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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Oct \ parent \ on: War, Taxes, and the National Science Foundation science
The more common counterexample I hear is that England had basically no public science funding during the time of the Royal Society and produced far more scientific discovery than the other European powers which were spending far more on science.
You don't need one entity to concentrate research in, like a giant tech monopoly, although our giant tech companies do spend a lot on scientific research.
This would take us into another big discussion, which I'd love to hear @south_korea_ln's take on, but current public research tends to be very low value. Almost no one tries to make major advancements, so it's just a bunch of small safe tweaks around what's already well-established. I think that's because of a bunch of ways the current system disincentivizes groundbreaking research.
Almost no one tries to make major advancements, so it's just a bunch of small safe tweaks around what's already well-established.
I work in condensed matter physics. Some of the main goals the field is trying to achieve in the next decade are:
- Achieve room temperature superconductivity
- Make quantum computers based on SC qubits
- Make quantum computers based on topological qubits
- Develop altermagnetic spintronics
- Find a theory of dense trion fluids
- Make excitonic superfluid circuits
These are far from being safe tweaks around what's already well-established. These will lead to trillion-dollar industries once successful (the use of once here is bold but intentional; people working on this do believe we will achieve it, one way or another).
Of course, we build on previous knowledge, and many of the papers are, in a sense, incremental improvements. But take 1 year of adding up such incremental improvements, and you see progress that was thought to be impossible the year before. Because the field has become so specialized, this is the only way to make progress. Long gone is the time when scientists could be experts in different fields and contribute meaningfully to both. Except for math with projects such as the Langlands conjecture to bridge seemingly disparate fields of math, most scientists specialize for years in a very small subfield to advance the field in lockstep with the rest of of people that specialize in slightly different parts of the field. In the above list, there are maybe 2 topics where I have contributed until now.
All this is public research.
Except for the current hype with quantum computers (thanks to previous progress made by public research), I don't see any industry doing its fair share yet (and I don't blame them, they either don't realize yet there is money to be made, or they can't justify to their shareholders doing such research that will only pay off in 50 years).
Of course, for the 100s of scientists working towards these greater goals, there are 100s who don't realize the bigger picture and who just care about making money. But the same is to be said by the 100s of companies that make an impact and the 100s of companies just trying to please Wall Street.
Looking at Wall Street, I think we could go into a very interesting discussion on how the free market does not incentivize useful behavior. But let's focus on the topic at hand~~
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Sounds like exciting times in your field. I'm glad to hear it.
What I've seen, and heard others complain about, is that it becomes hard to challenge orthodoxy when everyone's marching in lockstep. It's too dangerous to be in disagreement with potential reviewers. The areas I've worked and studied in have been highly politicized, which adds a very toxic element to those already flawed incentives.
If your field is making lots of tangible progress, that's not a huge problem, but it becomes one if an ideological pivot is needed.
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Yeah, condensed matter is not really political. There is no orthodoxy to challenge. A material either superconducts or doesn't. You can conclusively prove it1. That's very different from climate science, let's say.
Footnotes
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well, this is maybe the one example where we have some controversy, but what's science without a few scammers2 to make fun of. ↩
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Jan Hendrik Schon, I did enjoy going down your rabbit hole of scams ↩
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A material either superconducts or doesn't.
In econ, our version of this is "A transaction is either voluntary or it isn't." We know that voluntary transactions are welfare enhancing (in expectation and subject to some other caveats), while involuntary transactions are not welfare enhancing (again, subject to a bunch of caveats and clarifications).
That's where the absolutist and seemingly extreme views on this stuff come from. Government funded anything is involuntary and therefor unlikely to be welfare enhancing.
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