This typifies the quality of discourse around defunding of "The Science" at HN.
In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.
This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.
It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.
> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding
The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.
If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.
However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.
There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.
In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.
Plenty, of course.
> If so, why is state directed research a special case?
It's not a "special case", but rather there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than governmental funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be some misallocation from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.
Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative centralized industries (which is closer to government funding than not)), we don't.
In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.
I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.
Your argument would be appropriate if we were debating the amount of spending in the context of other spending, or relative to itself. But in isolation as some heuristic it's "not even wrong". The larger context is this same movement blindly destroying our scientific research institutions also just added $5T of new debt, with a large chunk of that being spent on nothing more than a spectacle of performative cruelty (ICE).
And so I have to ask - do you really want to be making an argument in support of indulging the mob in their desire to see people hurt instead of actually advancing as a species?
Thats what I'm talking about. Im not talking about the merits of a movement or mob.
Do you think the underlying reality of ROI is irrelevant? Do you support "advancement" at all or any cost?
I obviously do not support "advancement" at any [large] cost. But it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to not supporting it at any [small] cost, as the thrust of your argument implies.
>it seems plausible that there are diminishing returns to fundamental research, and that those returns are conditional on the funding system environment. I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.
Obviously nobody supports any specific thing at any cost, yet you are still asking this question rhetorically. The implication is the inverse whereby the cost is already too high - without actually substantiating this argument.
Thus the main part of my comment asking what you're actually seeing this cost in terms of, which you didn't respond to. Focusing on merely the monetary cost would be utterly fallacious in the context of this spendthrift administration.
As mentioned above, I am not talking about the motives of this administration, which you keep coming back to as if it is relevant.
I'm discussing cost in terms of money.
Or for a financial example closer to the subject - if I'm incensed by the overgrown and out of control NSA/DEA/ATF, extrapolate to harping on the need for less government in general, but then my arguments get taken up and only used to attack less hardened public-good-providing agencies like NPS and USPS - I haven't actually succeeded at my original goal! Rather my ideals have been abused to by people who don't actually care about my ideals, aren't looking to increase individual liberty, and merely want to destroy NPS and USPS - likely to focus on growing the type of agencies that I originally started off against!
As such, the motives of people actually carrying out the actions are highly relevant, and this is exactly why I keep coming back to discussing these motives. If the reasoning here is actually about money, we would expect to see reductions in costs across the board, perhaps some unevenness based on priorities, but still with the biggest cuts being on the biggest expenditures. However instead, we see $5T in new debt (monetary inflation), and increased wasteful spending on many things. Their goals are clearly not about fiscal responsibility.
So then if we're espousing an ideal of fiscal responsibility, it behooves us to condemn and distance ourselves from this administration. First, because they're burning the credibility of our lofty ideal rather than using it to create reasonable solutions in good faith. Second, because if they're cutting things based on a different metric than efficiently spending public funds, it actually means that public funds are then being spent less efficiently - so we're actually going backwards.
It seems you only want to talk about trump and their goal. If you see it as impossible to separate the topic from politics, even after sufficient disclaimers, then there isnt anything to discuss.
I dont see some obscure and transient conversation in a forum backwater as meaningful political action. There are no stakes.
To the extent there are policy implications, I would like to define a preferred policy position on a specific issue. I already know my position on $5T of additional debt. What is the point of talking about it?
Rather it's about people reading each others' opinions and continuing to placate themselves with thoughts that these actions are anything resembling reform or serving the general interests of our country.
Policy positions don't exist in isolation - their actual effects depend on other policies. Even if everything you yourself advocate for would work well together, this does not mean all of your desired policies will be taken up as a whole (similar dynamic of my comment two back). Furthermore the specifics of a big-name policy depend on the people implementing those policies, which is why I keep coming back to the motivations of the current gang.
Cut funding to scientific research by half, with the goal that private industry will take up topics adjacent to it (semiconductors, computing, drug research, etc), while significantly shrinking the tax/inflation burden by generally downsizing the government? Maybe plausible. Cut funding to scientific research by half indiscriminately while stifling domestic industry with hefty import taxes and raising taxflation? Once again, it doesn't seem like the goal is reform to further our national interests - regardless of one's political framework.
But even modulo other policies, what do you see as the point of say coming up with the perfect nuanced plan how to reform the public system of scientific funding? The system of last year no longer exists. Today's system won't exist in a few months. Maybe we can talk about how best to pick up the pieces and rebuild when the butchers are gone, but even just thinking we know where the bottom will be is hopeful.
I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.
Look I get it those with good incomes in America want to pay less taxes because they can take care of themselves.
Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).
The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?
We ascended remarkably similarly to how China is. Stealing IP from the old powers, giving it room and state support to scale and then staying out of nonsense wars.
Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.
Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.