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Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the takeaway here is that the research is getting done despite reduced funding from government.

Also, all of your questions regarding the motives of the wealthy should be asked of the government with equal scrutiny. After all, government is made up of individuals, each with his/her own level of bias and ideology.

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This is a good point, one that I myself make in this type of situations. But… there is a difference in that democratically elected government officials or administrations are, at least in theory, obliged and answerable to the electorate. I think that is a good argument for keeping certain things in the public hand.

You hit on an interesting angle:

> democratically elected government officials ... answerable to the electorate

The heads of the government agencies are appointed by the administration, and most (all?) other employees of the agencies are not. Thus, the only accountability of, say, the research funding administrators at NIH or NSF is to their immediate superiors. That is, they are far removed from the scrutiny of the electorate.

As a rule, government is more transparent and accountable than even publicly traded corporations. FOIA requests, meetings, hearings, transcripts, budgets, expenditures, rosters, etc.

Of course, we should never stop criticizing government (aka democracy). But don't take it for granted either.

>As a rule, government is more transparent and accountable than even publicly traded corporations. FOIA requests, meetings, hearings, transcripts, budgets, expenditures, rosters, etc.

What might make governments even more accountable are the threats of loss of tax revenue (people and companies doing business elsewhere) and loss of campaign contributions. This is similar to how corporations are held accountable by shareholders (CEO compensation), employees (take their talents elsewhere) and customers

At some point or on some level, there's someone whose immediate superior Congress ... who controls the purse strings, I believe. Thus, in a very indirect way, accountable to the electorate (or, keeping appearances when they succeed at avoiding any accountability).

The difference is that the gov't is a bureaucracy and there is a diffusion of responsibility. They make sure no one person is responsible for any financial decisions. So that if the funding doesn't pay off or bring the results they want, they can blame the process/procedures

Diffusion of decision making sounds like a good idea in general. Blaming the process is how NASA produces nearly faultless software, for example.

I never said it was good or bad...

Yeah, there are good and bad aspects. When there's nobody with the authority end decisionmaking and just go with the best option, nothing happens.

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