[exe34]

it's a shit argument. Fundamental research funded by the government led to the Googles and OpenAIs of today. If industry funds research, the profits stay in the hands of the same people. When government funds research, new billionaires are minted down the line. if you like billionaires (I don't), you'd fund government research, not hope that the existing billionaires think it's in their interest. We wouldn't know about CFCs and the ozone if CFCs companies funded the research - we'd be burned to a crisp.

[monero-xmr]

You have a lack of imagination. The research lead to Google and OpenAI, but you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding. Furthermore there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding, other than esoteric “America benefits when the research happens in America”

[exe34]

> You have a lack of imagination.

Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.

Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding

In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.

This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.

It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.

> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding

The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.

[runsWphotons]

Until somewhat recently America had an advantage in commercialising the basic research. But now increasingly we fund some basic research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars only to see it commercialised overseas (often by China but by others too), often when technical know how is exfiltrated and patents ignored. This reduces the expected benefit of funding the research.

Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).

The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?

[JumpCrisscross]

> it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might

We ascended remarkably similarly to how China is. Stealing IP from the old powers, giving it room and state support to scale and then staying out of nonsense wars.

[runsWphotons]

It wasn't much like China at all in my opinion. China heavily directs its economy, subsidising industries and players it thinks are critical to compete. Their companies aren't simply "given room". The US had protectionist tariffs and gave land to railroads and stuff, but nothing like the kind of industrial policy in modern China. Nor did the US really stay out of wars, although Civil War aside it mostly avoided bad entanglements where it couldn't win or winning cost a lot.

[monero-xmr]

Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer dollars perhaps made sense in a pre-internet age where central planning of research was potentially more efficient when capital moved slowly and wasn’t large enough to fund such endeavors. I truly think that time passed decades ago.

I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.

[Yeul]

Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer money is how China caught up.

Look I get it those with good incomes in America want to pay less taxes because they can take care of themselves.

[palmfacehn]

Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?

If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?

There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.

If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.

However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.

[jltsiren]

People who support public funding for research are usually strongly opposed to central planning in the allocation of the funds. They don't want to have uninformed politicians, administrators, and citizens deciding what research is worth funding. They want to have the decisions done in the field, by people who understand the topic.

Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.

There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.

In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.

[mindslight]

> Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources?

Plenty, of course.

> If so, why is state directed research a special case?

It's not a "special case", but rather there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than governmental funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be some misallocation from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.

Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative centralized industries (which is closer to government funding than not)), we don't.

In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.

[s1artibartfast]

it seems plausible that there are diminishing returns to fundamental research, and that those returns are conditional on the funding system environment.

I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.

[mindslight]

Sure? I would say that "many people" have concluded the system is a negative due to political propaganda fueled by general feelings of powerlessness, and are now trying to backfill justifications as if this is about anything more than the "culture war".

Your argument would be appropriate if we were debating the amount of spending in the context of other spending, or relative to itself. But in isolation as some heuristic it's "not even wrong". The larger context is this same movement blindly destroying our scientific research institutions also just added $5T of new debt, with a large chunk of that being spent on nothing more than a spectacle of performative cruelty (ICE).

And so I have to ask - do you really want to be making an argument in support of indulging the mob in their desire to see people hurt instead of actually advancing as a species?