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

Really?

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The author is marketing his book.
2. The premise is on the monetary worth of the research done, not it's importance. If the government would ask corporations to pay for the tech it developed at the current rates, they'd go bankrupt and pay for decades to come.

He's also using CERN as an example, completely ignoring research such as the nuclear power plants, and more recently the Stellarator.

I'm curious if in his book, after bashing the government's if he shows how much money is spent on royalties well past their expiration date, on battling trolls and other statistics that show the "value".

Starting to feel the need for a plugin that replaces economist with "Idiot with a degree" to make articles like this easier to stomach.

Re:Really?

[dinfinity]

His 'argument' there pretty much boils down to: "it was going to be invented anyway"

To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements.

There is some merit to the idea that all useful inventions will inevitably be done (the concept of technological determinism / technological imperative has been around for decades), but it is still idiotic to use that as an argument against government funding, as that line of thinking says nothing about when the inevitable will happen. A world in which the internet was invented 10 years later is not equivalent (and dare I say unpreferable) to ours.

There are too many other ways in which the reasoning in TFA is obviously flawed. Considering that you have to ask yourself the question:
Why the hell is this low quality shit even on Slashdot?

Guiding Hands

[ExecutorElassus]

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.

Ridley opposes state aid unless for himself

[Captain Kirk]

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.

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.