Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
God drives innovation by speaking to the blessed prophets we call 'scientists'. Government funding has no effect on who He chooses to bless with this new knowledge.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet? There's a lot of great technology we have today due to government investment. Granted they were hoping the research would lead to better ways to kill our enemies or to stop them from killing us, but we've got a lot of civilian use out of government investments into science and technology.
If anything, government needs to be more strict with publicly funded research and ensure that the results end up in the public domain rather than rotting while a patent expires or hidden behind a pay-walled journal.
Typical narrow-minded view of research and knowledge. Not many corporations or private organisations invest in fundamental science research and nowhere hear at the scale and intensity that govt. funded research does. Without fundamental research, you don't have anything to base applied research on, which I guess is what they mean when they call it "innovation."
As for self-organising systems, there's plenty of fundamental research to show just how unpredictable and unstable they are in reality.
Huh. How weird! Every time there's an article about, say, global warming, or efforts to correct imbalances in gender or ethnic representation in the sciences, or health care, there's always a sizable crowd of self-identified libertarians who show up and extol the virtues of unregulated markets and the need to rein in government spending. And now here we are, extending libertarian principles to their natural consequence (ie, taxpayers shouldn't be the ones to fund the sciences, but rather the market), and I see ... a puzzling lack of support for the idea.
It's almost as if taxpayer funding is only wasteful and frivolous if it benefits other people, and "libertarianism" is just a thin rhetorical cover for preserving privilege.
The only thing stupider would be if he was drinking a tall glass of Tang while he was posting his story about how government investment in research doesn't lead to anything useful...on the Internet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There is an old adage; everyone hates government spending except the government spending they benefit from themselves. In this case, almost every article Matt Ridley writes says how bad state aid is. Except when he was head of a bank himself, when times were tough he went to parliament with his hat in his hand to beg for a taxpayer bailout and suddenly state aid was a great idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley#Northern_Rock
If you want to change Matt Ridley's mind about state spending on research, give him a job in a research lab and watch with wonder as articles praising state aid for research emanate from his greedy mind.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Rocketry and Artillery were both developed before Newtons laws of motion
Distilling and Steam Power were both around before thermodynamics
The compass was here long before Maxwell's equations.
The opposite points though are ridiculously easy to make.
No Semiconductor electronics without BCS band theory
No Atomic Power/Radiation therapy without Atomic theory
No Refrigeration without thermodynamics.
It seems the author is trying to make points by framing the debate in overly simplistic terms.
There's nothing left of the WSJ's journalistic integrity. Nothing at all.
This is nothing but a sad attempt to apply "trickle down" economic theory to technology. Sadly for the WSJ, trickle down is thoroughly discredited in economics. This attempt to smear technological innovation with the trickle down brush isn't even plausible. Easy enough to see that these guys didn't get any engineering in their educations. Sigh...
What next? Are they going to try to tell us that corporations are self-regulating? Wait....
just because there isn't "profit in it" doesn't make something doesn't mean it's worthless, it means you identify as a ferengi.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Maxwell's equations which specify how electromagnetism works have been a complete waste of research dollars; a fiasco that has never led to any technological improvement or profit.
And all that money wasted on medical research has never led to a single profitable technology, nor increase in quality or length of life, never mind to any insight into why the four humours continue to kill people like flies.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics."
Oh, brother. That's just ridiculous. It was an understanding of thermodynamics (by the physicist Denis Papin) that led to the innovation of the steam engine. They imply that some guy messing around in his basement will "innovate" something and only later will the principles behind it be understood. But it is basic research and the building of mathematical models of the world that lead to inventions. And those steps in basic science are not profitable. Many blind alleys will be followed before a basic advance in science is made. Only a government dedicated to basic research will follow that path for long enough to see solid usable results.
And if occasionally a private company does advance the frontiers of real science, that's great. But I wouldn't count on that for the progress of mankind. I do agree however with the author's premise that patents are abused. Folks have forgotten why we have a patent system. It's not to make money, it's to advance the sciences. Don't believe me? Just read Art. 1, Sec. 8 of the US Constitution.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
also known originally as ARPANET, was born as a goverment project, which ended as one of the greatest achievement of the humanity in term of global communication. Do I really need to say anything else?
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Year in, year out, about 25% of new drugs are invented in academic labs. On the other hand, virtually all new drugs are invented and developed by people who were trained to do research on a government's dollar. Mostly the US government's dollar.
Basic science doesn't "drive" innovation, but basic science sure as hell enables innovation.
Einstein published his work on general relativity in 1915. The GPS system (which requires a knowledge of general relativity to design) began development in 1973.
Einstein published his work on stimulated emission in 1916. The first laser (which requires a knowledge of stimulated emission to design) was built in 1960.
For those keeping score, those are gaps of 58 and 44 years, respectively, to go from basic science to innovation. Neither of those innovations were simply bumbled into by tinkerers. The designers knew the science from the get-go, and the inventions would not have happened without knowing the science from the get-go. The days of Edison and similar tinkerers has long passed. Good luck inventing any modern technology by chance. The low hanging fruit have already been picked.
From TFA:
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.
Industry does not function on the timespan of 4, 5, or 6 DECADES. There is zero chance that modern industry could do that.* The argument in TFA is total bullshit.
*That said, once upon a time industry did kind of do this _a little_. I did research with Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), and I decided to look into the history of the devices. Where was the first SQUID made? Ford (the car company) research labs back in 1963 ( http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... ). Once upon a time, large corporations were flush with cash and without shareholders who wanted to wring every ounce of profit from them, so corporations _sometimes_ funded basic research just because they could -- _sometimes_ without applications in mind. However, that has long gone the way of the dodo. And no, they didn't abandon the business because the government was funding it instead. Modern corporations will never spend the money to do real basic research because it is not economically useful (either in 1963 or now) to invent something and have someone else use it 5 decades later. They learned that lesson decades ago. Ford has never made use of a SQUID, and real applications are still on the horizon (tho they may not be far away today).