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Government Funding of Basic Science? Knock It Off.
For decades now, even free-market economists have argued that the government should fund basic scientific research. I myself have always felt suspicious of the argument — this is one reason I remain skeptical of NASA, despite the ridicule of my comrades Rob Long and James Lileks, who can barely contain their pleasure at the thought of spending untold sums to send someone to Mars — but I confess that I’ve never possessed the analytical skills to investigate the argument, let alone refute it.
Along comes Matt Ridley in this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, where he has published a brilliant essay called “The Myth of Basic Science.” Excerpts:
[I]t has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer….[Yet as Terence Kealey, a biochemist who became an economist argues] there is still no empirical demonstration of the need for public funding of research and that the historical record suggests the opposite.
After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. After World War II, the U.S. and Britain began to fund science heavily from the public purse. With the success of war science and of Soviet state funding that led to Sputnik, it seemed obvious that state funding must make a difference.
The true lesson—that Sputnik relied heavily on Robert Goddard’s work, which had been funded by the Guggenheims—could have gone the other way. Yet there was no growth dividend for Britain and America from this science-funding rush. Their economies grew no faster than they had before.
In other words, the government should spend a lot less even than many on our side had supposed.
As for Brothers Long and Lileks, why should NASA spend tens of billions to send a man to Mars when 21st Century Fox has already put Matt Damon on the planet for just $100 million?
Published in General
Well, some organization has to act for who we are as a species. Just about every free people, including peoples not then free benefited from America’s destruction of various tyrannies. But these peoples had nothing to do with what was done; their organized governments sometimes did, for better or worse.
Who is going to act to save the species when we do not think of ourselves, for purposes of action, as such?
It turns out this has actually been done. It’s a San Francisco startup called Experiment, and they’ve raised a little over $2.4 million in investment.
WSJ: Experiment.com Gains Big Venture Backers To Bring Crowdfunding To Science Research
But they do tiny research projects. It appears that the average project raises only a couple thousand dollars. Nothing of the scale of government research projects such as the $3.5 million study of why lesbians are chubby, or other projects we’ll need to advance humanity.
Private industry already spends much more than the government on R&D, including funding basic theoretical sciencce. Have a look at the Nobel prizes in science, and you’ll be surprised how many come from private corporations and foundations. IBM spends billions on basic science. Microsoft Research is massive, and a lot of it is aimed at basic science.
Philanthropy is huge here. The Allen radio telescope array is privately funded. Many of the world’s great telescopes have private funding. Billions of private dollars fund cancer research. The X-prize has stimulated a lot of research and development. The human genome was sequenced by a private company.
I actually don’t mind government funding big science projects that are beyond the capability of any private firm, such as deep space probes or the Large Hadron Collider. The problem is with the myriad grants asnd subsidies for ‘science’. Which have the effect of crowding out small firms who don’t have access to the halls of power, and consolidating research among a few large companies. That is very detrimental to progress, bencause true innovation comes from a process where many, many ideas are tried.
The left operates under the fallacy that science can be boosted by having ‘pro science’ politicians driving the direction of research with government power. They believe that just throwing more money at the same institutions will result in more in more innovation. But just as an economy thrives most when it is centrally controlled least, maximal innovation happens when you have many, many people exploring different paths and following their own hunches and ideas. You can’t ‘plan’ breakthroughs and discoveries.
One reason why my company refuses all government money.
And yes, we do some pretty fundamental research.
The history of science and technology supports Ridley’s argument.
Historian Phillip Glass points out that innovation often flows from the practical to the theoretical. Telescopes and spectacles were not invented by scientists, but by craftsmen who were experimenting. Scientists came along later and used the technological tools to study the skies.
Likewise the history of human technological innovation is dominated by human invention, which then enables science – it is not science that enables invention! Such enormous advances for human health as running water, sewage systems, and shoes all predate the germ theory of disease that much later explained how people get sick. The history of medicine is full of examples of medicines that work, but nobody is quite sure why until much later (think of Aspirin and penicillin). And forces like gravity, which can be described and modeled very beautifully by science, are still not understood. The lack of understanding has not stopped mankind, from ancient times to the present day, from harnessing gravity in countless human-made machines and mechanisms.
An exception: Nuclear fission, where science postulated something that was tested afterward, following the “accepted” version of how things are supposed to work. But these remain exceptions. Technology, by and large, has led the way. Engineers, those much-maligned junior cousins of “scientists,” design and develop the computers that scientists use, the software that run those computers, the cars and trains and airplanes that scientists use to attend conferences. Humans were harnessing fossil fuels long before geologists declared that they came from fossils.
Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. He appointed bright people, then left them alone. Over the course of a few years, the moving assembly line popped up from the grass roots. It was such an egalitarian development that the official company magazine did not even recognize what had happened until well after the fact.
It is quite telling that Ford’s executives didn’t even have a name for the assembly line at first, and that the term ‘assembly line’ was hardly used even in the technical press in 1913 and 1914. The Ford innovation wasn’t a research and development goal, nor was it first developed as a theory and then put into practice.
The most productive factories are not those that are designed by great minds on a clean sheet of paper; the most productive and nimble factories are those that involve every worker on the floor, each as free as possible to improve what they contribute to the whole. And then the great minds study what has worked, and use it as the baseline for the next great factory.
From Alexander Graham Bell to the modern discovery of how to extract natural gas from shale, it is not perfect understanding that leads to breakthroughs, but rather accidents and errors. Human creativity is typically not actually a result of a great thinker in an ivory tower. It is usually achieved through hands-on work: tinkering, crafting and active experimentation.
I see the “opportunity cost” as the biggest reason why government funding of the sciences is so destructive. Government money takes smart people and makes them waste their talent in fruitless and stupid endless grant cycles. What a loss!
You are missing the point.
It does not matter whether you have taken government money. If your invention appears to relate to aerospace you may get a notice and have to respond. It seems to go in cycles perhaps based on who at the Patent and Trademark Office is doing the reviewing. In some years, only rocketry and aerodynamics might merit notices; in other years, almost anything related to aerospace does.
Many times I’ve seen such notices when the first line of the patent application references the USAF contract that funded it.
Thousands of patent applicants per year are forced to jump through this hoop at considerable cost so as to provide 100% compliance with NASA’s vanity requirements.
In our case (over 150 patents filed), we have never had any issues, nor have we had any export limitations. This includes for patents that really ONLY have military uses.
It helps to avoid government contracting and military work.
It’s not that hard. The question is something like this: how much did Edison need to know? The practical incandescent light bulb is a search for a material cheaper than platinum that glows in a vacuum for an acceptable amount of time when a current passes through it. For Edison we know this was a brute force search, not an excursion into physical chemistry. For a dc generator, what’s important about Faraday: his law or his experimental equipment showing that a magnet moving over a wire induces a current?
If you think about it, the phenomenon must precede its explanation (except possibly in Laputa). Explanation is the afterthought: the usual case is the physics catching up with the practical device (10 years for the transistor.) One advantage of really understanding the thing is that you can build from it easier (think Lee de Forest vs. Edwin Armstrong in uses for a triode), but even then you still get useful devices from someone saying “I bet I can find a use for these lousy, leaky transistors” and coming up with DRAM.
Building anything from first principles is the uncommon case.
\
S,
With all due respect, you are hallucinating. I suggest you talk to the next engineer you meet about engineering anything without knowing the basic science. The first principles were simply assumed because they had become so well known.
This is romanticism about things that are anything but romantic.
Regards,
Jim
NASA rights and export issues are really unrelated.
My guess is less than one in 200 military-related patent applications receives an actual Secrecy Order. You can sometimes get these merely by using a bad word or two. About 20 years ago, the word “encrypt” was a bad word that could cause an otherwise innocent application to receive a secrecy order.
Nonsense.
Engineers don’t need to know science at all.
Do you know any civil engineers who use Einsteinian mechanics to design something? I don’t. Newtonian mechanics are wrong, but they are sufficiently correct to be useful.
Engineers only worry about what works. Rules of thumb dominate, and they are worked out using trial and error.
iWe,
Again your argument is childish and circular. Do you not consider Newtonian Mechanics Science?!! Can you imagine engineering without it. You are sneaking science in through the back door to your engineers. Without first principles you get garbage not anything useful.
Regards,
Jim
Noted. Though we have not had any NASA issues either, despite applications that talked about, for example, replacing radioisotope thermoelectric generators for use in deep space probes.
Of course not. Science is something that describes the natural world and is, as far as we know, true. Newton was wrong. His laws give you wrong (but useful) answers.
Buildings were built long before people understood how they worked. Intuition, and trial-and-error are enormously important tools.
iWe,
I recommend trial and error then for your next project. That should occupy you for the rest of your life.
No thanks.
Regards,
Jim
Have you read any of the threads on Ricochet about the importance of failure?
Even with all the science we know, innovative engineering is always pushing the “what actually works?” envelope. And it does NOT come from atomic-level understandings of metallurgy.
Understanding does not come as a bolt of lightning. It is an iterative process.
iWe,
Iteration implies a method. No method is just madness. Abe Lincoln said that if he had an hour to chop wood he’d spend 45 minutes sharpening the axe.
Regards,
Jim
Merely having a method is not science. Government does not fund methods.
iWe,
You are suggesting trial and error. That is not any method at all. As far as the government, it is quite questionable just what the government is funding. In some cases it is not science, not a method, not even trial & error but a narrative to be used as propaganda.
Regards,
Jim
The vast majority of what NASA does, and for that matter, the Energy Department, Defense Department, and other government programs and grant providers, including the NSF is for applied science and engineering. Very very little goes to true basic research. Some of what DARPA does, some of what the NSF funds, and a little of what NASA or the Energy department does, actually funds basic research. Most is applied work in engineering, and occasionally a bit of science. This has always been a good complaint about the Space Station, for example, it cost tens of billions, but has allowed a couple of million of what might be justified as basic research, most of the “science” program is still applied science or engineering.
I think there are valid reasons for government spending in some of these areas, but only where there is a legitimate government purpose, e.g. Defense being the main one, but there might be others where government should be involved. We should have the conversation in those cases.
This is why the super-conducting, super-collider was never built, according to one of the members of the committee/commission that was charged with picking a site. Before the site was chosen, lots of people were in favor. Once the site was chosen, people from the states and congressional districts that were not chosen were against it. (This is what I gathered from the unpublished memoirs of said commission member.)
Hadn’t heard of that program, Google helped.
Not sure how the wage rate applies here, because you’ll end up with a blended rate split between the labor between the U and the private company.
It does look like, though, with all the strings and requirements, that it looks exactly how you would not want to invest in private-sector or public-private sector research. There is nothing nimble about gov’t grant monies, and I imagine the application, monitoring, and report-outs are an admin nightmare, eating into (probably) the U’s budget if not cannibalizing the grant, and/or contributing to overhead rate growth in both models.
Why is the gov’t picking technologies to invest in? Are they any good at doing anything right? Just saying “investment” is USG cover for another word: Boondoggle.
For NSF grants, the application process is difficult. It’s hard work to write a good proposal, and the odds of success are slim. The monitoring and reporting that is required are pretty light, although universities do monitor to make sure that the funds are being expended as specified in the proposal budget. I once had a university auditor call me and question a purchase I made, asking where it was in the budget. I explained over the phone, and that was the end of it. But I was not one to get overly creative in coming up with such justifications.
One of our professors got a lot of his research funding from the Department of Energy, and the reporting required on those was very different. He had a reputation within the DoE as someone who got his reports done on time and in great detail. I am told that the file cabinets full of his reports (this was before the days of electronic reporting) were an object of wonder at the DoE.
I gotta admit, when I saw this on Sunday I was waiting for iWe to step in. We had the discussion he covered in comment #67 at the Mackinac meetup. I’ve got another counterexample for you: the Transistor.
Even so, Mr. Gawron, I’ve got to back iWe in this one. Engineers are much more likely to use trial and error than a first principles approach to solve problems. Are you familiar with Design of Experiments? You have a problem, you think of a couple variables that might affect your problem, and then you run tests at each combination of those variable to see what works best. Don’t let the Wikipedia page fool you, it has very little to do with learning why a thing works and very much to do with finding a good enough solution quickly.
Hank,
I am well aware of the difference in temperament and method of scientists and engineers. Engineers often use bench marks not theoretical maxima. Anyone who has run a process knows sooner or later they will need the rule of thumb as the measurement won’t be there or be there on time.
What you are missing is that hidden in your evaluation of everything is the science that you already know and just take for granted. There is no need to stop what you are doing and swear an oath to the NSF. However, moving the knowledge foundation forward helps everyone do their job. It also opens up doors to whole new possibilities not seen before. That doesn’t mean that going through the door won’t take guts and the seat of your pants.
Everybody has a role to play.
Regards,
Jim