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Comment by quantummagic | Hacker News Reader

Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever.

Maybe if science depended on the average Joe actually having a living wage, enough to donate some directly to science, the incentive structures of our society would become more healthy than they currently are.

Rich people, worrying about rich people jobs and outcomes, is getting a little tiresome. We don't care about your women's studies "research" grants. Maybe something will actually be done about income inequality, if you want to save the things you actually care about. Until then, let it burn; a lot of us will barely notice the difference.

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Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014. Wage inequality severely decreased between 2019 and 2023.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

Sometimes good things happen!

> Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever.

I do. I'm not one of these wealthy startup founders, just a guy earning a salary--but I've donated to foundations doing basic research many times; and even to individual researchers when they lost a grant but were doing work that I wanted to see the results of.

However, funding science in general this way is likely to miss a lot of value. Not everyone makes basic research a priority in their charitable giving. More importantly, not everyone has my impeccable research taste: not to sound elitist, but if the average American's priorities determined the directions for basic research, we'd have thousands of studies on why vaccines cause autism, an nothing on weird stuff like the medical potential of gila monster saliva.

Not only that, but science was largely a privately-funded industry until a few decades ago, and many would argue governments do a bad job of funding science because a lot of nonsense gets wrapped up in it. It's frustrating because people will whole-heartedly claim science research needs more funding, and then hand the funding over to John Money so he can publish what happens when you sexually abuse children (spoiler: they committed suicide).

I don't think a lot of the people defending government backed research understand everything they're defending

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