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The Crisis of Government-Funded Science
eldavojohn writes "The New York Review of Books has an article penned by Steven Weinberg lamenting the future of physics, cosmology and this era of 'big science' in which we find ourselves. A quote from Goldhaber sums up the problem nicely, 'The first to disintegrate a nucleus was Rutherford, and there is a picture of him holding the apparatus in his lap. I then always remember the later picture when one of the famous cyclotrons was built at Berkeley, and all of the people were sitting in the lap of the cyclotron.' The article is lengthy with a history of big physics projects (most painfully perhaps the SSC) but Weinberg's message ultimately comes across as pessimism laced with fatalism — easily understandable given his experiences with government funding. Unfortunately he notes, 'Big science has the special problem that it can't easily be scaled down. It does no good to build an accelerator tunnel that only goes halfway around the circle.' Apparently this article mirrors his talk given in January at the American Astronomical Society. If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?"
If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?"
I presume by "our government" he means the U.S. government. Why is it that that so many of those who lament science funding only talk about U.S. funding, as if the U.S. is supposed to fund everything by itself? He cites the SSH as a bad example of the U.S. cutting funding, but to me that's actually one of the better examples of other countries picking up the ball. Would CERN still have funded the LHC in 1995 if the U.S. hadn't cancelled the SHH in 1993? Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. And to me CERN is an excellent model of countries pooling their resources, rather than relying on one actor to foot the entire bill.
I'm not saying that the U.S. shouldn't be funding science at adequate levels, but way too many of these sorts of articles talk about science as if it's the exclusive purview of the U.S. Instead of asking if the U.S. can continue funding the big physics projects, maybe the question he should be asking is why more countries aren't POOLING their money to build these projects. After all, as long as the science is open and shared, why shouldn't it be in everyone's interest to fund these projects (including, but not *exclusively* including, the U.S.)?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
In case anyone thought I was referring to the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Cosmologists in particular should not complain at all for at least the next 20 years: look just how many cosmology missions get to fly. I think that point in the summary is kind of moot, since cosmology is a very fine example of how much money gets pumped into a field of science with presently zero practical applications; consider how many missions don't get to fly, for every cosmology one that does.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
We saw recently how a project to build a laboratory for the development of controlled thermonuclear power, ITER, was nearly killed by the competition between France and Japan to be the laboratory’s site.
Also, put another way in the article:
What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong. We saw several members of Congress change their stand on the SSC after their states were eliminated as possible sites.
I think the counter argument to your idea of 'pooling' resources is that this isn't really necessary. We have the resources to do this as the United States or as the EU or probably even as China itself. I don't care what country/countries/bordered region does it, I just care that it gets done. It is, however, very easy to point out that the country that Weinberg is residing in has the resources to do it yet fails to do it. Even when bills are passed to fund it, it fails.
Even as the SSC's cost ballooned up from $4 billion it only hit $12 billion in 1993 or about $19 billion in today's money. US defense budget for 1993 was ~$350 billion but it appears that we can't rely on the military to progress particle physics any further.
My work here is dung.
The problem is the schism between Businesses and Government.
The Democrats go. We want to Keep Businesses out of Government, as businesses with their big money will corrupt government.
The Republicans go. We want to Keep Government out of Businesses, as government with their big money will cripple businesses.
For companies to have a True R&D department they need steady funding, During the cold war, the government gave businesses a ton of money to do R&D. The government prospered because they got new technology that can help expand our countries influenced, the business prospered because they got new technology which they have rights too.
Then as the Cold War cooled down and ended. Government started to separate themselves from Business, and Business from government. So those corporate grants have became less reliable. The companies now need to make sure their R&D is profitable, so less spending on just straight R&D and more focus on making sometime that brings profit. Other companies just dropped their R&D all together.
Business key motive is to make money (It isn't a noble motive but simple). The Government has many motives (many of which are noble, some not so, and it is very complicated), Business influence in Government makes sure the government stays efficient. Government influence on business, make sure the businesses do go too far.
I am disenfranchised with both parties. As they are on different sides of the wrong issue.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The point of central authority is that we all pay in a certain amount of our wealth, and it concentrates that wealth and does great things with it. Whether that's Roman emperors building temples, or NASA, it's the same principle.
It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.
The people are going to ask why are we spending billions of dollars this and not on education or on the poor or healthcare?
Then those people are idiots. Not because they think we should spend money on those things, but because they not only think that we can't spend money on all of them, but they aren't asking an important question: why the fuck are we spending so much money on defense and wars?
The reality is that "government" itself really isn't anything other than wealth collected by force. For some reason people have come to think of it as a problem solver, when all it can really do is collect and spend money... usually inefficiently and recklessly. It has very little interest in spending money wisely as the political winds blow different directions every day. Government exists to protect the rational from the irrational.
I see a need for a separation of science and government. Get it out of setting policies regarding stem cells, cancer treatments, etc. Those that argue it is needed to advance science have forgotten the lessons of the past. The repression of science and new ideas from kings, popes, and populist insanity. Sure it is nice to get a phat grant from the endless US coffers, but at what *real* cost? Government has no place amongst the rational.
Asmov went on a small rant on this very subject years ago in a short novelette called The Dead Past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
The Democrats go. We want to Keep Businesses out of Government, as businesses with their big money will corrupt government.
You claim that when the Democrats have:
1) Had the government purchase a whole car company.
2) Wrote a health care law to funnel money from consumers to the insurance industry.
3) Given hundreds of millions in loans to green companies who donated sufficiently to the Democrats.
4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.
Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.
The Republicans go. We want to Keep Government out of Businesses, as government with their big money will cripple businesses.
But not all Republicans. There are also Republicans willing to interfere in business or to prop up large companies at the expense of the smaller.
Also I have never heard a single person say you should keep government out of business because the government money "cripples" the business. It's more than companies that are over-regualted cannot function.
To label the two sides like that is absurd because you can find counter-examples in each party. You SHOULD NOT mention party when complaining about this kind of issue, instead you should point out both sides have flaws in this regard and it's up to the people voting to look and see what each candidate stands for when they are voting.
Basically you have I think way too simplistic a view of how the world is currently for what is really going on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There was a silver lining to the cancellation of the SSC. There has been an explosion of quantum, solid state, and low temperature physics in the last 2 decades that might not have happened if all those great minds had been dedicated to just a single project.
Physicists have been forced to throw huge amounts of creativity at science. In a sense, they have probably done more with less. I'm not advocating cutting spending further, just seeing the silver lining of the cancellation of one project.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Many of the big experiments (LHC, ITER, etc.) are already funded by many countries. Steven Weinberg is a US Citizen, so he deals with his government. Other scientists complain about their governments. It wouldn't make sense to do it the other way around. No one thinks the US should be solely funding all the experiments.
... and the prison system and law enforcement, subsidizing unsustainable agriculture, funding propaganda-research...
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
What we are seeing now is a few decades of really big science to test the models and discover which are correct, which are not, and which need to be rewritten. This is not going to be a forever process. At some point our experiments will result in data and we will have another direction to go in. Cyclotrons are not going to get arbitrarily big. Spacecraft will eventually need to be sent out and we are simply going to have to wait. We may see a time when the theoretical physicists have to work for a few decades to understand what we need to build next.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
While I sympathize with the point of TFA's author, I'm not sure if it's that simple.
More government funding, which is the source of big dollars, isn't an unalloyed good.
From Eisenhower's famous speech about the (dangers of) military-industrial complex:
The more that funding is a result of the POLITICAL process, all the more will science be politicized. For scientists to expect money "no strings attached" would be staggeringly naive.
Pure science is absolutely critical to the continued advancement of our society.
Considering the diminishing returns and extraordinary numbers required to push out the boundaries of human knowledge, I don't know where the dollars could come from WITHOUT government, but funding from government is invariably a tarbaby that makes everyone sticky and dirty.
-Styopa
RE: why the fuck are we spending so much money on defense and wars?
Because the owners of "The Fed" also own military contractors and other companies (Oil, etc) on top of political property.
-They make governments buy weapons for war
-They tell them where to make war (to remove fiscal opponents)
-Wars break things and those need fixing
-Rinse & Repeat
Get rid of *career* politicians and most of these problems will go away.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I recently gave a similar talk to the UK Institute of Physics conference on High Energy Physics. The fact is that particle physics costs too much. The problem, in my view, is generated by particle physicists. We have underinvested in the basic technology of accelerator-driven HEP, namely superconducting magnets and to a lesser extent high gradient RF cavities. This underinvestment has lasted for several decades.
For example, there are a bunch of folks working on HTS (High Temperature Superconductors) in the US with the potential to increase magnet field strengths by an order of magnitude - and hence particle accelerator fields by an order of magnitude. But the program is poorly funded if at all. In Europe, there are similar programs but they are disjoint (as so many things in Europe) between different countries.
Sadly, the SSC and LHC were both disastrous in this respect. They basically bankrupted the HEP community. Now the US is more-or-less withdrawing from HEP and European accelerator driven HEP seems to have nowhere to go after LHC.
The impact to HEP community is clear, but what about the impact to society? Where will we be in a world where we no longer have the capability to push back the fundamental frontiers of knowledge. Is that it?
In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel. If they had let the private sector sort it out we'd be sipping cocktails on Mars already!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?
Yes, if the cost of pushing the frontiers of science continues to increase, we'll hit a limit where we can't fund the next step. However, I don't think we're there yet. The world economy just isn't doing that well now. When the economy picks up again, the funding will probably come back.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Is this really a political problem?
We haven't been building steadily larger, more complex, and harder-to-get-funded physics machines just for giggles, we've been building them because the previous ones failed to smash particles hard enough.
It's not as though scientists like grantwriting and political money-grubbing to get their science widgets built. It's just that, so far, each generation of Big Apparatus has managed to peel back another layer of detail that bears no signs of being the deepest one. There is, after all, absolutely nothing that requires the laws of physics to be discernible with apparatus(or minds) of modest size. It is entirely possible that this isn't just the comparatively petty matter of deciding which politicians sign the checks; but of whether we will be able to declare victory within the limits of all the mass and energy within our reach. If it turns out that chasing elementary particles into their spider holes requires an accelerator that runs around the edge of the Kuiper belt, or a Pulsar caliber beam source, who do we get to complain to?
... first recognize its not government funding by rather misuse of tax payer contributions to funding.
Next crowd source funding direction, each tax payer instructing government where their share is to be spent.
Congress will like this as they no longer have to fail at budgeting and accounting, we the people will do it instead.
The government and other previous and current government funded projects will have to educate the people where it is they need funding and why.
Amendment 16 of the US constitution empowers congress to lay and collect taxes, but it does not and cannot define where the funding is to be used nor can they strip the people of their right and duty to say, otherwise we the people will have no choice but to follow the recognition and instructions the founders left for us in the Declaration of Independence, upon such wide scope government failure.
There is need for: organized structures for the optimization of teamwork benefits shared among the contributing members and citizens of the membership. There are many shared benefits we do have, but given the waste and misuse, budgeting and massive accounting failure.... we the people can certainly do better. It is our right and duty to.
What we need is forms that allow us "the people" to instruct government at all levels (local, state, federal, etc...) where they are to spend our taxes.
Scientific research will may or not benefit at first, but its gonna get better when the individual tax paying people learn they have voice that literally counts. rather than an illusion of a politician claiming to be representing the people.... by lying to the people. Which does NOT equate to "no taxation without representation"
At least once a year, during and with income tax returns... tell the government at the levels you pay taxes to... where to spend your money and if they cannot validate it.... we can work through credit unions to do so.
Educating the public in a manner of asking for their democratic participation in the direction of the Republic of the United States... WILL BRING THE AMERICAN SPIRIT BACK.... And we know research does a lot better when the spirit is there, as does many other aspects of the environment we live in.
cause that is the true question; science is $$, and, even more importantly, there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?) I would say that spending a lot on cosmology is less important then cancer, but thats my bias
The military will advance particle physics when they can shrink the accelerator small enough to mount it in a turret.
Or, they can try to find some other way to do this research that doesn't involve such immense construction. But without establishing this alarmist false dichotomy, Mr. Weinberg won't be able to scare us into giving him more money.
Liberty in your lifetime
The "Free Market" most people rave about is a mathematical fantasy that is based on incorrect assumptions. No "Free Market" would have created nuclear power, for example, as the initial investments were too much for any business ledger to survive.
Take for example, Google -- they regularly take media heat for spending down on basic research. If they just ignored this pressure from stockholders, their stock would tank, so occasionally they back off. The "Free Market" punishes too much ambition, or any large amount of spending directed at creating a marketplace that benefits the world at large more than it benefits the individual company.
Occasionally visionary company executives manage to convince investors that something good for the economy at large is worth investing in. Most of the time they fly smaller projects under the radar. The Government has the same problem, in that politicians have to deal with pressures from the public over the debt. Corruption in either sphere has long turn deleterious consequences because it increases adversion to big speculative projects.
Certain types of progress absolutely require levels of effort beyond what the corporate sector is able muster. If we want top make these kinds of progress we have to pool resources. So we should not complain that that gets done, we should just complain when it gets done wrong, most especially when the mistake was easily preventable.
Someone had to do it.
I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.
Additional tax on "the 1%" would yield about $5bn/year. Considering our hole is in the trillions of dollar range, that $5bn is a drop in the bucket.
If you consider a tax increase across the board, increasing the tax rate by 1-2% for everyone would yield an additional $150bn - $300bn annually, which is probably enough to start digging ourselves out. It's also the surest way to drop the economy back into a recession.
The only voter-friendly choice left (mostly because it's generally invisible to voters) is to inflate our way out of debt. The value of your dollar is going to be worth a lot less over the coming two decades, but the rate of change will be so slow that by the time you realize what is happening it will be too late to do anything about it. That car you need to buy in retirement is going to cost you $100,000, and that will get you a Honda Fit.
Sorry guys. There won't be magical fusion breakthroughs, improbable new ways of moving mass (doing F=ma has been done the same way for decades now, ie fossil fuels and combustion in engines, same principles for decades).
Time to move on.
Biotechnology needs funding. How does matter organize itself into life? What is aging? Can we control it?
Social sciences need funding. How do we transition from the old cheap high-energy source social model (cars, suburbs, 100% employments, careers, subsidized universities) into the inevitable expensive low-energy source, yet high-tech world to come?
Mental health sciences will need funding when Space Nutters eventually realize that their delirious 1960s fantasies will never, ever become true, ever. World Haloperdiol supply won't be enough.
There's lots of political pressure to cut education and health care as well. What isn't being cut is the department of defnese, or the 17 different civilian agencies with people who carry weapons as part of their agent status. The same people who worry that someone from the health Education and Welfare will abuse their vast federal powers and take their home schooled kids away, don't worry about what happens when a BATF or DEA agent, who may be armed with a 30 caliber machine gun, abuses his powers to the same extent
Just look at your own post. Yes, you didn't mention the defense budget, but then you didn't mention the bank bailouts either. You mention the Tea Party that seems to be stagnating at present, or becoming a special sub-brand of the Republican party, but you don't mention any of the Occupy movements. It's like your whole post buys into a Right Wing only model, even though you don't particularly seem to agree with the Right.
Who is John Cabal?
In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel.
Uh, they did.
Being first to the Moon was the biggest single incentive for private manned spaceflight; someone would have done it sooner or later for the prestige. But the government threw vast amounts of money at NASA to do it without leaving any usable infrastructure behind that would allow such flights to continue.
So if any company says today 'we want to raise billions of dollars to go to the moon', people just shrug and say 'so what? we already did that years ago'.
The field of high energy physics requires these ever increasing expenditures almost by definition.
However it is silly to correlate this with all of science, or even all of physics. There is lots of perfectly good science that doesn't requires this scale, and in fact it might well be that allocation of these vast sums of money to these types of projects is a mis-allocation in the sense that you may get far greater return on the investment in other areas.
If the free market were such a great thing then there would be a country with a great economic success record as a result of practicing it.
Hasn't happened.
Here's an example of a pool for a medium sized project, IceCube -- an experiment that uses a large chunk of ice at the south pole to observe neutrinos.
Here's a list of the 39 organizations in 11 countries involved:
http://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/collaborators
The funding comes from 5 countries:
http://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/funding
Yes, the US's National Science Foundation provides the largest chunk of the funds, but it's a US based experiment (notice the wisc.edu) and the US is the world's largest economy to boot, so there's nothing crazy about that. Other experiments are primarily funded by other countries.
This is common for experiments that need large pieces of equipment. The notion that only the US funds science and the rest of the world are just funding parasites is simply false.
Impressive, a +4 Insightful post that is nothing more than a quick troll. Not a very good one, either.
Bravo, sir! Bravo!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Indeed. I think the most impressive part about this troll is that it actually managed to be taken seriously and modded UP.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This is so true. Another example is that the government's efforts to end racial segregation resulted in corporate personhood. This is how things work out in practice. Government is a tool that can be used for good or bad.
Let the free market decide. This country is great because of private business research. We haven't needed government funding till the socialist fascist democrats took over.
Parent is troll with little knowledge about the history of government-funded research. Mod down.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
What if we challenge the assumption that more money == more scientific progress? It's quite possible (nay, quite common) to spend vast amounts of money and make little or no progress, even if measured by "useful failures".
Does anyone really believe that if we dedicated 100% of the earth's GDP for 5 years, we'd cure all cancers? End aging? Cure Jerry's Kids? When we imagine that science is simply determined by the amount of resources we're willing to throw at it, we're making a fatal error.
At a certain point, scientific breakthrough is a combination of creativity, genius and luck, and you simply can't *buy* that.
This would such a useless weapon compared to just about anything else. About the only thing it could do is kill everyone on the ship/whatever with cancer in a single shot.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Get rid of *career* politicians and most of these problems will go away.
I've often wondered why US Presidents are limited to two terms, yet the likes of Robert Bird, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain are left to fleece the taxpayers for decades on end.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
How about making corporations actually pay taxes. Close the loop holes. Expire the Bush tax cuts. Inflation might help a little, and piss off the Chinese which would make me happy, but too much would be a disaster.
The AC missed a large number of options.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That whoosing noise was th sarcasm going over people's head.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Free market /= publicly held corporations. Even if we accept your assumption that no "free market" (as you say none has ever existed) would have created nuclear power, as fossil fuels are depleted the value of such an industry will rise, thus increasing ROI. Is this not obvious?
Hmmm... well you could consider the billions spent on R&D infrastructure. Safely getting people to and from space created a technology which the private sector can now take advantage of. As well as leasing launch sites to the private sector.
If any CEO had said, "We will have a man on the moon and safely return in ten years", they would have been fired and possibly locked up in the looney bin. Only the government had the muscle and the lack of commercial pressures to do a job like that. The private sector is incapable of building something like a Hadron accelerator because there is NO PROFIT in it.
No profit, no progress. That's how the private sector operates.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The crisis is NOT in Government-Funded Science, but eventually in funding extremely large projects. Funding small (intended in terms of size) basic research is a flexible and effective way to move forward an idea into something that can become a product. It proved essential for the development of high tech companies and to spur innovation in general. When the government either takes the job of venture capital (in funding R&D) or takes on multinational resaerch projects, it will end up not performing as expected. With this in mind, I am glad NSF budget has risen in recent years (despite the economic situation). It's the way to go.
...
I think the counter argument to your idea of 'pooling' resources is that this isn't really necessary. We have the resources to do this as the United States or as the EU or probably even as China itself. I don't care what country/countries/bordered region does it, I just care that it gets done.
And the counter to that is that there is a limit on how large share of its resources that any nation is willing to devote to a given class of science projects. The combined subjective limits of multiple nations will always be larger than the limits of any of the individual ones.
Exploring new regions of science (in physics and astronomy/space exploration at least) inevitably drives up costs with time, and it is inevitable that it will hit a point that only the combined science budgets of all major nations will be sufficient to fund that next (and perhaps last) Big Project.
After that last Big Project, only long-term world economic growth, and ever longer project schedules, will allow follow-ons. (Or else we get smarter and figure a way to do it cheaper.)
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The budget for the Department of Defense is being cut though. http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.
I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.
Additional tax on "the 1%" would yield about $5bn/year....
Only if you agree that the Bush tax cuts should expire this year - the baseline against which this claim is made (i.e. the expiration of the cuts erases much of this tax inequality). But the people making this claim - Republicans - are insisting that those cuts must not expire for the rich.
This is intellectual dishonesty.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The US government is broke. So is most or all of the European governments. Of course, they are all spending money like its going out of style. Where is the money supposed to come from for government funded science?
Yes, government priorities are screwed up. But that isn't going to change anytime soon regardless of how much you hope for it. (yes, that is a dig at the current POTUS)
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
It's not government's business to use taxpayer's funds to subsidize science.
No "Free Market" would have created nuclear power, for example, as the initial investments were too much for any business ledger to survive.
- nonsense. Nonsense.
Without the government stealing money (production) from people through taxing productivity, the companies can create anything that any government can just fine.
It WILL take more time in some cases, but it must take more time, because things must become actually profitable so that nobody is required to be a SLAVE in order to fund whatever pet program that some government official is interested in.
This absolutely includes nuclear. There is nothing about nuclear that is more difficult than any other innovation and discovery that people have done on their own throughout history of humanity. From basic chemistry, to locomotives, to air flight, to electric motors, to telegraph, to radio, to TV, to freezers, to transistors and microprocessors, to cruise ships.
How much does it cost Intel to build a new Fab site? A few billion. It's private money.
Certain types of progress absolutely require levels of effort beyond what the corporate sector is able muster. If we want top make these kinds of progress we have to pool resources.
- nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
1. There is nothing that tells the government that it is doing anything worthwhile at all. They are not price sensitive, they are not profit sensitive, they are not asking the market: Am I doing the right thing when I am investing my resources for the last 5-10 years into this project, are you willing to buy?
There is NOTHING that really can stop a government short of complete bankruptcy (it happens much faster with governments that don't issue 'reserve currency').
2. There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of investment capital to be pooled WITHOUT any government involvement at all.
In fact, the more government there is the harder it is to have legitimate savings that can be used as an investment capital pool.
Government destroys savings via inflation, it prevents innovation via regulations and taxation schemes, it prevents all sorts of real viable economic activity while insisting on running its own insane projects. How expensive is that new F22 exactly and WHEN will it stop? How much did the entire 'space shuttle' program cost and what has it actually accomplished that couldn't be accomplished with non-reusable rockets much cheaper?
Etc.etc.etc.
You can't handle the truth.
It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.
Naw, what we need is a huge Kickstarter for various things like the SSC. There could be various levels of donation where you get your name written on the collider, tours of the building once completed, special VIP tour if donations are high enough, mentioned in the paper written with data collected, bits of old electronics as the device is upgraded, science lessons by the scientists working there, etc. I could really go for a "I'm an SSC Backer, ...and you're an anti-science numnut." t-shirt after the thing is funded.
They are not price sensitive, they are not profit sensitive, they are not asking the market:
Were the market perfectly rational, your argument would hold water. It is not. Nor is government. Both have failures, because they are made out of apes.
Someone had to do it.
Market doesn't need to be perfectly rational or even right all the time, market only needs to be not tempered with by government with a fake money printing press and a war and social programs agenda.
Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market.
Worse - in the market you can opt out of any insanity that ensues.
With the government running an insanity you can't really opt out. You can't opt out of bombing Iraq and Afghanistan and being all over the world. You can't opt out of SS and Medicare and EI and minimum wage and price controls, and fake money and price control over the money (interest) and it's worse even.
With government you can't opt out even if you find a way for you personally not to participate, because 99% of people can't opt out, and because they can't, you are a victim of their suicidal herd behaviour. What I mean is that they won't stop destroying the economy and society and waging the wars even if you figure out how not to participate at all (say you are in the woods somewhere, gathering your own food, etc., when the society crashes because of gov't, you'll be subjected to all sorts of unpleasantness, say a civil war around you, you may get shot even if you didn't participate in the destruction process).
You can't handle the truth.
Market doesn't need to be perfectly rational or even right all the time
Yes, actually, it does, for the claims of "Free Market" proponents to be true. They took an academic game theory paper, didn't bother to read the assumptions, and just assumed that everything in it would come true. Even the simple presence of information latency throws off the model's emergent behavior quite far from the ideals that such as the AMI would have us believe will magically happen if we just cut their taxes and let them dump chemicals wherever they see fit.
Serious economists have long known that you need both government intervention in the market and private ownership of the market, or the whole system falls to crap.
Again, we need to be getting angry at incompetence, corruption, and avarice in both the public and private sectors, and stop wasting times dealing with the handwaving from either set of wingnuts.
Someone had to do it.
The article summary tells about "fiscal constraints", where "fiscal decisions" should be used. Remember the story about Warren Buffet tax percentage being inferior to its secretary one? This does not result from a natural law, but from political decisions.
blah blah blah BIG SCIENCE blah blah blah waa! waa! That is all we hear. The vast majority of research is not big science and small scale science makes the biggest contributions to society. Not the Space Torch. Not Hubble. Not FNAL or CERN. The bottom line is we are well past the point of diminishing returns with particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics, etc. They cost way too much and what is learned is of minimal value. Does it really freakin matter if they find Higgs (or not) in 2 years, 20 years or 200 years? Will it spell doom if we don't know the answer to 'does dark matter really exist' for another thousand years? Just because the answer might be interesting does not justify putting thousands of scientists on the government dole for decades on end.
We pour astronomical amounts of money into a very few areas where the only 'return' is some degree of speed up in technological innovation necessary to process data from said projects. This would happen on its own for other reasons in short enough order.
If we must spend money that we really do not have, spend it on all the thousands of other science projects which only get a pittance of money because they aren't sexy enough to make the news.
The budget for the Department of Defense is being cut though.
http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf
FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.
That sounds like a big cut, until you look at how much the defense budget has grown since 2001. You'd have to cut about 60 times that much to put us back where we were just over a decade ago. (Or 100 times that much, if you look at total cost rather than just the budget per se.)
And as for our unbudgeted wars, there seems to be a growing consensus that they've cost us 3 or 4 trillion dollars in direct and indirect costs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.
Just rolling back the Bush-era tax cuts would put a huge dent in our deficit.
We could also tax capital gains at the same rate we tax people who actually have to work for their money.
And tax profitable corporations rather than subsidizing them.
Unfortunately, this country has become a cream-skimming operation for the rich. When their wholly-owned legislators have bankrupted us, they'll throw us away and move on to the next country, just like they do when the acquire a business, squeeze it dry, and discard the husk.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Without the government stealing money (production) from people through taxing productivity
Tell us more about this ethical system that views taxation as stealing.
Presumably you're posting from the anarchist's paradise, Somalia, where all you have to do is pay off the local warlord and pirates.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market
Evidence? I've worked for companies large and small, and waste, mismanagement, and bad investments are the norm.
Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?
And as far as value returned per dollar spent, if both the government and and the market do the same thing, the basic costs will be about the same (except that private sector employees are generally paid better). But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.
And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.
It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Who wanted a picture of that?
It's a popular meme. Ann Romney says we won't really know her husband until they unzip him for us.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you live in USA, then you live in that 'anarchist paradise', except in that country in 1913 the freedoms of people were bought with a promise of bread an circuses.
You can't handle the truth.
Even the simple presence of information latency throws off the model's emergent behavior quite far from the ideals that such as the AMI would have us believe will magically happen if we just cut their taxes and let them dump chemicals wherever they see fit.
-
wait, so you have 'perfect knowledge' in your totalitarian paradise right now? And clearly there are no special interests that are part of the elite there, who are not even constrained by the system?
Before 1913 USA wasn't a 'perfect free market', but it sure had a much better economy, without income/corporate/payroll taxes, without EPA, FHA, FDA, HUD, FBI, FDIC, SS, Medicare, EI, dep't of education, energy, commerce, interior, agriculture, transportation, small business, without wage and price controls including the minimum wage and artificial interest rates, etc.etc.
US money was appreciating in value, prices were dropping, unemployment was minimal, conditions were constantly improving as there was more and more competition and profit made. US became largest exporter and creditor in the world. Almost all of that happened just between 1870 and 1913, and before 19 century USA was just an afterthought to Europe.
Today the closest approximation to free market is China with all its manufacturing, Switzerland with its culture of freedom and Somalia actually, after it was ruled by the British until just about 50 years ago and then by Communists that were removed from power in a huge bloody civil war 20 years ago, so it's a poor nation with lots of problems, but at least without one crippling totalitarian government structure and it's getting better there.
Serious economists have long known that you need both government intervention in the market and private ownership of the market, or the whole system falls to crap.
- of-course by 'serious economists' you do mean Keynesians, who are basically part of the totalitarian regime, as they provide the necessary academic backing to this insane idea that government can print money towards prosperity and buy whatever with fake money while diluting everybody's purchasing power.
USD lost about 98% of its value in gold since 1913.
USD lost about 99% of its value in oil since 1913.
Same goes for most of other products, from bread to milk, etc.
That's purchasing power that is lost. The unemployment is always higher and higher since the Fed came to power and created one recession after another, and then the Fed and government turned every recession into a depression (except the one from 1921, which only lasted for about a year, because Harding cut gov't spending by 70% instead of doing what Hoover and FDR and Johnson and Nixon and Clinton and Bush and now Obama were doing together with their respective Feds.
Inflation has been in 11-15% range for about 20 years now, real rates of return are negative on all this insane debt, the currency is fake, the investments are destroyed and coupled with the highest effective taxes in US history and with regulations, this pushed almost all production and productivity out of the country.
So is the Fed and this insane government succeeding in anything? Sure, they are succeeding in destroying the US economy and society.
And what about those 'serious economists'? Well, they provide the necessary theoretical and academic base to support these policies. These economists are nothing more than shills and trolls for the government.
Again, we need to be getting angry at incompetence, corruption, and avarice in both the public and private sectors, and stop wasting times dealing with the handwaving from either set of wingnuts.
- more blame shifting.
The righteous anger should be directed inwards, because it's the people that allowed the government to consist of those, who destroyed the Constitution. At this point the system will be destroyed, there is nothing in the way of destruction. AFAIC the faster the better, this government cannot be removed from power peacefully and without destruction of currency and economy, so the faster that happens the faster it can be rebuilt, but already without the crippling enormous government.
You can't handle the truth.
Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?
- because there is no profit.
But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.
- profit is the only indicator that something is being done that is worth all of the time, money and resources that is spent on the project.
And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.
- really? iPads, iPhones, iPods and other electronics are getting better, not worse.
Cars are getting better, not worse. Same with everything. Quantity becomes quality at some point, because increase in production requires increase in quality of production lines, and increase in quality of production lines creates demand for more and more engineering and this in turn requires more and more basic science.
The profits that are made in production can be then used to pay for all the training of workers, engineers and scientists, and this eventually leads to better quality.
Quantity becomes quality eventually and lack of quantity destroys quality, and that's what is rotten in USA and Europe.
It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.
- the bottom 50% of earners in USA only pay 3% of all income taxes. The top 20% pay over 80% of all income taxes.
The only scam you should be worried about is inflation - money counterfeiting by the Fed, that's the real tax on you as it destroys the economy and your purchasing power as it grows fake government spending (fake, because it's done with fake money).
Free markets exist now outside of USA, that's where the prosperity is. USA used to have it, I explained more in this same thread.
You can't handle the truth.
Nah, there's TONS of profit... for the politicians and their friends who are in on the racket
- profit from government theft and profit from legitimate business activity are different things, and I am not talking about government theft.
You can't handle the truth.
Germany's chancellor Ms. Merkel is a physicist. To me that is part of the reason that education and science remains a priority in Germany despite tough financial times.
They could have built it around 4 corners, then they'd get 4 states actively pooling their money together for the SSC.
Same difference. No matter how you got the profits, it's all for personal benefit
1. Profits are not a measurement of increase of personal wealth, they are a measurement of health of business idea and implementation and willingness of the market to buy into the idea.
thus
2. Profits that are not received out of legitimate market activity cannot be used as a feedback mechanism to tell us whether this market activity is worthwhile or worthless. If the profits are not coming out of VOLUNTARY market transactions, then the don't tell us anything about viability of the business.
And that's all that matters. Only by acting for our own self interests can we achieve freedom.
- I know that you are hunting after my comments, trying to be a smart ass with plenty of nonsense responses, but you are actually completely off pretty much always. Our own self interest dictates that we do not allow some to gain from government stealing and divvying up the proceeds of the theft. Our own self interest requires that as people we set up a government structure that does not favour one individual over another based on government decree, only this allows for freedom for all, and thus only this allows maximum profits, maximum market efficiency.
You're only holding your own freedoms back when you refuse to do something because it's not "legitimate"
- you are completely confused.
I am not talking about any one particular person who can get into a position of power and abuse it for his benefit, if he can do it HE MUST. Well, there will be those who will.
I am talking about the 99.9% of all people, they will never be in these positions of power and it is in their best interest that these positions of power do not automatically grant ability to the politicians to abuse those positions.
By giving up our own freedoms and allowing politicians to above and beyond what the law states they can do in government, (the law, being the contract between the people), we create tyranny and destroy economy.
You can't handle the truth.