Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
Because aprior it's not really clear what does increase our collective wealth. For example, the whole quantum age (and hence the silicon age), came about from people trying to understand the spectrum of radiation emitted from a heated box. If you spoke to someone at the end of the 19th century they'd probably think this was a waste of time, and tell you that people should be trying to make steam engines more efficient.
> How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
It is not obvious that fundamental research does not “increase our collective wealth of lead to some useful application”. Just not in the short term, usually. Despite a lot of economics theories, companies being directed by their self-interest or that of their shareholders does not lead to good outcomes over the long term. Someone needs to do it, who’s not going to be limited by ROI over the next 5 years. In practical terms, this can only be public funding.
Taxpayer-funded institutions justify it by pointing out that if there are short-term applications, companies tend to already do the R&D themselves, therefore public money is not needed to have good outcomes. The alternatives are:
- research in private institutions with public money (the big pharma model), which has obvious ethical issues when said private institutions make billions off of publicly-funded research.
- public institutions funding short-term research through things like patent licensing, which is quite impopular (there is a strong argument that public institutions’ output should be public; governments are not corporations).
- governments not funding research at all, which quickly leads to countries falling hopelessly behind as you cannot count on corporations to give a fuck about public good.
Overall, it seems like a good idea to let everyone do what they do best: corporations focus on bringing stuff to market and applications developments, whilst institutions with a longer outlook focus on things that could be used in applications 20 to 100 years from now.