[moonchrome]

>If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

Sorry it should have been private R&D investment. I'm saying that there is evidence that suggests that public grants to R&D crowd out private investment, that public R&D doesn't correlate with GDP growth, that private R&D does and that grants are inferior to market approaches such as tax breaks for R&D. I think that video I linked overstates the strength of the evidence and it's conclusiveness but it's still a valid point and goes against the accepted view. Also the argument that the Internet is here only because of public R&D is very hard to make because at every instance I've looked at where public R&D gets credited (eg. CERN) there is similar work done separately in the private sector (eg. Xerox PARC). I'm not saying that the evidence is definitive, that all public science funding doesn't generate GDP growth, that GDP growth is a good metric of the value created by public R&D or that public funding is inferior to private, those are all empirical questions (or even unanswerable/subjective) and can't be generalized. I'm just saying that the position you seem to take - without public funding it wouldn't get done - isn't true both historically (eg. check out Nobel prizes from IBM and Bell labs in pure research) and you can make a theoretical argument why that is the case.

As for the authors post, yeah it's a rant but I get where he's coming from.

[microarchitect]

Fair enough, this is a viewpoint I can agree with. I don't think this is what the OP had in mind, though. Or if he did, he didn't do a good job of articulating it.