look so good.
As a comprehensive whole, even as somewhat of a supporter, the results seem unimpressive to me.
But then this overlooks at least two things:
- we do not have access to an accurate counterfactual reality machine, thus we ~~must~~ speculate (note: the ~~ ~~ is intended to cross out the enclosed word, as supported on Reddit)
- there may be substantial unrealized value within subsets of theology (I'm a big proponent of Taoism, but then I'm surely biased (which is not necessarily synonymous with incorrect))
> We’ve tried sending thoughts and prayers at every single peoples we face, but it just doesn’t seem to work.
See the "accurate counterfactual reality machine" comment above.
Two questions:
- is this intended as an accurate representation of theology? If not, what is it intended as?
- it seems to me that: delusion is a substantial contributor to causality, most of human communication (some exceptions exist) is at least partially delusional (in a technical sense of the word, not pejorative), and arguably causality is the most important known phenomenon - from my frame of reference, science seems to have very little serious interest or knowledge about either (delusion and causality), yet despite this seems to have somehow ascended to the throne of the de facto superior metaphysical framework for discovery of reality. Is it just me, or does something seem "off" about this state of affairs?
inb4: popular and persuasive thought terminating cliches/memes.
Again, there are countless religions besides Christianity. I doubt you really polled muslims, jews, hindus, sikhs, taoists, etc on their experience with social media. I think you're just trying to make a sweeping generalization about one particular faith, and at the same time totally ignoring and invalidating faiths of 60% of the world.
Huxley
future is here!
Not saying those aren’t important goals, but the proposed remedy doesn’t exactly address them head on:
In brief, the report calls for:
Increasing funding for SDG-related research and innovation, particularly in lower income countries, on underlying social issues, social policy and grassroot innovations, and research relevant to a region or context.
Promoting a rich diversity of science, technology and innovation pathways to address specific SDG challenges, including social and organisational innovation.
Designing accountable initiatives that strengthen science, technology and innovation governance and support open and inclusive processes of deliberation and prioritisation.
Empowering stakeholders to form different interpretations of what counts as SDG-related science, technology and innovation.
And that's kind of what the article says in more diplomatic terms - if you really believe that sustained development is important, then you have to put your money where your mouth is and fund it.
Surprise surprise. Technical problems have technical solutions. Human problems have human solutions.
Social problems (like racism) can't be solved with a calculator, and we need to stop trying to.
Our lives, trajectories and opportunities are obviously different, but I see that as historical lag that tend to solve themselves over time, charity is only marginally helpful and I think it has many second-order negative effects, especially corruption.
Having said that the most powerful force we have available to rectify such conditions is economic development based on liberal economics and the rule of law. Charity is analgesic, economic development is the cure.
Charge royalties for teaching a man to fish, you can profit off feeding him for a lifetime.
The thesis appears to be that it is bad that some countries are wealthy enough to pursue any research on non-subsistence topics.
> The second reason for the decline of the UN and international organisation is ideological. According to the ideologies of neoliberalism and ‘the end of history’ which so heavily dominated the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, dealing with world peace and security was no longer the most pressing task of the UN. Helped by the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (and false NGOs), the new ideologues broadened the mission of the UN to many subsidiary issues with which it should have never been involved but rather left to other governmental and non-governmental bodies.[]
>
> The third, related reason is financial. As the mandate of the UN, the World Bank and other international institutions was broadened to include practically everything imaginable, it became obvious that the resources provided by governments were insufficient. Here NGOs met billionaires and private-sector donors. In a series of actions unthinkable when the UN was created, private interests simply infiltrated themselves into organisations created by states and began to dictate the new agenda.
>
> This is how the entire UN system went into decline and we ended up in a position where the head of the only international institution ever created by humankind whose role is preservation of world peace has become a spectator—with as much influence on matters of war and peace as any other of the 7.7 billion denizens of our planet.
Should it be? Are those actually things that would benefit from additional expensive research?
- we already know how to do fission power, and how to get rid of any waste (if the politicians wouldn't forbid it); there's a lot of research money already going to fusion power; both direct solar (photovoltaic) and indirect (wind) power are getting cheaper very rapidly as they're done more; hydro and geothermal are already things in places where they're a thing
- social research isn't hampered by lack of funds, but by ideological uniformity of researchers and "I want to believe" (seriously, it's amazing how much lasting real-world harm communism and more generally "the entire world is just a struggle between groups defined along such-and-such axis" cause ever time they escape from the ivory tower)
- hunger is downstream of social issues
- good health and wellbeing looks like it's mostly about infectious diseases? Aside from high-end research for new things (eg covid), that'd be either poverty (social issues) or trust in medical authorities (also social issues) or maybe outside medical folks being banned from places (social issues again)
https://globalgoals.org/ #GlobalGoals #SDGs #Goal17
Each country (UN Member State) prepares an annual country-level report - an annual SDG report - on their voluntary progress toward their self-defined Targets (which are based upon Indicators; stats).
Businesses that voluntarily prepare a sustainability report necessarily review their SDG-aligned operations' successes and failures. The GRI Corporate Sustainability report is SDG aligned; so if you prepare an annual Sustainability report, it should be easy to review aligned and essential operations.
GRI Global Reporting Initiative is also in NL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Reporting_Initiative
> Critically, the report finds that research in high-income and middle-income countries contributes disproportionally to a disconnect with the SDGs. Most published research (60%-80%) and innovation activity (95%-98%) is not related to the SDGs.
Strategic alignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment
https://USAspending.gov resulted from tracking State-level grants in IL: the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Funding_Accountability...
Unfortunately, https://performance.gov/ and https://USAspending.gov/ do not have any way to - before or after funding decisions - specify that a funded thing is SDG-aligned.
IMHO, we can easily focus on domestic priorities and also determine where our spending is impactful in regards to the SDGs.
> Illustrating the imbalance, the report found that 80 percent of SDG-related inventions in high-income countries were concentrated in just six of the 73 countries
Lots of important problems worth money to folks:
#Goal1 #NoPoverty
#Goal2 #ZeroHunger
#Goal3 #GoodHealth
#Goal4 #QualityEducation
#Goal5 #GenderEquality
#Goal6 #CleanWater
#Goal7 #CleanEnergy
#Goal8 #DecentJobs
#Goal9 #Infrastructure
#Goal10 #ReduceInequality
#Goal11 #Sustainable
#Goal12 #ResponsibleConsumption
#Goal13 #ClimateAction
#Goal14 #LifeBelowWater
#Goal15 #LifeOnLand
#Goal16 #PEACE #Justice
#Goal17 #Partnership #Teamwork
If you label things with #GlobalGoal hashtags, others can find solutions to the very same problems.
>the concept has been captured to mean that the pursuit of individual interest leads to the general good.
However, to my surprise, it seems to have been thought up as an argument against a global adjustment of income:
>Smith was worried that if the movement of capital and the movement of goods (imports) were both free, the British bourgeoisie would invest abroad, to the detriment of Britain. To this, Smith came up with an argument according to which the British bourgeois would be biased according to their place of residence and would therefore make investments in the home country guided by an "invisible hand".
Against this, I would like to argue that there is no need to help the poor beyond allowing them to access the global market. If you look at Fiverr and such, with internet access, everybody can participate in the global economy and take some of those sweet ad dollars.
"Many right-wingers-in-love-with-large-corporations keep citing Adam Smith, famous patron saint of “capitalism,” a word he never uttered, without reading him, using his ideas in a self-serving selective manner—ideas that he most certainly did not endorse in the form they are presented."
-Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
David Graeber, in his book Debt, points to some interesting work by an Islamic scholar Al-Ghazali[1] and this is mentioned in the article you linked - though it's nowhere near as thorough. This is of interest because there is, to my knowledge, a considerable difference between Medieval Persia and Enlightenment Europe (to now) in both the domains of social landscape and moral paradigm. This is kind of an interesting parallel with the above point. Perhaps these 'components' aren't independent and require a great deal of structure and maintenance - pulling them out of their context and plugging them in to a given civilization, it seems, does not work. And perhaps that's evinced by the gross poverty suffered the world over.
Taleb has an interesting point:
"The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can." -Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
Having pointed that out, I hypothesize that even if it were as outlined by Taleb, discovery would be random and that would lead to similar conditions mentioned in the article, but I would include in that hypothesis that the rate of discovery would drastically increase.
Of course, "research" in the common sense is not conducted in the free market, it is highly regulated. Not only in the most common sense, by the government via financing selectivity, but also in more pernicious differential forms through institutions of higher learning. One, in that they vet people in many ways (financial, ideological, 'intellectual') and two, they withhold the tools and information generated which used public funding and is dependent on a long lineage of information. As a tertiary point, I imagine it would be much more difficult, if not virtually impossible for some "layperson" (read: expert without a degree) to propose some new theory, or perhaps to do something as simple as publish a paper. This lays the land in a way that is truly bleak for an independent informal scientist, even bleaker for someone who wishes to be one - though the domains vary on that.
I think this is crucial to understanding the failures of the Western economic model as it relates to science.
[1]: This is corroborated by Taleb.
Let's start from a popular topic, ridden with propaganda of various sides, the Green New Deal. In theory we know we can't have more than very little p.v. or wind power because being very quick in output change no other classic power plant can keep the network at the right frequency: the Sun the sun rises, p.v. quickly grow to the peak, loads on classic power plants goes down too fast to adapt, frequency skyrocket causing a chain of blackouts, the sun sets and the load on classic power plant skyrocket, frequency plummet and large chunk of the network get cut out to reduce the load. The solution was and is named "Smart Grid" with storage, where the storage (batteries + inverters) are actually quick enough to compensate. The Sun rise, all connected cars start charging and so loads on classic P.P. remain almost unchanged. They slow down charging slow enough that classic PP crank down their production at a sustainable peace. Similarly in the evening all connected cars start discharging quickly compensate the very quick p.v. production loss, and stop discharging slowly allowing nuclear/gas/... PP to crank up at a sustainable peace. Or, so to speak, the extremely high costs of storage is offset to private individuals instead of being on energy operators shoulders. Such model does not happen because p.v. start to get economically sound, but until gasoline/diesel reach 3€/l (~11USD/gal) and/or the national grid became unstable most would not buy BEVs.
Another example is IT history: Xerox PARC invented and implemented the modern Desktop and desktop computing, the classic Paul Otlet/Henry La Fontaine Mundaneum idea in practice, than for business purposes such concept was crashed and developed few parts at a time by modern GAFAM in a way to ensure end users have next to no power and are locked in in their service.
Another example is the classic rent vs buy model where at first rent pay well, faster and cheaper, then the big cucumber arrives up the a* with rental prices to the stars and almost no more options to nor resources left to buy instead of rent.
Long story short: Science and technology works well ONLY if Science is PUBLIC, witch means NO research is done for private interests but for whole society one, and technology is UNDER Science, witch means the private sector select and pick new Science innovations and implement them on scale. So the model must be:
- a State, on top, witch means Democracy, witch means ALL PEOPLE on top;
- the State MASSIVELY found general interesting research maintaining universities, schools, labs, factories etc for the general interests;
- such PUBLIC apparatus produce innovations for the society;
- private sector grab ideas and hire some talents who do want to implement them instead of keep researching, try to sell resulting implementations, some will profit, some will fail.
All critical sectors are public only, so weapons are public only, health is public only (pharma for first), energy is public because we all need it, food due to it's nature is a mix BUT with a State/public regulation to ensure a minimum intake for all, basic transportation infra are public from TLCs to (rail)roads and harbors/airports. The rest is private.
NOTHING impede private research but having this far less resources only real success for the society will survive, modern absurd anti-society stuff get criticized by the compartmentalized public research, religiously separated from the private, and fails quickly.
For those who say "that's communism" or EQUALLY "that's fascism" do remember a thing: no market have proved to be or remain really free in a very short timeframe. No dictatorship have proven to last, they innovate quickly, expand quickly, than fall. The key is the old Roman's "est modus in rebus" or "there is a measure in anything" meaning, nothing can work taken to the extreme, there is no one-size-fit-all.
I didn't even knew world is a thing. I believed we live in different countries and each and every one of us us is responsible for his or her well being.