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142 sats \ 3 replies \ @south_korea_ln 25 Oct \ on: War, Taxes, and the National Science Foundation science
It's a long article, and I agree that, indeed, too much research time is wasted on writing the next research proposal. The general gist of the article properly points out the inefficiencies of the system.
So, for the sake of cherry-picking one quote.
I'm not sure about that. Most, if not all, of today's commercial tech is based on solid-state physics. Yes, I saw the iPhone argument about cherry-picking a winner to make a point, but solid state physics is for sure not a good example to pick to make this counterpoint.
Now, will a private market of science better allocate resources?
Mr Klein does not seem to answer that question here.
I've heard someone make the point once that SpaceX is a prime example of a private company doing better than a government agency (NASA). True on one level, but they'd never have been the company they are now without all the government handouts they benefited from. But maybe that's more an argument against space travel as a profitable endeavour.
they'd never have been the company they are now without all the government handouts they benefited from
Neither would Boeing, but it doesn't mean the military industrial complex is worth the expense because we got some better planes out of it.
On one level, it's not possible to know the counterfactuals, so neither side can make airtight assertions. However, the standard is how things would have been allocated voluntarily vs how they've been allocated coercively and none of it is all-or-nothing.
It can be the case that both "solid state physics has generated enormous returns" and "too many resources have been deployed towards solid state physics" are true statements. That's because the marginal solid state physics project is less productive than the average one and may not be as productive as whatever activities had to be forgone to pay for it.
The dimension I'm less sure about is how wasteful the grant process really is. In any system there's going to be some process of justifying research expenditures and that will probably involve something like grant proposals.
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none of it is all-or-nothing.
That's the problem with many of the articles I see arguing against public research. They make it sound like it is an all-or-nothing, too. Just taking the other side of the public vs private research aisle. I did not read the original carefully enough to figure out what position the author really defends behind the avalanche of paragraphs musing on the topic.
But I think we quite agree on this, you don't seem to take an all-or-nothing stance on this. Maybe that's why you won't be writing for Mises, and why I hate writing in my research proposal to get money from Samsung that my basic research is going to have an impact in the next 2 years.
On one level, it's not possible to know the counterfactuals, so neither side can make airtight assertions
Yeah, it's all very speculative.
In the same vein on how hard it is to actually assert whether a bitcoin-standard will be better than the current fiat economy. A reality check by a society that actually goes fully bitcoin will teach us much more than Saifedean's rants on the topic.
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I do have an absolutist view on government research, but it's because I believe states to be morally illegitimate. I'm more agnostic on the possibility of government funded basic research to be net productivity enhancing. There are theoretical econ reasons to be very skeptical of any central planning venture, though.
One way to think about it is that basic research is pretty easy to fund, from an entrepreneurial strategy standpoint. You hire a bunch of nerds and cut them checks when they request more funding. If that tended to be profitable, we'd probably see successful businesses doing it, especially since there are plenty of improvements that can be made to my "Just pay the nerds" model.
Since that doesn't work as a business model, we now need to explain how a bunch of bureaucrats are able to identify value adding ventures when entrepreneurs with direct skin in the game can't. It's far more likely that this just isn't a value adding venture. Again, you'd have to think on the margins. Maybe private industry would only fund the highest valued 20% of research, but that might account for 80% of the total value.
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