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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of Trump, but it's important to approach studies like this with a healthy dose of skepticism. Macroeconomics isn’t an exact science, and studies like these often rely on dubious assumptions and extrapolations. For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.

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Private industries are not incentivized to pursue the same kind of research as the public sector. An excellent example of this is antibiotics (or antifungal drugs). Pharma companies do not put forth a large budget for research like this, because it isn't profitable. But, if we were to see a super bug crop up in the next 10 years (unfortunately this is not a crazy "if" due to trends in antibiotic resistance), then you would quickly see the public sector's research paying enormous dividends in terms of missed economic hardship. These economic benefits would not affect the private sector in the same way, because a pharma company would not see, let's say, $50b in profits from helping ease an equivalent $50b in economic hardship caused by hospital bills/suffering/lost productivity.

On top of this, let's just look at the current private sector and what they spend R&D dollars in: can you really say that $1b spent by Google, Meta, Amazon etc. actually ends up being better worthwhile than $1b spent by NASA? see this list of inventions NASA has inadvertently created: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...

In general, public sector research is already so strapped for cash. Their budgets are not large. Their salaries are lower than the private sector. I agree that public R&D spending is likely not at a "theoretical optimal level", but would you argue that private sector R&D spending is?

We probably want even more R&D than we have now. Private companies frequently spend much less than the optimal level because it's a tossup on whether it will amount to anything, government can fund a wide range of R&D and society picks up the benefits of it even if half the projects don't turn out.

Something doesn’t need to be “optimal” for it to highly net positive.

But even if you don’t want to believe all the research and all the very obvious examples that suggest the tremendous benefits of public research even from a purely monetary perspective, maybe just consider that nearly every other country is trying to rebuild what the U.S. has in terms of public research.

China, Europe, etc.

And countries in the Middle East are using their oil money to essentially pay for these universities to build campuses in their nations.

That's besides the point though. I was criticizing the study's misuse of statistical models, not public funding of R&D.

> For example, what are the odds that current public R&D spending is really at an optimal theoretical level? Do these models account for potential substitution by private industry if government funding is reduced? etc.

On the other side of things, they're using an economic model based on keyword searches for woke language in grant descriptions, and yet you felt compelled to comment to urge skepticism and "just ask questions" only about this study?

I don't know what you are talking about but I'm generally skeptical of macroeconomics as a field - especially its frequent misuse of statistics.

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