Does Government Science Funding Drive Innovation? (wsj.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, British businessman and science journalist Matt Ridley argues that basic science research does not lead to technological innovation, and therefore isn't deserving of taxpayer funding. Ridley says, "Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. ... The implications of this new way of seeing technology—as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge—are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. ... It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics."

Comments

Re:Try getting by without fundamental science...

[KenDiPietro]

Bell labs was a subsidiary of government regulated monopoly. It only existed because research and development could be written off in its day. Ronald Reagan killed that concept because he couldn't comprehend the difference between this and a tax loophole. And with it went HP and most other thinktanks.

I would add that this was about the time this country started the decline we find ourselves living in now.

Thanks Obama.

Re:Guiding Hands

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a self-identified libertarian who believes there is a need to rein in government spending. I also believe that the government funding what I call "pure research science" is beneficial for everyone. For example, up until recently space travel was expensive and required domain-specific knowledge that would be hard to find at a random corporation. In addition, there were only a handful of companies that had the excess funds required to delve into space travel. Ergo, I think NASA was a decent investment at the time.

Similarly, it is unlikely that any company would have built their own supercollider powerful enough to discover (for example) the Higgs-Boson. That kind of research is important in other areas, but the practical applications based on those discoveries can take decades to fully realize.

In a semi-related point to your misrepresentation libertarianism, there is a branch of libertarianism called Voluntaryism, which contains the belief that human association should be voluntary. Government spending tends to take money from one group and gives it to another group, which may utimately harm interests and beliefs of the original group. This is why charity is historically considered a substitute for taxes, as it allows you to decide where the money should go. By this reasoning, taxpayer funding can be considered "wasteful and frivolous", not because it benefits other people but because it harms other people. Short of the opportunity cost of the money being spent on, say, electricity, in a supercollider, it's hard to argue that it's actively harming anyone.

I think there can be both government spending on pure science, and the government also cutting back on "pork" projects. There is no contradiction in my mind regarding those two positions, and it has nothing to do with "preserving privilege".