Capitalist Science
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large.
Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.
> Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests,
No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations.
> channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life.
Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.
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It always bothers me when I see absolutist statements such as this one. Are you claiming that there's some plausible 'pure-capitalism' existent outside of all laws?
Isn't the basis of capitalism itself wholly dependent on the governmental construct called currency? What about policing and a court system? It's hard to imagine anything approximating the modern idea of trade without those functions.
When you boil things down, 'government' is just a set of rules we all agree to. Capitalism is a set of rules we agree to in the area of trade. These are inexorably linked ideas.
There is even a term for this: "laissez faire capitalism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire
> Isn't the basis of capitalism itself wholly dependent on the governmental construct called currency?
No, we've used gold for hundreds of years without any government intervention. Fiat money is relatively recent invention.
More recent example: bitcoin, which works as currency without any governments.
> It's hard to imagine anything approximating the modern idea of trade without those functions.
Yes, but these services can be provided through free market. They'll become more cheap and available. Take for example government-run courts: they are slow, inefficient and expensive(which is the reason why patent trolling is viable: in many cases it is cheaper to hand some money to at troll instead of trying to resolve a conflict using government system).
True, such ideas may seem radical to you(No government, won't there be violence and chaos?!). If you want to know how such system will work, take a look at Murray Rothbard's awesome book "For a new liberty: libertarian manifesto" mises.org/rothbard/foranewlb.pdf . There is a chapter "The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts", which you'll enjoy.
Some people distinguish between free market capitalism and crony capitalism. Others don't. Some of the people who make the distinction do not consider crony capitalism to be capitalism. That is why you will see people who say things like patents are not capitalist or Too big to fail is anti-capitalist.
Not sure why intellectual property is considered any different.
purely governmental? Really? Property rights exist wherever people successfully claim stuff and are willing to defend their claim. Even dogs have property rights (and help us have them!). The idea of property is a social construct, not a government one. When it comes to land, the government role started by setting up a system where people could register the pre-existing territorial claims they'd made under the local customs, thereby making it easier to arbitrate disputes. But you don't need government to do either of those functions. (Neither running a registry nor arbitrating a dispute requires a monopoly of force, so both of those can be done privately. And have been, and sometimes still are.)
That may be true of some corporations (most notably in companies that have already achieved success and thus have an incentive to maintain the status quo), but it's not a universal rule [1] and patents aren't the only method of maintaining artificial scarcity [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GE...
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11
For instance, you are your own property, but the state defies this by extorting taxation from you. They defy you, and therefore your property in order to gain value from your work.
Your work is also a result of your time, expertise and effort, therefore your property. So already tax defies your property rights in two different ways.
That's a big word there, and I suspect it doesn't mean what you think it means. Property rights are a government construct. It's one of the primary reasons why governments exist. Without government to enforce these rights, you have no real claim on what you consider yours. Anyone can come along and take it away, and the only recourse you have is to steal it back, or steal something similar from someone else.
Since that's not a very ideal situation, thousands of years ago we decided not to do that anymore, and anyone who still did it, would be punished. That's basically what government is (and I'm amazed I'm even explaining this to anyone over 8 years old).
What you are saying is indeed a common conventional wisdom opinion taught in grade school. Thus, people who believe differently might do so because they've thought more about it than an 8-year-old. Perhaps they've looked into the history or the economics of the situation.
To remedy your amazement I recommend reading _The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without The State_ by Bruce Benson: http://www.amazon.com/The-Enterprise-Law-Justice-Without/dp/...
And also perhaps _The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism_ by David Friedman (which just went out of print - there's a new edition in process but in the meantime you can read the old one for free on the web in pdf form here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
With or without government to enforce your rights, you can make it hard for people to take stuff away - and even in a government based system we expect you to do that to some degree. You can lock stuff up - put it behind walls and gates. You can guard it yourself. You can get a dog. You can ask or pay other people to guard it. You can install streaming security cameras to help identify miscreants. You can pay private patrols. (There are more private guards than public police in the US) But if somebody still takes your stuff despite your best efforts to protect it, there are several nongovernmental ways to deal with the problem. Some of which work now in the real world. For instance, there are reputational systems (Reporting somebody to a credit agency for bouncing a check is making use of a private rule-enforcement mechanism. As is reporting a bad doctor to their certification board.) When dealing with businesses or known individuals you can post a bond with a third party or use an escrow agency. Or appeal to a private arbitrator - agreements between diamond merchants in NYC are often made on a handshake and handled under Jewish courts and Jewish law that have nothing to do with the government system.)
There are other mechanisms that could work but are currently barred or restricted by the government. Competitive private protection agencies could serve most of the same role, were they allowed to do so.
It's true that there's no perfect way to defend property without government. But there's also no perfect way to defend it with government. There are pluses and minuses. A private competitive legal system would be more complex, less predictable. But the downside risk of depending on a single monopoly provider for any important service is substantial - and not easily dismissed.
Congratulations on that cheap blow suggesting there's something childish and immature about understanding history, government and law.
> With or without government to enforce your rights, you can make it hard for people to take stuff away - and even in a government based system we expect you to do that to some degree. You can lock stuff up - put it behind walls and gates. You can guard it yourself. You can get a dog. You can ask or pay other people to guard it. You can install streaming security cameras to help identify miscreants. You can pay private patrols.
You do realize that this means only the rich and powerful can defend their property, right? You create a system of might makes right, with the rich and powerful as substitute government. And if you lack the power to defend your property from those more powerful than you, you need the protection form someone who does, which leads to feudalism. Feudalism can certainly work, but it's not preferable to the rule of law, with justice for rich and poor alike.
Nope, I don't realize that at all. It's a common objection made by people who don't understand how private legal systems work and have never looked into it. You'd know better if you had read the books I recommended above.
There is no way to perfectly defend property - "utopia is not an option" - but you can raise the cost to the criminal in various ways. The cheapest is by buying a lock. Even very poor people can and do have locks on their doors or bars on their windows. Another cheap option is to organize a volunteer community watch program. A little more expensive but still quite doable is for any GROUP of people to form a neighborhood association which hires a guard for the neighborhood - this has often been done by a local merchant's association. The poor currently pay a rather large amount of money for "protection" in the form of police salaries paid via sales tax and property tax - but they don't GET protection for their money! The government-run police primarily serve the interests of the rich and powerful and their own interests - they don't do much to protect the poor. In a private system you get what you pay for and pay for what you get - people who hired police protection would actually GET police protection.
> You create a system of might makes right
Nope. In fact, putting government in charge is a system of might makes right, one prone to terrible abuses. Decentralizing power makes it less prone to abuse. I'm talking about actual rule of law, which does protect the rich and poor alike.
> And if you lack the power to defend your property from those more powerful than you, you need the protection form someone who does, which leads to feudalism
Here's another option: Consider that by social convention when you aggress against me I have a claim against you for damages. Suppose I can sell that claim. If I can afford to prosecute you directly I do so; if not, I sell my claim against you to someone who is more powerful. But selling a claim is an ordinary business transaction - it doesn't give the buyer any special power over the seller.
(BTW, wikipedia says "There is no broadly accepted modern definition of feudalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#Definition )
Tell you what. If you just want to read a SINGLE CHAPTER of MoF that most clearly addresses your concerns, it is quite short, it is titled "POLICE, COURTS, AND LAWS---ON THE MARKET", and it can be read online here:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...
> The government-run police primarily serve the interests of the rich and powerful and their own interests - they don't do much to protect the poor.
That's certainly the case in corrupt countries, but much less so in the less corrupt ones.
> I'm talking about actual rule of law, which does protect the rich and poor alike.
What law? Whose law? Who enforces that law if you don't have a government? Without enforcement, the law is meaningless. With enforcement, you've got a government. There's really nothing in between there.
What you're talking about are different forms of government. Better ones, perhaps. There are definitely a lot of improvements possible (and needed) in our current forms of government, and especially so in the US. But one way or the other, you'll still end up with some form of government.
> Consider that by social convention when you aggress against me I have a claim against you for damages. Suppose I can sell that claim. If I can afford to prosecute you directly I do so; if not, I sell my claim against you to someone who is more powerful. But selling a claim is an ordinary business transaction - it doesn't give the buyer any special power over the seller.
Sounds interesting, but to prosecute, you still need courts, you still need enforcement, and that means you still need government. (By the way, this already exists. Some legal claims have gone to the stock market even.)
I read it, and I admit, in my teens, I had a similar sort of wishful thinking about ideal societies, but it's ignoring a couple of issues.
Firstly, it's basically a kind of for-profit government. Will that ultimately be better? Look at how many companies screw their customers now, often without their customers noticing. Of course once customers notice, they can switch, _if_ there is sufficient competition. But companies love merging, and at some point, a powerful protection agency can dictate terms to smaller agencies. The largest agencies can form a cartel to concentrate and divide even more power. And sure, you can switch to a small, independent agency, but will they be able to protect you against the big guys? Maybe if enough people switch, but that takes time.
In the end, you're trying to play one protection racket against another protection racket, but in the end, you're still stuck with a protection racket.
Let's first try to get honest competition working in something fairly innocuous like telecommunication, before we start giving those companies real power, okay?
From the intro: > Anyone with a little imagination can dream up a radical new structure for society, anarcho-capitalist or otherwise. The question is, will it work? Most people, when they hear my description of anarcho-capitalism for the first time, immediately explain to me two or three reasons why it won't. Most of their arguments can be reduced to two: The system will be at the mercy of the mafia, which can establish its own 'protection agency' or take over existing ones and convert them into protection rackets. Or else the protection agencies will realize that theft is more profitable than business, get together, and become a government.
The text that follows explores and answers that objection, always keeping in mind that utopia is not an option - our existing system already is a cartel that screws its customers in many ways and is very hard to hold accountable for its actions. "perfect" isn't an option, but "better" might be achievable.
Exactly. They are a government construct to enable the capitalization of science.
(Note: the fact that it's a government construct does not contradict anything I said.)
> Yes, but increasingly less so.
IMO opinion the real problem isn't that basic science is becoming less publicly available as much as it's becoming less basic, and really less science also.
If "capitalist science" meaning holding scientists to the same production quotas that Frederick Taylor gave steel workers, then above and beyond the problems seen with steel workers, there's the additional problem that bad science drives out good since it's easier to produce.
Though it is lamentable that publicly funded research papers are often encumbered by a fee for access, the general knowledge contained within is still free for the public benefit.
Furthermore, the content within most papers is not patented or even patentable.
His fundamental assessment is still true: publicly funded science is currently a socialist enterprise.
Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process.
Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for.
Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap.
(Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)
But that's not what ends up happening. The funding doesn't get allocated such that the total utility would be maximized. Instead, it is directed toward those areas having a constituency that's better organized.
The result is that AIDS research -- its victims being fairly focused in a particular demographic -- gets about 350x more research funding per victim than does COPD. It gets 112x more than Hepatitis C, and 33x more than Alzheimer's disease. [1]
Government funding equals political funding. And this is what leads to scandals like Solaris, too. The government is not able to make rational decisions, as much as we might tell ourselves that it does. In a democracy, the funding will go to those causes that can muster the most votes.
[1] Source: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm
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>"rather than using the force of gov't to coerce every citizen into paying for it"
Oh please. If we're living a capitalist society, we have to realize that citizens are not incentivized to give a significant portion of their money for the improvement of society, so it's time to stop treating things as though free markets will come in and inevitably save the day without government intervention. Specifically, talking about medical research, there is no incentive for me or any other citizen to fund leukemia research, or heart disease research, and I certainly don't donate money to both causes on a regular enough basis to provide enough monetary support for this research. Unless we rethink our current economic model, this is just not a possibility.
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I certainly agree the government is not an ideal re-allocator of wealth. I think it needs to be reformed. But saying "Hey this isn't ideal, so we should throw it away" is kind of silly, no?
One, you don't necessarily need to donate to different charities for every possible disease. You could donate to a charity "fund" sort of like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Two, I think most people don't donate a lot of money because they feel they are already contributing a lot to benefit society via taxation.
So some sort of central fund for cancer research, where bureaucrats distribute funding to constituent organizations... Hmm where have I heard that before? ;)
> they feel they are already contributing a lot to benefit society via taxation.
So you _do_ admit it is benefitting society?
That's like comparing social security to a personal retirement account.
Let's imagine a hypothetical piece of research that every single person wants, and wants enough to willingly contribute their share (per capita, or wealth/income adjusted, whatever) if that is required in order to have the research done. However, if they value the money they would be contributing more than the marginal change in the research for lack of their funding, they might rationally choose still not to contribute unless coerced to do their part.
Example: you start a project on something like kickstarter, people contribute the amount of money they like. Then after the project reaches its goal, the research starts. If goal isn't reached then people get their money back.
If you had a contract that required defined (possibly in terms of wealth/income) contribution from everyone and would only go if unanimously accepted, that would eliminate this problem but raises obvious logistical issues.
But, I don't think a huge depth or breadth of science gets done that way.
A democratic government should seek to fund science through taxes, if that's what you're asking, yes: we collect taxes to benefit society and science provides an efficient benefit.
(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)
This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.
Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.
Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete.
This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence.
I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this.
Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either.
Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement.
I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs.
Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!
They've utilised their monopoly of force in order to contract themselves to these responsibilities. Most likely in order to use the glory to justify their existence.
I'd argue the exact oppsite: that the current private research work done especially in the field of medicine would yield vastly more benefit for lower costs if it were completely replaced by state funded research.
I'd like to open by saying that I have nothing but respect for Virgin Galactic. I still get chills thinking back on watching the SpaceShipOne flight. I also largely agree with your stance.
That being said the argument could be made that all Virgin Galactic is doing is taking all the hard work and science done by the old state funded model and trying to repackage it in a simple cheaper form for "mass marker" consumption. That's not Science, that's business and engineering. And no one would disagree with that fact that Capitalism is great at business and engineering.
Capitalism rocks at taking concepts out of obscure theoretical journals and putting them in a form that affect our daily lives (often for the better), no argument there. I'm somewhat less convinced that capitalism rocks at getting those concepts into those obscure theoretical journals in the first place.
There are already examples of private investment achieving in these areas despite all of the above. I think private enterprise will eventually take over, but it will be a long battle.
Companies are good at research when there is a payoff in sight. What about the fields with no quick return? Or the fields that don't yet exist?
> "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible"
What's up with the citation to the above paragraph:
> "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example."
I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand.
This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?
One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that.
"Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research."
Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.
That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.
Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general?
Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.
It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent.
Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication.
Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems.
Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children.
the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest
Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results.
Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
Certainly everyone's mother was killed by cancer who works on cancer. And no, not everyone who works at a Big Pharma company is terrible, but the problem is more that Big Pharma is concentrated on improving their current prescription systems, rather than finding a cheap one-off cure. If Big Pharma wants to stop acting like a giant faceless evil monster, I will stop treating it as such. But how can you really justify current medical costs without saying that someone, somewhere in that industry is doing something disingenuous?
> The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
The problem is that there isn't enough demand to justify the cost, if we're doing it in a "if a person is diagnosed, they pay for it" manner that capitalism demands. Cancer research costs many, many billions of dollars due to many factors [1]. Say we're talking about leukemia research. 40,000 cases were diagnosed this year [2], but should each of those cases have to pay for the extremely high costs of research? Or, could we distribute it in a way such that each citizen pitches in a much smaller amount to help cancer research? In my opinion, the latter makes more sense, rather than punishing those who get sick.
Lastly as for credibility in the research world, there are definitely lots of examples I could look up. And also plenty of examples to look up for your cases that you mentioned as well. I think it would be too hard to count, no? But when you see things like the Tobacco Institute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_cu...) it's hard to say that we should research everything privately, because the conflict of interest is just too high. In my opinion, publicly funded research could / should be reformed, but there's not as obvious of a bias one way or the other there.
[1] http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm [2] http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html
Be careful with those broad strokes - they're likely to be a result of selective perception unless supported by external fact.
I actually read the paper (not just the abstract), and I'll be the first to agree that ant that the paper is a little basic, and it makes too many "economics in a vacuum" assumptions.
If you're going to take the time to disagree, though, you really should be prepared to back it up with something. Anyone can spout their opinion ("Capitalism is bad at science") as fact, but that alone is meaningless and adds nothing to the conversation.
Really, though, I'm not sure the conclusion would do much to convince people. The debate between socialism and capitalism has never been purely economic. Most people's positions have a lot more to do with their core values and what they believe is fair.
You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.
See also: