In this one, on competition in science, he talks about public spending on science. He also notes some differences between the production of art and the production of science that could be interesting for those of you who are into the intellectual property rights issue. At the end he touches on what economists would call "intensive vs. extensive growth", and notes that innovation and science is necessary for extensive growth. Barry Eichengreen - in his book on the post-war European economy - stressed that the reason for the economic slow-down in Europe after their initial post-war growth miracles was that they did not have institutions that could foster extensive growth and innovation in the way that the U.S. did.
In this one he talks about science funding as stimulus. I of course agree with him, but I would make distintions between long-run and short-run growth here. He's talking about long-run growth and of course that's not the only thing we need to be thinking about right now. Science funding didn't do badly in ARRA but it was ridiculously lop-sided. The National Institutes of Health got a lot of the research funding, continuing a trend in NIH funding started by the Bush administration. I think a greater emphasis on NSF funding would have made more sense.
Also - Tyson has something in common with Keynes. They're both huge Newton fans.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
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The public funding of science leads to the corruption of science (another thing Eisenhower warned against).
ReplyDeleteBack at the 50th anniversary of the farewell address, the AAAS covered this point well: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2011/0211eisenhower.shtml
ReplyDeleteA few things:
1. Eisenhower's unease at big labs vs tinkerers was understandable insofar as it was a pastoral, nostalgic view in a rapidly changing society. But ultimately the prejudice was misguided on his part.
2. The scientific community was somewhat shocked by this, since the Eisenhower administration had been a big promoter of public scientists and big research labs in general.
3. When pressed by confidants, Eisenhower clarified that he has no problem at all with public funding of science, and had greater concern for the role of the military specifically in the development of science. This clarification of course makes sense in light of the rest of his address and in light of the policies of the Eisenhower administration.
@Gary Gunnels: what a nugget of nonsense. The science funding discussed here is primarily experimentation, engineering and R&D, and the only way it could be "corrupted" is if it didn't fucking produce results. You can give a trillion dollars to the Discovery Institute and they still won't be able to give evidence for creation, but you can give money to engineers and physicists and they'll be able to create a fancy new particle-colliding thingamajig that wouldn't exist without that funding.
ReplyDeleteWatoosh,
ReplyDelete"The science funding discussed here is primarily experimentation, engineering and R&D, and the only way it could be 'corrupted' is if it didn't fucking produce results."
There are plenty of ways to produce results without having any actual results. And of course scientists who are working in politically sensitive areas can have lots of problems when they push against the grain. What's bizarre is this naive faith you have in some sort human institution that is merely "results based."
A good example of what I am getting at here: http://reason.com/blog/2011/04/04/the-green-politics-of-reprisal
This is not an isolated case.
"...and they'll be able to create a fancy new particle-colliding thingamajig that wouldn't exist without that funding."
That seems like a hard to substantiate claim at best.
Well, Gary, there are plenty of particle colliding thigamagigs i.e.Large Hadron Collider at CERN for us to look at. Gubmint communism and crushing of experimentation at its best.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand you can see a half-completed version of the same project in texas. Now that one was on track to be built. Then the government cut funding and it doesn't exist. Somehow the private sector declined to step in and fund this project.
Would you call that substantiation? Or do we have to have a "true free market" first?
"Somehow the private sector declined to step in and fund this project."
ReplyDeleteBecause no one was interested or because of the regulatory and permit regime?
Further consider that there are dozens upon dozens of particle accelerators around the planet; there is definitely a lot of crowding out going on when the state subsidizes this sort of work.
Also, consider that right now there is a private SETI project; lots of people claimed that without the government SETI work was just not going to be feasible.
Anyway, I'm quite glad that we didn't build an LHC in Texas; given how much of a welfare subsidy the Euros leech off the U.S. yearly let them build it (the technological and scientific knowledge can't be bottled from it by the Euros).
let them build it (the technological and scientific knowledge can't be bottled from it by the Euros)
ReplyDeleteGary, that is the problem... private sector actors can't capture the full benefits of possible discoveries, and hence will not do the research. Thanks for pointing that out.
and SETI. That's a wrap.
Hardly.
ReplyDeletePrivate sector actors could capture them if there weren't a couple of hundred government funded accelerators around the planet. You can't just ignore this sort of outright state subsidy for public science and then say "market failure!" Opponents of private space flight used to make the same argument - well, until some of the explicit prohibitions on private space flight were lifted in the 1980s and 1990s.
The point about CERN is that you were all "whoas me" about the collapse of the LHC project in Texas. Much gnashing of teeth went into that by "national greatness" types.
The Allen Array isn't SETI by itself. There are lots and lots of SETI projects. Thus pointing out the robust nature of a private system of such projects - the federal government would have sponsored a once size fits all project that if it ever lost funding would end the whole deal.
Gary -
ReplyDelete1. Crowding out refers to competition for resources, not competition on outcomes. It's not clear to me how the government is crowding out this market. If there were crowding out you'd expect to see price increases in the input market, for one thing. Do we see that? I don't know much about input markets for particle accelerators, with the exception of scientific and engineering labor - and we aren't seen any signs of shortages or crowding out there (and when we do start to see signs, over the last hundred years or so the labor market has adjusted fairly smoothly to it - there's a long literature on this).
2. What benefits are you expecting the private sector to capture? Science has broad benefits that can't be captured - that's one of the most fundamental elements in the economics of science. These benefits also usually come up much farther down the road. Relativity helps us with GPS now, but Einstein didn't work at it to get rich making GPS devices. Argosyjones is exactly right, and you are misunderstanding the economics of the issue.
3. re: "The point about CERN is that you were all "whoas me" about the collapse of the LHC project in Texas. Much gnashing of teeth went into that by "national greatness" types." --- you need to learn to better distinguish between "national greatness types", and people who think that public investment of any sort (international, national, supranational, etc.) in certain positive externalities is important. You seem to have a hard time distinguishing between these perspectives.
4. Let's stop this fallacy of thinking that private sector robustness is somehow incompatible with public viability, and let's stop pretending that everything the private sector does is by definition decentralized and everything the public sector does is by definition centralized. And when thinking about centralization in the public or private sector, let's keep in mind that scale is a function of the production technology (i.e., reasonable economies of scale) as well, and centralization in either private or public hands as a result of scale economies is very different from unhealthy centralization (this applies to Microsoft and NASA alike).
FYI: That screen you stare at when you type is a 30 KeV particle accelerator BTW.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to any current technology, etc. there always was a time when it was considered just impossible for a private entity to capture sufficient rewards in order to make the private finance, etc. of it possible. There was a very early fight regarding this with broadcast television - lots of American liberals/progressives argued that public funding was necessary (this is the route that the UK went), but advertising solved that issue in the U.S. (as has subscription services for cable).
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteWell, the government is crowding the resources associated with particle accelerators. That's true say from the standpoint of personnel.
What benefits? Well, you know, much of modern imaging technology is the result of experiments with particle accelerators. This wasn't accidental really; they were either designed (or as in the case of some older accelerators) retrofitted to do that sort of work. And again, you're looking at a particle accelerator right now (in fact, you stare at it for much of the day).
Yeah, yeah, the LHC was designed to do "big science" supposedly, but there were always actors who wanted something like this subsidized so as to create more down to earth products.
"These benefits also usually come up much farther down the road."
The actual history and sociology of science makes this claim into something of a myth. Their may be a long swath of unthought of technologies that arise, but there are almost always thought of advances which scientists are expecting to suss out. The process isn't quite like the development of the light bulb, but isn't a "build it and they will come" type deal either.
re: "That's true say from the standpoint of personnel."
ReplyDeleteEvidence?
Granted, I've been looking at a bird's eye view, but I've been working through wage and employment data for the last several decades for engineers (and looking at a lot of the literature for natural scientists, although I'm not in that data), and there's no real evidence for this. Not only is there no real evidence for it over the last thirty years that I've been working with - analyses back to the fifties, including work done by several Nobel laureates, find no evidence for this.
Why do you suggest this is happening? What is your evidence?
re: "Yeah, yeah, the LHC was designed to do "big science" supposedly, but there were always actors who wanted something like this subsidized so as to create more down to earth products."
ReplyDeleteJust reread argosyjones's point. Yes, these have "down to earth products" as outputs. That's a huge part of the reason why we invest in science. It makes our lives better and more comfortable.
The problem is, the benefits of basic research are very hard to internalize, so people who do basic research have a much harder time getting compensated than people who do, say, development or even applied research. It's a positive externality. That's the whole problem. We aren't saying there aren't down-to-earth benefits. There are, that's the point. The problem is they can't be internalized to the market transaction and that has consequences for what to expect from market allocation.
1. Show me a private SETI Project that doesn't depend on Government funding for radio telescopes. Hint(The Allen array was dependent on government funding, so look elsewhere.)
ReplyDelete2. You can move goalposts all day long on this LHC CERN thing apparently. Now it's about national greatness.
3. You can't even comprehend the significance of the fact that CERN-generated "technological and scientific knowledge can't be bottled" which you stated yourself. I feel sure that Daniel has already explained this to you better than I can.
4. Private space flight is now possible because of a generation of public subsidy into research and development. That's a good thing. Not to mention most of the funding for private space flight comes from governments.
5. Daniel was right; you're not worth talking to.
I feel sure that Daniel has already explained this to you better than I can.
ReplyDeleteI am a psychic apparently. even as I was typing the words...
Also
ReplyDeleteIf you're looking at a CRT right now, where the hell did you buy it? Are you on a Tandy1000 FFS? Got any TI Basic shareware I can have?
Hoo
ReplyDeleteRah!
"The military system in the United States is basically a government-guaranteed market for high-technology production... It is not a conservative program; in fact, quite the contrary. Reagan's program was to increase the state's component of the state capitalistic system by the classic means... In effect, this means the government will intervene by increasing demand for arms and high technology production to get things moving again... This is a very harmful system economically; it does spur production but in a very wasteful manner. Therefore, we have to make sure that our commercial rivals also harm their economy, roughly to the extent that we harm ours; otherwise we're in trouble... Japan is a rival. Europe is a rival, too. We can no longer tolerate the wastefulness of this type of economic pump priming and still expect to be competitive in world trade... We're putting resources into military production and those resources are not going into things that can be sold, that meet consumer needs in the market... If our engineers are working on the latest technique for making a missile hit 3 mm closer than it did before, and the Japanese engineers are working on better home computers or something, you know what's going to happen... [T]he Japanese system is geared for the commercial market... Our system, on the other had, works quite differently, since our system is the Pentagon system. It is only by accident that it has any commercial utility... a crucial point is that none of this has anything to do with military threats. Nothing." --, Chomsky, Deterring Democracy.
ReplyDelete--successfulbuild
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Washington
address to Congress, January 8, 1790
_____
I agree there should be science funding and I agree it helped during after WWII. An entire industry and discipline (computer science) was created by this funding. I don't see how it crowds out investment as nothing is stopping the private sector from investing.
However, I don't think military investment is that beneficial right now and could be reduced.
The founders hoped that the printed word would be widely disseminated so as to provide people with the reasoning skills they needed to elect good governments. The quote above is only one example of them expressing this opinion.
--successfulbuild