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by ronaldx
4574 days ago
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Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite. Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process. Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for. Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap. (Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science) |
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But that's not what ends up happening. The funding doesn't get allocated such that the total utility would be maximized. Instead, it is directed toward those areas having a constituency that's better organized.
The result is that AIDS research -- its victims being fairly focused in a particular demographic -- gets about 350x more research funding per victim than does COPD. It gets 112x more than Hepatitis C, and 33x more than Alzheimer's disease. [1]
Government funding equals political funding. And this is what leads to scandals like Solaris, too. The government is not able to make rational decisions, as much as we might tell ourselves that it does. In a democracy, the funding will go to those causes that can muster the most votes.
[1] Source: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm