“It’s extraordinary that a state that struggles to provide essential services like public health and education somehow thinks it can be the vanguard of a new technological revolution. British ARPA is destined to fail because it is built on a fundamental myth: that state-funding for scientific research magically turns into marketable innovations and economic growth.”
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Samizdata quote of the dayAugust 20th, 2020 |
 24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Science research can often be turned into technology, and technology can often spur science research. Government funding, however, often leads to corruption and waste – not always, but often. Consider NASA, then look at SpaceX. Once NASA got the science and technology working, they slid down into the pork barrel. SpaceX couldn’t have gotten started without NASA (though the military might have done the rocket thing just as well). But now that they’re going, they don’t have to answer to a swarm of bureaucrats and committees.
The article doesn’t talk a lot about *why* state-funded blue skies science doesn’t have a great track record.
The *funding* isn’t what matters. It makes no difference to the scientific outcome whether the money came from taxpayers, or a pension fund, or a bank, or shareholders.
What matters is *what you choose to research*, and why. Commercial companies won’t put money into research unless they see a high probability of it making money. Government labs are usually forbidden from researching easily-exploitable topics because those are things that private industry is already doing anyway, and it breaches competition rules on state aid. Commercial companies will complain if they’re facing competition from a rival with state backing. For both reasons, commercially successful ideas are vastly more likely to come from commercial research.
There is also the huge gulf between reasearch and innovation. It’s one thing to invent a commercially exploitable idea. It’s another thing entirely to solve all the practical problems needed to bring it to market at an affordable price. Governments don’t do the latter, and it’s largely what decides which ideas succeed.
Also, there is the problem that it is nearly impossible to disentangle all the many varied ideas and technologies that go into making a product. We have all heard the “How to make a pencil” story. The same interconnectedness applies to invention. It’s a meaningless question who ‘invented’ it.
The biggest effect such an approach might have is to pump a lot of money into training scientists and engineers – to build up an experienced and educated workforce who can go out into industry and invent things commercially. As the article says, sometimes it’s the people who *leave* the government labs to go work in industry who have both the blue-skies theoretical breadth of knowledge and the narrow profit-seeking practical motivation to innovate.
Maybe some blue sky cutting edge research on getting the motorway repairs finished.
I don’t see why this would be true. SpaceX isn’t using any technology specific to NASA. Most of it dates to the 1950s. You could make the argument without the capsule contracts SpaceX would not have survived, but the company was already launching commercial payloads by then and as it’s not a public company we don’t have the financials to say one way or another.
Nullius in Verba
The *funding* isn’t what matters. It makes no difference to the scientific outcome whether the money came from taxpayers, or a pension fund, or a bank, or shareholders.
That isn’t true for the simple reason that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Where the funding comes from matters a LOT as to how it influences the outcome. An example of this someone gave here (apologies that I can’t attribute since I don’t remember.) For a zoologist, which project is more likely to get government funding: “A study on the migration patterns of gray squirrels”, or “The effects of global warming on the migration patterns of gray squirrels”? Both studies could well be exactly right, but the paymasters want to push an agenda and do so even through pure science itself. Heck, NASA was nothing more than a wing of the cold war, and you don’t get more political than that.
Were I to show a Greenie a report on fracking explaining the benefits and safety of such a procedure, he would dismissing out of hand had it been funded by Shell Oil. Why are we so ready to accept reports favorable to Big Government, when they are funded by Big Government?
What matters is *what you choose to research*, and why. Commercial companies won’t put money into research unless they see a high probability of it making money.
But that comes across as pejorative. Making money is not a bad thing, it is the opposite of a bad thing. Another way of saying “making money” is “making services and products that satisfy people’s needs so much that they are willing to part with money for them.” Research that doesn’t meet people’s happiness or needs is pointless.
Now does government research produce useful results? Of course, if you sling around a few billion dollars you are going to do some good. But the question really is this: if the government had left that money in the hands of the companies or individuals who made it would we not be better off? Maybe we would not have discovered the Higgs Boson, or had less understanding of black holes, but we might have discovered a better cochlear implant, or a safer automobile, or more mosquito nets for malarial countries.
Just as when Shell Oil spends money they do so to benefit Shell Oil, so to when the government spends money it is to profit politicians an bureaucrats and any benefit that might accrue is merely a side effect.
Where the funding comes from matters a LOT as to how it influences the outcome.
Exactly.
Let me twist the meaning somewhat by highlighting the word ‘from’.
– If this money for STEM is deleted from some budget for soft-subject woke research, that’s a gain – and likewise if it comes from many another government source. Best if it were then left with the taxpayer from whom it came, but half-a-loaf is better than no bread – and further cuts to woke budgets better than quarrelling over the beneficiary of this one.
– If instead it comes from the already over-burdened taxpayer, that is ‘no bread’ or worse.
Dominic Cummings is keen to refocus UK education on maths and science – a most worthy goal.
Intelligent critique of the methods is also worth having, of course.
(If I am remembering correctly) you are remembering Nigel Calder’s remark on “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (2007). He uses that example to show how researchers whose own work has no natural connection to global warming are motivated to endorse the idea because it will swing key votes on funding bodies, thus creating an echo chamber which is then presented as the scientific consensus.
“That isn’t true for the simple reason that he who pays the piper calls the tune.”
If you borrow the money from the bank, say, does the bank get a say in how you spend it?
No. The only thing the bank cares about is that they believe you have the means and intention to repay it. The government could quite easily offer money for scientific development, without taking any part in picking which projects to give it to. Or they could, like commercial funders, only give it to those who are close to delivering something money-making. They could do it as a lottery – giving money to projects at random. The funding and the direction of research are separate and distinct. The problem (if it is one) isn’t with state funding of science, it’s with state direction of science.
But I think the causal arrow is to some degree the other way round. It’s not that it fails to deliver because it’s state funded. It’s that it’s state funded because it’s expected to fail to deliver. Who is going to make a profit from manufacturing the Higgs boson? Where’s the money in taking pictures of black holes? Who is going to buy a theory unifying gravity with quantum mechanics? As a scientist working for a commercial company, the most important question your bosses ask is “How are we going to make money from this?” and the idea that somebody at some other company might come up with an application in 250 years time is of no interest to them.
Blue skies science is a public good. We all use the products of what was once blue skies research, but usually from so far back that there can be no commercial connection. The number theory invented by Fermat in the 17th century is used today in cryptography to secure internet money transfers. How could Fermat possibly get paid by the internet banks for that? But if you stick to researching only what has an obvious immediate commercial application, you constrain and impoverish your thinking – you get no great leaps or scientific revolutions.
Think of it as like making TV shows. If you pay attention only to what makes money, then the airwaves will be filled entirely with soap opera and fake-dramatic ‘reality’ shows and no-talent ‘talent’ shows and dating shows and cookery shows, in endless permutations. Celebrity big-brother ballroom bake-off. Or the music industry – where there are a handful of manufactured boy bands and global stars being pushed by huge publicity campaigns who repeatedly appear in the charts. We’ve got seven billion people on this planet – are we really saying Lady Gaga and One Direction are the best we can do?! That’s what makes money – the lowest common denominator. Where do the fundamentally new ideas come from?
To invent something truly new, you can’t be thinking about what’s going to make the most money, because that’s where everybody else already is. It’s not the only consideration, but it’s an important one.
Speaking as a mathematician, my starting point is that my department makes (quite a lot of) money from teaching. As a non-profit, a major way we should spend that is on blue skies research. In fact, most of it gets nicked to subsidise Chemistry.
If someone goes on a pro liberty site and types an obvious untruth such as “it makes no difference” where funding comes from (voluntary or forced) they are a “Troll” – someone who is simply writing to annoy, like someone who goes into a bar in Glasgow and shouts “all Scotsman are tossers”. Nullius is a troll, and he will not leave voluntarily because he enjoys being obnoxious – that is why he is here.
Of course it matters whether funding is voluntary or from force and fear (government spending) – force and fear corrupts everything it touches. This was he central point of pro liberty writers such as Bastiat and J.B Say – higher government spending is not just “economically inefficient” it is a moral EVIL – for it is based on either taxation, or borrowing (delayed taxation) or money creation (which debases the currency itself – and that is a clear moral evil).
The great moral evil of increasing government spending can only, possibly, be justified on “lesser evil” grounds that an even greater moral evil will occur if the government does NOT increase its spending. Government, the “Sword of State”, is about violence – force and fear. But force and fear has its place in the world (at least some people believe so) in countering other force and fear.
For example, the supporters of Rearmament in the 1930s did not (at least did not if they were sane) deny the moral evil of tax-and-spend, they argued conquest by National Socialist Germany would be a greater moral evil, therefore that Rearmament was the lesser evil.
As for scientific research it is possible that commercial research will leave some things out – and it is possible that people interested in these things will not be able to fund itself.
This is why there are charitable foundations for scientific research, and it also why wealthy people have endowed universities – hoping that scientific truth, objective and universal truths, would be uncovered perhaps centuries after their own death.
Sadly even research that is voluntarily funded can be corrupted – especially in a corrupt age such as own own, with its “Peer Review” (group think – crushing dissent), and scientific journals and institutions more and more dominated by a Collectivist political agenda.
Nothing new about that idea – after Plato taught that one should de facto accept that the planets moved, as this was useful for navigation, but that one should TEACH that they did NOT move – and censor any dissent with state violence.
Sir Francis Bacon (supposedly very different from Plato philosophically) held that state violence should be used against those who claimed that the Earth went the Sun.
Sir Francis was interested in scientific research – but his faith in a Technocracy (the “New Atlantis”) would please the Covid 19 Totalitarians – Sir Francis also believed that judges should be “Lions UNDER the Throne” – the role of the law NOT being to limit state power in any way.
To creatures such as Sir Francis Bacon or his henchman Thomas Hobbes (essentially an “Igor” figure to Sir Francis’ Dr Frankenstein) there is no moral problem we see today – even extreme examples such as Victoria Australia. This is because there are, to them, no rights AGAINST the state – indeed an excuse such as Covid 19 is NOT needed, if the ruler or rulers just feels like doing this that is enough – as “the law” is just the WILL OF THE RULER OR RULERS.
David Hume, with his radical scepticism (both about the physical universe and the human mind) need not detain us – if there is physical universe there is nothing for the scientist to study, and if the human person (the mind – the reasoning “I”) does not exist there is no scientist anyway. Not that Mr Hume ever made the clear statement “the physical universe does not exist” or the clear statement “the mind does not exist”, he covered everything in his polite but UNCLEAR language (which J.S. Mill bizarrely called the “light of Hume”, but which would be described as the “thick dark smoke of Hume – with his effort to “explain” the mind, really being an effort to EXPLAIN AWAY the mind).
Jeremy Bentham is another person who denies that there are any rights AGAINST the State – he says that government should act for the “greatest good of the greatest number” but what that means is for government to decide.
To Bentham (as to the others above) the state LYING is fine (as Plato put it – the “Noble Lie”, if it is for the cause of Collectivism) – objective scientific truth (if it exists at all) is less important than the desires of the State.
Why so much on philosophy?
Well let as assume, for the sake of argument, that a possible state (say under a ruler with a deep personal respect for scientific truth) might do good science – even if it funded it in an evil way.
Such a state is not the BRITISH State – the BRITISH State is influenced by the philosophers above (and others who are as bad – or worse, such as Dr KARL MARX), it DESPISES truth and it hold that there are rights AGAINST the state, certainly NOT the rights of truth.
Nor is the British state unusual – sadly most modern Western States are influenced by the same sorts of thought.
They have no love of truth, they believe that ordinary people have no rights AGAINST them, and they LIE as they breath – to most States it does not matter a fig if they, for example, change scientific data (such as temperatures in the 1940s) to fit a political agenda.
The idea that such wicked entities should have anything to do with training scientists (who are supposed to be defined by their love of TRUTH) is clearly insane.
And what they fund they, eventually, corrupt.
Obviously the “social sciences” have been utterly corrupted – even stating a simple truth, such as black people kill far more white people in the United States than white people there kill black people, is enough to get a university “social scientist” denied tenure – indeed such a person is likely to be savagely persecuted even when they are a student.
But it also starting to get this way in the physical sciences.
Scientific truth itself is NOT dying – it can not die, even if every human being denies the truth the truth itself remains exactly the same.
But it is becoming harder and harder to openly state the scientific truth – due to the persecution of truth tellers.
Pecunia non olet, Paul.
“If you borrow the money from the bank, say, does the bank get a say in how you spend it?”
What bank is it that doesn’t want to know EXACTLY what you’re planning to spend the money on? Unless the loan is 150% secured of course.
“What bank is it that doesn’t want to know EXACTLY what you’re planning to spend the money on?”
Any bank offering an automatic overdraft?
Some of the truths of the human affairs were uncovered a very long time ago.
For example, Plato (in spite of being a Collectivist – perhaps even BECAUSE he w was a Collectivist) understood that democracies are turned into tyrannies by leaders offering the poor the goods of the rich, corrupting the people by making theft (injustice) sound like justice by talking of “fairness” and “distribution”.
Aristotle(although most certainly not a libertarian in his politics) understood the truth that trying to cure poverty by tax-and-spend was like pouring liquid into a jar with-no-bottom-in-it.
The truths that led to Welfare Reform in the United States in the 1990s (do NOT give people money or stuff, funded by taxation, in return for NOTHING) had actually been know for thousands of years.
The advantage that the physical sciences traditionally have had is that it is easier to make such truths STICK.
One can carefully explain why mass state benefits are a bad idea, tending to the INCREASE of poverty over generations (the growth of an underclass) a thousand times – using both logical arguments and empirical evidence. But that will NOT stop people (hello Senator Harris) supporting the idea of income for “the masses” from the state (2000 Dollars a month was her latest offer – why not two MILLION Dollars a month for everyone?).
Even obvious principles of economics such as how a price system works will be ignored by a politician (again – hello Senator Harris) who wants to support such madness as RENT CONTROL.
Empirical evidence? Senator Harris is from San Francisco – he knows the harm rent control does.
Logical arguments? Senator Harris was the head of the student economics club at her university – like her Marxist father (an economist at Berkeley) she KNOWS these policies do harm.
“Cloward and Piven” (1960s tactic – deliberately seek to increase the number of people dependent on government handouts, the “Great Society” was not a failure to Cloward and Piven, it did what they wanted it to do) – advocate the WORST policies you can in order to destroy the West (capitalism”).
So telling these people that “guaranteed income” and all the rest of it will do harm is pointless – because they already KNOW that. Indeed that is why they support the policies they do – in order to do as much harm as possible.
The physical sciences have been, historically, less political – so more likely to achieve progress.
Sir Francis Bacon may want people punished for saying the Earth goes round the Sun – but most rulers really can not see the political point in persecuting the physical sciences.
The temptation to persecution in the physical sciences comes when a scientific truth contradicts an element of religious faith.
For example a literalist reading of parts of the Bible. Or the modern religion of “Social Justice” – with its off shoots such as “Climate Justice” and “Racial Justice”.
As for good science coming of evil.
Pope Gregory XIII was a great patron of the natural sciences – we still use the Gregorian callender.
But how did he get the money?
The Pope got the money by demanding that every property owner PROVE that their ancestors had “justly acquired” the property in the distant past.
Not that they themselves had inherited it – but that the property had never bee stolen EVER over the generations.
Of course people could not do this – so the Pope was able to take their property to fund his scientific and other research.
Rome itself was already infamous for poverty – due to the policy of Pope Gregory the First of (in imitation of Ancient Rome) handing out free food to the poor (like “Food Stamps” brought by President Kennedy in 1961 and which over generations have helped corrupt American society), but this “legal” robbery was all over the PAPAL STATES (not just the city of Rome).
The people who had their property stolen had two choices….
Take the welfare of the state – or become robbers (which the Papal States soon became famous for).
After all being a bandit has more style than begging from the state – and it is just “Social Justice” without the middle man of the state.
staghounds – you are trying to reason with a TROLL.
You are wasting your time Sir.
NASA, (and the military, as I’ve mentioned) did a lot of work developing rocket engines, and building a base of people who knew how to make and use rocket engines. Without that body of knowledge, technology, and people, SpaceX would be working off Robert Goddard’s designs. The USSR certainly weren’t going to give over their secrets! The captured German rockets might have been a basis, but that gets back to my “or the military”.
It’s the “We stand on the shoulders of giants” scenario. It’s definitely not “We stand on the purses of the paymasters”. The fickle paymasters have turned NASA into a bloated machine for getting money into senatorial districts, and they really don’t let NASA maintain focus. Too many cooks spoil the broth, after all. How many wonderful rocket programs have been started, then canceled when they got late and over-budget? The Constellation program was canceled after one half-ass launch of a partial Ares V. The Space Launch System was started in 2011, expecting an uncrewed first launch in 2016. It’s possible it may happen in 2021. Launches are expected to cost well over a billion dollars each, while the Falcon 9 had its first launch in 2010, and after several versions is now man-rated and carrying astronauts to orbit for less than a hundred million dollars. The Falcon Heavy, of course, is more expensive.
Scientists and technologists can do a good job on private money or government money. But government money comes with more strings attached, and you end up with more jobs than just the job.
“staghounds – you are trying to reason with a TROLL.”
No he isn’t.
You obviously have your own immovable opinion about me, and seem determined to be nasty about it, and I’m not going to argue about that. That’s your choice. But everyone else gets to make their own mind up about who they choose to talk to.
I’m not a troll. I’m just somebody who holds a different opinion on some things to you. The world has lots of them, and it’s a sad life when we find ourselves incapable of listening to anyone who has a different view to our own.
Having had clients who have received small business loans – private and otherwise – and having had to help them lay out their books on a regular basis for the bank to examine, and to request permission from the bank loan officer for expenditures – I’d take exception to this one statement of yours.
“Having had clients who have received small business loans – private and otherwise – and having had to help them lay out their books on a regular basis for the bank to examine, and to request permission from the bank loan officer for expenditures – I’d take exception to this one statement of yours.”
Was the loan secured against the business itself? Or have they based their ability to repay entirely on the profits coming out of the business itself? Then the question might still be whether they had the means and intention to repay it. Or banks might offer accountancy services as a service to people with no experience of running a business.
But other than that, what right or interest would the bank have in how you ran your business? They don’t own it. They have no rights over it.
They have whatever right or interest that you grant them in the contract defining the loan. In my experience, most loans to not-mega-corp businesses contain such terms – unless, of course, you have sufficient collateral such that you don’t really need the loan. If not – if you’re like most small-business owners – you sign the contract and accept a troublesome partner for the life of the loan.
(Not arguing with any of your other points – just this one.)
Paul Marks vs NiV ?
There aren’t enough words in the Universe. Posts with word counts needing scientific notation.
When did you say you’d stopped beating your wife?
Paul may be wordy, but you get the impression he is seeking the truth.
NiV on the other hand, doesn’t believe there is such a thing as ‘truth’.
I am seeking the truth APL – but, of course, that is no guarantee I am going to find it. After all I recently found out that I had laboured under a radical misunderstanding for some FORTY YEARS – and I will not deny that this was a blow.
As for the application of science.
I do not believe that there is any serious doubt that the establishment elite know the Covid 19 narrative is a lie – Covid 19 does indeed exist and is a very serious disease (although there are treatments for it – if it is caught early, treatments the establishment elite have tried to SMEAR for their own vile reasons), but the “narrative” is false – the “the state has to be given these vast and arbitrary powers” narrative is false, and they KNOW it is false.
If they did not know the narrative was false the establishment elite would have been horrified by the Black Lives Matter and Anfifa riots – after all, due to lack of “social distancing”, vast numbers of their own leftist supporters were going to die……
But the establishment elite were not horrified – indeed they SUPPORTED and ENCOURAGED the “anti racism” riots (not that the death of Mr George Floyd was anything to do with racism – and the establishment elite knew that as well).
They supported and encouraged the massive riots because they knew the huge numbers of their own supporters doing them would NOT die, that they would still be alive to vote for Puppet Biden in November (not ALL the votes can just be printed – they need SOME real votes, even though they intend to have MILLIONS of fake mail in ballots).
It is the same with the Belarus protests now. Where are the masks – there are very few. Where is the “social distancing” – there is none at all.
The international establishment elite do not care, they support the protests – because they know their own narrative is a lie. And Belarus is a bit of a problem – as the local dictator (a bad man – but not THEIR bad man) did not do anything about the virus, and it was no worse in Belarus than the lands that “locked down”. THAT is the reason the local dictator has to go, they have not cared about him for 26 years, but now he is a threat to the Covid narrative, they do care.
So explaining to them that the “science” behind their Covid narrative is false is pointless – because they ALREADY KNOW that.
It was not a mistake – it was a massive campaign of lies to justify their “sustainable development” power grab.
To have such people in control of the funding of science is not a good idea.
As President Trump puts it “if you can protest in person – you can vote in person”.
The left hate that – because it is TRUE. The left hates the truth.
And I was certainly no friend of Donald Trump in 2016 (check up what I wrote about him) and I STILL think he is a wild spending New York City Big Mouth.
The left also hate “poverty is not a barrier to photo I.D. – because we are prepared to give you that for free”.
People who were sincere about “the poor can not afford photo I.D.” would be delighted at an offer to provide it for free. But the left are not sincere about this – so they are horrified by an offer of free photo I.D. (as it destroys their false “narrative”).
Again this is not just the “social sciences” left – it is also the natural sciences left, as they moved into the natural sciences long ago now. Especially “public health”.
In short when listening to a “public health expert” you are likely to be listening to an enemy of civilisation – that is what their “advice” is intended to do, smash “capitalism”.
Really want these people in control of the study of the physical sciences?
As for the denial of objective truth.
Yes indeed – this philosophy makes a fetish of its love of “science” but its principle of relativism DESTROYS science. Destroys the very foundation of science.
It is not an accident that it was Thomas Reid not his opponent David Hume that actually did physical science. For if one takes the philosophy of Hume seriously (and translates it from its gentle language – to get a clear meaning) Hume is casting doubt about BOTH the existence of the physical universe (the very thing science is meant to study – why study something that does not exist) and the existence of he human mind (“explaining it” is really “explaining it away”) – if there is no “I” (no personhood – no agency) then there is no scientist.
Late 19th century Historicism (German) and Pragmatism (American) does the same relativist job – it may celebrate “science”, but it actually undermines the very foundations of science – undermines science with relativism.
Logical Positivism in the 20th century also undermined science – whilst claiming to celebrate it. As, in their different ways, Sir Karl Popper and Joad (Oxford – before absurd hysteria was whipped up over an unpaid railway ticket) showed.
A person can not seek truth if there are no persons (no free will agents – human BEINGS) – and it is pointless to seek truth if there is none.
Into this void – the seeking of political POWER comes.