So I need to ask, how much are you, either personally and generally, willing to contribute towards that benefit?
It’s fine to point out areas the government can make us all better off, but the challenge is to figure out how to pay for it. And what you’ll notice is that 99% of the time the answer is “tax the rich.” Anything else is viewed as “hurting the poor.”
So when you put the two together, what it says is that people like getting the benefits of government, without having to pay for them.
A rather childish viewpoint, no?
That’s where the free market comes into play: If it’s something that you want, than you should be willing to pay for it. If you’re not willing to pay, but would rather other people pay for it, maybe you don’t actually want it.
Satellites are actually a better example of government research that we now all benefit us all, where no individual company could pull of a project like that.
But then, what about the ban on Federal funding for stem cell research? That is a place where people want money to be spent, but it gets blocked through ideology driven politics. The government is actively failing people that could benefit.
I’m generally done with this minefield of strawmen and snark, but this post of elucidator’s deserves a response.
This is not the same at all. The Marxist claim is a philosophical statement rooted in some nebulous belief in the ‘correct’ state of society, offered without really any proof or justification.
Libertarian arguments against government are rooted in hard arguments and specifics. It’s like the difference between philosophy of government and economics - one in really an a priori belief, and the other seeks to be gounded in actual empirical evidence and logical analysis.
Also, as I already pointed out, a major difference is that Marxists are purists in the sense that they believe that any pollution of Marxist principles at all can result in complete disaster, while Libertarians do not believe that at all. You won’t hear libertarians arguing that a state must be purely libertarian or it will fail. Any amount of movement towards libertarian principles is good. In that sense, they’re more like socialists than Marxists. Marxists require revolution and the destruction of the current state - socialists and libertarians seek change on the margin.
None of this is correct. There’s nothing magical happening here. And I have never said that government is always less efficient than private industry. In fact, I have repeatedly stated that there are cases of market failure, and in those cases you need government to correct the market. This is clearly a case where government does work better than the market.
The frustrating thing about these threads is that John and I and others have been making nuanced arguments, and we keep getting responses as if we’re dogmatic absolutists. Every single person on the ‘libertarian’ side of this debate has acknowledged the need for government action in many cases, and yet we keep getting called anarchists. It’s damned annoying.
But let’s talk about the core issue you brought up - the nature of government vs the nature of private enterprise (and by the way, when firms become very large, they can internally start to look like governments - with the same lack of efficiency).
The difference between private firms and government is simple, and dramatic: private companies exist in an ecosystem of producers and consumers, and are driven by the requirements of that ecosystem. Governments operate by fiat and stand above the fray. This means that the incentive structure for government is completely different than for private industry.
And even more importantly, government is a monopoly. That means the choices it makes cannot be compared against other alternatives. Once government goes down a path, we do not get to see the paths not taken. In a well functioning market, there are many paths. People try things, and we compare them against other things and capital flows down the path that people like better. It’s an iterative process of trial and error in a competitive environment.
Think of how many products have failed in the market, only to be tried again in different ways until one succeeds. The Apple iPad is just the latest in a long generation of tablet devices, all of which failed. But with each failure we learned things, and eventually converged on a product that is wildly successful. What would be the government alternative to this? Let’s say that politicians had decided that it was important for every citizen to have a tablet computer in 1990. So they fund a whole bunch of research, and come up with the equivalent of an Apple Newton. They then use taxpayer money to give every citizen a Newton.
How would we know if this was the best device? How would failure be measured? At what point along the way would we decide not to fund the Newton program? And wouldn’t that decision simply become one of partisan politics? The politicians who voted for the Newton program aren’t going to admit failure - they might demand more money to ‘improve’ the program. Then there would be Newton factories in Congressional districts, and now it’s a ‘jobs’ program. It can’t be killed. And besides, we never got to see the other paths, so who knows? Maybe the Newton is the best thing we could come up with, and we should be happy with it.
This is not theoretical - this is exactly what happened in France with Minitel. It also happened with the Concorde - a program that operated at a big loss through its entire existence, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars on a technological dead-end, and was ultimately used as a subsidized status symbol for the rich and famous.
So there’s one problem with government action in the marketplace - it replaces competitive decision-making and iteration with top down commands and up-front design that cannot be challenged.
Given how rare it is that the first attempt at a product is optimal, it seems likely to me that a lot of government effort must therefore be suboptimal, because it’s just so hard to change paths once government starts down one.
Now let’s look at the more micro incentives in government. What makes private industry so efficient is that ultimately products must be sold in a competitive marketplace. That means that decisions regarding how much to pay employees, or invest in R&D, or to invest in the quality of materials, or any other business decision must be made with respect to the real-world demands of the marketplace. I may want to pay my employees $1/hr, but if I try to do that, someone else will offer them more and I won’t be able to hire them. I may want to pay them $100/hr, but if I do someone else will make the same product with cheaper labor and undercut me.
Every decision in a private firm is ultimately tested against the market. If my designers aren’t as good as yours, my products won’t be as nice and I’ll lose market share. That drives me to hiring better designers, which in turn raises the premium on those skills and stimulates demand for more good designers. If I don’t spend enough on R&D and instead take all the money out as a whopping CEO salary, my company will eventually be left behind and I’ll lose market share. If the market’s demands change and I don’t change with them, I lose market share.
On the other hand, if I over-spend on R&D, my competitors can undercut my price or spend the extra money on better materials or otherwise out-compete me.
All of these forces drive private firms towards always trying to find Pareto-optimal solutions to problems. And all choices are tested in the marketplace against other choices. And no, they don’t always find those optimal solutions - firms still fail - but the incentives push all actors in the system in that direction.
In other words, companies in the marketplace are the very definition of a ‘reality based community’. No one can make decisions by fiat and impose them on customers. You can believe with all your heart that your automatic weasel-skinner is the best product ever made, but if there isn’t enough demand for weasel skinning machines all the hope in the world won’t keep your business alive.
In government, the incentive structure is completely different. If I come up with a new idea for a government process - (say, a $500 million program to help kindergarten children sit still in class), there are no market-style checks and balances to ensure that this is money spent on things that people really need. There’s no way to know if the program is being run as efficiently as possible. There’s no way to know if the money would have been better spent on some other program. All we have is the assertion of the politicians who started it.
And once the program is going, all the incentives push one way - to keep it going and expand it. People are hired into the government, and they become a constituency for the program. The bureaucracy created to administer it becomes a constituency. And because the program is funded with general taxpayer dollars, there’s little incentive to scale it back.
This highlights another problem with government. There is a general ‘market failure’ in government in that money spent by government is directed to specific things, which have a vested interest in keeping the money flowing, while the money collected from government is collected diffusely, and therefore there are skewed incentives. If the government weasel-matic skinner creates 5,000 jobs in several powerful districts, but the money spent only amounts to pennies per person collected diffusely across the country, then the political forces will skew towards keeping the program going, even if it’s a total waste of money.
Now, there may certainly be cases where a company becomes so dysfunctional that it is even less efficient than a typical government agency, but that company is ultimately tried in the courtroom of the market place. If my private school has a ‘non-fidgeting’ program that’s wasting money and doing no good, I have to pay for it out of tuition, and that pushes my tuition costs up relative to other schools. And if the program isn’t working, my student’s outcomes will be no better than the cheaper schools, and I’ll start to lose customers.
That kind of feedback does not exist in government.
So in general top-down government programs do not operate as efficiently as private industry operating in competitive markets. However, there may be times when the market is not operating efficiently, in which case government may be the only game in town. Therefore, we can recognize the need for government, while still recognizing its inefficiency and trying to keep it sized so that it’s only doing the things that only it can do well.
Hard arguments and specifics? You have to joking. Even Greensppan was able to understand what a stupid and bankrupt philosophy it was after spending a lifetime pushing it. It nuked the economy across the globe.
You guys have some kind of general concept that government is worse than the private sector. What does it take for you to see the pathology of greed? Watch" American Greed" the libertarian hour and you can see what fine citizens businessmen are.
America is turning into oligarchies now. Business wants utter and complete control. We are all in danger the closer they get.
Health care run by the companies. Social Security run by the government. Social Security run on less than 2 percent of intake. can you imagine what "business " would do to it?
We are privatizing the military. Blackwater and the other contractors are fleecing the tax payers. iT has been a terrible disaster.
Simple to answer. If there is enough money to fund high quality proposals, the amount is right. If there is pressure to fund crap proposals to spend the money, there is too much. If really good proposals don’t get funded, there is too little.
As for your comment on political pressure, since research funding doesn’t get directed by Congress, this doesn’t happen. However, there was political pressure for NSF to support free enterprise by funding proposals by small businesses that would supposedly lead to lots of jobs. I’ve been on a few NSF review panels for this program, and most of the companies submitting more or less make their living by doing proposals and seldom actually produce anything. This is a no-no, but they’ve learned to write good proposals. I’ve also been on panels for traditional grant reviews, and those were for the most part much better.
I haven’t been invited back because I refused to be the lead reviewer for proposals I knew nothing about, which is somehow a problem, since they’d have to find people who knew what they were talking about, instead of the usual suspects.
Have you ever been near industrial research? I assure you, this research would not get done, since you have to spread the money fairly widely to get some big winners, and the normal company would rather play it safe.
Even if 90% of research money is wasted, no one knows which 90% that is. How do you know a line of research is a dead end unless you explore it. And by the way, “Government” does not determine where the money goes - panels of other researchers from industry and academia do. There are a few national labs, and though they are kind of government they are run by industry or universities. I worked fairly closely with some people from Sandia for a while, and they were closer to me as a fellow Bell Labber (back then BTL ran it) than to a government employee.
The real major advances have been either funded directly by the government or funded from companies with explicit (like AT&T) or de facto (like the old IBM and Microsoft) monopolies. No one in a competitive environment can afford basic research, because it is very likely that the company funding it won’t get a lot of benefit - see Xerox PARC. So, you do immediate stuff, which is well and good until that runs out of steam. Then you’ve got a stagnant technology. Is that what you want?
Have you got any cites for this? And I notice that you are pre-emptively engaging in a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy by disqualifying Microsoft and IBM as ‘de facto’ monopolies. Nice.
How does Xerox PARC fit into that? Is Microsoft still a ‘de facto’ monopoly in the age of mobile computing, linux, and Apple? If not, how do you explain away their $10 billion R&D budget?
Are we also discounting pharmaceutical companies, who spent more money on R&D than does the U.S. government?
How about the private company that mapped the human genome, or all the private companies doing other work in genetics?
Then there’s all the basic research being funded by private donation - everything from the American Cancer Society to SETI research funded by Paul Allen, to the Koch Brothers giving $137 million for cancer research and $139 million to MIT.
Small and large companies are invested in basic physics research now, because that’s where the money will be in decades in the future. Nanotechnology, new solar materials, breakthroughs in solid-state physics at Intel and other places required to maintain competitive advantage in microprocessors… All this requires expenditures on basic science.
IBM discovered high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 - long past its’ ‘monopoly’ era - if it ever had one.
Then there are the private research funds like the Axa Fund, which has given out about $80 million so far in prizes for basic research.
Then there are all the private universities that do basic research from endowments and other private funding sources, or the University/Corporate collaborations such as the Pittsburgh Supercomputing center, which is a joint venture between Carnegie-Mellon and Westinghouse.
Large corporations like GE and Xerox still maintain basic research labs, and give out plenty of money to fund basic research in colleges. I was a recipient of a Xerox award when I was in college. GE gives $25,000 per year to a life science’s Ph.D researcher at Duke every year for life sciences research. They do the same thing for new Ph.D’s in molecular biology at UCSD. GE scientists have won two Nobel prizes. GE alone invests about $10 billion per year in R&D, and a lot of it is basic science in materials, chemistry, biotech, nuclear medicine, etc.
The University of Minnesota publishes a list of external funding sources for research fellowships - the vast majority of which are private companies.
Then there are the non-profit institutes, like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which spent $776 million dollars on medical research in 2010 alone. It has a 14.8 billion dollar endowment. That’s just one institute out of many.
Aerospace companies invest billions in materials science, basic physics, and long-term engineering. Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas were working out concepts for space stations and Mars programs in the 1960’s. Today, purely private ventures like XCor, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, SpaceX and others are building the next generation space program.
In the U.S. today, only 31% of research is funded by the government.
No, no, no! Nothing in an NSF grant review requests that the reviewers predict the likelihood that the experiment will succeed. What does matter is that the question is important, that the proposed plan will be effective at getting a result, that previous work is known and described, and that the investigators are competent to do the work.
Your mistake is exactly the reason that standard industrial research is not the same as academic or research center research. When I was doing advanced development stuff, I had better be sure it was doable. But the people in Bell Labs Area 11 in the good old days had no such constraint.
Short term research is important also, but doing that alone is not going to get the advances we need.
Is there a true Scotsman in the house? So far, for the Libertarian side, we seem to have a couple of pretty luke-warm advocates, Sam and John. John announces himself…
and further..
Wow. Way to throw yourself headlong into the fray, John! And Sam?
Not exactly a bold call to arms, now is it? Really, this sort of suspicion and skepticism about government regulation would fit quite comfortably within standard Republican corporatist cant.
So, that’s it? This is libertarianism, as she is today? I am much reassured. As the libertarian juggernaut moves to dominate American political discourse, it appears much like the rest of the mildly righty wing, willing to accept progress so long as it doesn’t involve any actual change. At most, a little bit of trimming, keep the socialists from imposing too much burdensome regulation upon the Free Market, blessings and peace be upon it.
That’s it? So, this stuff I keep reading about libertarians and their radical agenda for reaction, that’s just stuff all made up by the liberal media? Damn you, NPR, rattling my cage like that! No more pledges for you!
You can tell them by them being able to generate the oodles of cash needed to fund this type of research. You deny that IBM was effectively a monopoly in the mainframe days? That Microsoft was in the height of Windows? The Nobel Prizes IBM researchers got and Gordon Bell running around recording his entire life are indicators enough.
I started at Bell Labs during the Bell System days, doing 3 - 5 year out research, and I can assure you that our monopoly paid for this. Hell, it paid my salary, because the oddities of regulation meant that every dollar they paid me returned more than a dollar in profit, even if I never did anything useful. When the monopoly went away, researchers were suddenly told to go find something useful to do. Not just in Bell Labs, I know someone from IBM research who said that his “research” had to be directly tied to a product need.
That you use the term “R&D” demonstrates that you don’t understand this issue very well. The D stands for Development, which is most of any R&D budget, and which is something government should neither fund not get involved with. Companies do the D part just fine. It is the difference between inventing the laser and writing code for a new switch, both of which fell under the Bell Labs R&D budget. In the old Bell Labs, you could tell where someone was by his or her department number.
My group usually got 1/3 R money and 2/3 D money, and I assure you we understood the difference very well.
Microsoft is quickly becoming a former monopoly. When they suffer profit issues, guess what will get cut first? Oh, they’ll call it Microsoft Research, for the PR benefit, but the people there will be told to start doing something to make money.
Does doing efficacy studies and improving the manufacturability of a drug count as real research in your book? My wife worked on Tagamet - the difference between the fundamental R part (done at a university) and the D part was very obvious.
Drug companies don’t do too much fundamental research, and we shouldn’t expect them to.
Understanding how to map the genome was the R. Understanding DNA was the R. The very brilliant work at finding ways to do it faster was D.
None of which is expected to make a profit. Nowhere did I say that only government could fund R. You need leftover money with no expectation of a return on your investment. Do you think that this private funding would be adequate to fully fund research, under any model of full funding you agree to?
Nanotech companies have business plans, right? They have specific niches where they think they can make money. Very advanced D, but D nonetheless (and they might well be wrong - not all D pans out.) As for Intel, I know plenty of people at Intel Research, and they are doing the kind of research needed for next generation processes, which is nothing to sneeze at. They are a monopoly also, but may be losing it. Did you know that if Intel vanished today, AMD does not have enough fab capacity to replace it?
Intel illustrates my point quite well. They are awesome in manufacturing. However, their tightly focused research missed the non-PC market. They did nothing in the embedded space, which is why ARM is eating their lunch there.
IBM discovered high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 - long past its’ ‘monopoly’ era - if it ever had one.
There is also SRC, which funds university semiconductor research from a consortium of industrial companies. I was a rep to one project from both Bell Labs and Intel. There was an ongoing discussion about how researchy the projects should be, and about technology transfer. I’ve also funded university research from with companies, and been on committees deciding on funding. Most industry people want to play it safe. I convinced the Intel committee I was on to go with the riskiest (but potentially most rewarding) of several proposals, since most people were very successful developers.
And I can go on for pages about technology transfer. Ever done this? It is harder than the research.
$776 million? NIH invests over $31 billion in medical research.Cite. There are a limited number of crazy billionaires out there.
There are lots of reasons for private industry to fund research. Like I said, I did some myself. There is PR value. There is recruiting value, since if you talk to a professor they will soon be asking about funding. There are some CEOs committed to it. There are some projects which companies can’t do well, but which they think can contribute to their bottom line. My daughter is being partially funded by an electric company for one. There is the fact that students work cheap - $25K a year is chickenfeed for a smart almost-PhD who you’ll have a fast track to hire.
As for the 31%, how much of that is real R? I had the pleasure of helping to fill out my conmpanies R&D tax credit form one year, and while most of what we did qualified, little or none of it was real R in my book.
Company funding is great, but it actually rarely pays off, works at a longer planning horizon than most companies can handle, and is not going to fill in for government R funding, not ever.
BTW, D people are just as smart as R people, but we have a different mindset. I’m much more R than most developers, but much more D than most researchers, and I’d go nuts without some practical application. I’ve gotten to tell Arno Penzias about how our work was research, and factory managers how exactly the same work was practical development. I’ve been in this space for over 30 years, I know it quite well.
I don’t understand the difference between likely to succeed and will be effective at getting a result. You said it was easy to know how much federal funding was the right amount by measuring it against “high quality” proposals. But we don’t know in advance how many dead ends have to be explored before we hit pay dirt.
I’m well aware of the differences. Basic research is just that-- basic. It is not necessarily product driven but just seeks to understand the fundamentals. It’s a wonderful thing, and I’ve done some myself when I was in graduate school. But I can’t justify taking money for Joe Average in order fund my own curiosity about the universe.
But he’s saying that, in the long term, basic research is not about your own curiosity. It is so-called basic research where new ideas or developed. It is only after R that D can happen. And R is high risk, and companies are loathe to do it without help.
It shows the fundamental flaw of libertarianism. Science shows that creativity is not fueled by desire for profit. People are most creative when they don’t have to worry about how much money their work is worth. More work gets done when you have a sense of mastery and autonomy.
Despite saying you are for freedom, you are actually about taking that autonomy away, making all researchers work for their corporate overlords. Research that doesn’t directly produce a product, or might never help that particular company, will never be done.
What you call basic research is both necessary, and necessarily decoupled from the profit motive. It’s not just about your own curiosity, and I find it odd that someone on this message board of all places would think that.
I have a comment more directed towards real Libertarianism, rather than the moderate libertarian you are, but I don’t know if it’s necessary. Let’s just say that I think the fundemental premise of Libertarianism is wrong.
You know what, I’ve got it already typed up. If it doesn’t apply to you, it doesn’t apply to you. Sorry if it seems a bit overly accusatory: I was assuming you were hardcore.
So you admit that it has no actual benefits other than those that Libertarians like yourself describe as good. Now take it one more step and realize that most of us would rather have the better country than this version of liberty that libertarianism proposes. If we don’t want Libertarianism, then, by your own definition of liberty, we shouldn’t be forced to have it.
As I’ve said before, the main thing is that WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT. Of course we want us to have more control than them–the corporations. But at least we are trying to be fair and give them equal support. What libertarians seem to want is rich people with all the power, and everyone without. Heck, why is it in a business’s best interest to even allow competition? We already see several companies that would have monopolies if not for government intervention.
Unlike libertarians, we liberals acknowledge that government is needed to maintain liberty. The threat is not only from without, but also from within. We’ve seen the working conditions before unions, the company stores, the child workers, the global financial messes. We have tried libertarianism, and it didn’t work. And you’re only excuse is that we didn’t do it perfectly libertarian, so it won’t work. But we’ve tried the components libertarianism, and they don’t seem to work.
Unlike for libertarians, not having a plutocracy with oppressed workers is worth more to us than your definition of “liberty.” A society where everyone is relatively well off is better than one where only a few have a lot of money, and the rest are powerless.
Just because the government is not involved does not mean that an oppressed person is truly free.
You are confusing Libertarianism with Free Market Capitalism. Libertarianism says nothing about profits. It says nothing about what motivates people to choose careers or avocations. It simply lets then choose for themselves, with the minimum amount of coercion possible.
And basic research is absolutely about our own curiosity. If it’s not, then it’s directed toward something, and it’s not basic. If you expect to get something out of it, then you’re in the realm of investing, which is the function of the market.
You can be surprised all you want that someone on this MB would think that, but I’m surprised that someone on this message board advocates taking money away from people so that they can satisfy their own curiosity. Because that is exactly what basic research is. The guys who developed Quantum Mechanics in the early 20th century didn’t expect to making a killing in the IC market.
I don’t think you understand how research works. A huge fraction of the work needed to get to a final product takes place before you even know such a product is possible. There is no path between a 19th century steam locomotive and a superconducting Maglev train without a fuckload of research focused only on improving our fundamental understanding the basic properties of materials. To characterize that work as merely “satisfying one’s own curiosity” is ridiculous. Basic research is an investment our society makes that creates innumerable industries and opportunities for innovation that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, and a foundation of knowledge and understanding that makes applied research far more efficient and effective. It’s not merely answering random questions because it would be fun to know.
And, like environmental regulation, basic research is not something that private companies can do anywhere as effectively without the government taking a central role. Competitive entities dominated by short-term incentives are going to either have massive duplication of effort (since they’ll each want to keep all results of the basic research they funded to themselves) or simply be unable to pursue the long-term open-ended research needed to enable revolutionary developments and remain competitive (since their rivals will have a better profit margin by simply sticking with evolutionary enhancements to existing technology). Society is well served by taking money away from people now to scout for new advances that will benefit everybody down the road.
No disagreement there, and that doesn’t contradict anything I said.
No disagreement there, either. And that doesn’t contradict anything I said.
I never said they were random questions. Research is almost always focused on pushing our current understanding into areas that we don’t understand. People who engage in fundamental research may sometimes have an idea of what concrete applications will derive from their research, but not always. Often, research scientist do their work simply because they have a burning need to know how the world works at the fundamental level. That’s curiosity.
Number 1, that’s a bad analogy, because environmental regulations are needed in an industrial society for the health, safety, and often the very lives of the citizens. Not so with funding of “basic research”. Number 2, there are lots of things that governments can do more effectively than private institutions, but we don’t let the government do those things in order to preserve the liberty of the people. So I don’t take “more effective” a justification for government action.
It all depends on what you value more, liberty or material goods. Libertarians value liberty more. You don’t. But neither assumption is objectively better than the other.
But the idea that government funding is necessary for the advancement of science is simply false. It might help and sometimes it might hinder, but it isn’t necessary.
So, if this is a flaw of libertarianism, what is the solution?
What it sounds like you’re proposing is to increase the top marginal tax rate so that the government can give that money to people working on what can best be described as “curiosity.” No purpose, no direction, simply curiosity.
Can I have one of those grants? I’ve got all kinds of curiosity and they all require a larger, flatter, higher definition tv.
But really, this entire line of argument can be dismissed not by mocking the funding source, but by pointing to the Federal Ban on Stem Cell Funding.