This should explain thebroken window fallacy, it’s an economics theory parable to try and explain the concepts of opportunity costs, hidden costs and unintended consequences.
I expect Steely Dan Fan is trying to tell you that pouring 5 gigabucks into the military to get a 0.01 gigabuck GPS network out of the deal* isn’t necessarily a fantastic idea even if you do get tons and tons of dust-gathering boomstuff on top of the GPS network, and using the latter to justify the former doesn’t really work either.
Which, you know, he’s not wrong. GPS sats aren’t really high-tech or the result of pioneering science ; and private entities such as Virgin Media have their own space programs these days. There’s also no reason I can think of why a civilian space program like NASA or the ESA couldn’t have thrown up a global positioning system, given adequate funding.
I occasionally read about spending that DoD does not want, but which congress has required. However, I cannot find a comprehensive list or even a good “worst offenders” summary. It’s hard to know the scale of the problem.
First of all, let’s address the supposed application of the “broken window fallacy”, then the misconceptions about how “high tech” the Global Positioning Satellite system is, and after that we’ll return to the original statement I made which is an empirical observation about the funding for high threshold advancements in science and technology.
The “broken window fallacy” posits that (within its allegory) employing people to repair broken windows is money that is less well invested than dealing with the cause of window breakage, e.g. vandalism, recklessness, et cetera, and jobs created in the service of window repair could be better . This is true insofar as it goes, but has almost nothing to do with the issue at hand, to wit, how investments in technology development are supported and justified in the reality we actually live in, in which investment in technology with military or politically salable applications such as the Apollo program or agricultural subsidies are greenlit almost regardless of cost, whereas research for applications without direct military or immediate economic benefit are rejected even at modest cost, e.g. infrastructure improvements in the electrical grid or elimination of contagious pathogens.
The notion that “GPS sats aren’t really high-tech or the result of pioneering science” is completely wrong; the Global Positioning System, when first proposed in the early 'Seventies, required a degree of measurement precision that was several orders of magnitude higher than previous satnav systems such as SECOR or TRANSIT. It was the first satellite system that needed to make corrections for General Relativity, and the first that allowed very quick position fixes with sufficient accuracy to replace TERCOM (terrain contour mapping used for nap-of-the-earth flying) or high precision ballistic missiles. The demodulation and decoding algorithms, developed by the National Security Agency, were very advanced for their time, and the implementation on the 'Seventies era space-rated hardware at the required calculation and transmission rates was itself an extraordinary software accomplishments. “Virgin Media”, by which I assume you are referring to space tourism enterprise Virgin Galactic, provides suborbital flight using a low performing hybrid rocket engine-powered vehicle (SpaceShipTwo) deployed from a flying platform (WhiteKnightTwo). SpaceShipTwo is not capable of putting anything into orbit–much less the Medium Earth Orbit that the GPS space segment resides in–and Virgin Galactic does not build satellites or provide the ground support capability for a space-based satellite constellation. The basic GPS System Costs from 1974 through 2016, as estimated in the NAVSTAR GPS Selected Acquisition Report of 1994 was US$8,565M (in 1995 dollars). No private company in history has ever invested a tenth of that cost in research and development to deploy a technology; this is the provence of governments, and even in major nations the justification is based upon some critical defensive or military need rather than of general benefit to the public.
That GPS is so prosaic today is an exact illustration of how a technology can be developed at great expense and in a massive technical project but can end up spurring on commercial industries which were not even dreamed of when the project was initiated. That GPS might one day be used for marine and aviation navigation is, at least in retrospect, obvious, but that it might be used by UPS and trucking companies to improve logistics, by farmers to improve agricultural yields, by private drivers to navigate the complex array of roads, to locate traffic jams, track endangered animals, et cetera as nauseum. But there is no way someone back in 1970 would have conceived of these applications or justified the investment in research and deployment of this system in order to support use of the system for these purposes decades later.
That it is so ‘easy’ to use now is a testament to all of the energy and technical expertise went into making the system as robust and accessible as it is. “Given adequate funding” assumes that NASA or ESA can command the same budgets as the military. These are agencies which struggle to justify even scientific research missions like the Solar System Grand Tour (only resurrected on the sly as Voyager 2), Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, or the MarcoPolo asteroid sample return mission that are a fraction of the cost of GPS unless there is some critical nationals need, e.g. beat the Russians to the Moon for prestige and apple pie. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense or Missile Defense Agency commonly receive approval for multi-billion dollar budgets on programs of dubious defensive or technical merit. I’m not justifying that situation or saying it is the only way technical development can possibly work, but the empirical reality is that nearly all fundamental technical advances have been funded largely or even exclusively as military or defensive developments and have only later been applied to commercial and civil applications.
As for Steely Dan Fan, his or her posts are so reflexively anti-military and full of invective but lacking in any content or rational argument whatsoever (see [POST=17217012]post 24[/POST]) that they are scarcely worth acknowledging and lack enough content to respond to.
Yes, but to ignore the foundation for a plethora of modern technologies is making the assumption it would have played out otherwise. In other words, you are deflecting actual history in favor of your perceived hypothetical and claiming the real world examples are asinine.
Highly, highly disappointed in your “arguments” thus far.
The Littoral Combat Ships and the new generation of supercarriers are fantastically useless, be nice to put that money into urban enterprise zones and infrastructure, it would make us a stronger country. If we want a big military we’re going to have to ditch the professional army and go back to a conscript force. Big business has learned you can’t afford to give your employees defined benefit pensions and free medical care for life, that’s why the military is continuing to cut personnel.
This is a very important and often-overlooked point; by investing in energy and infrastructure technologies which make us independent of foreign energy dependence, natural resources, and materiel, it relieves the United States of having to involve itself in military conflicts halfway around the world or having critical dependencies access to foreign goods. It would be smarter and cheaper to invest in transportation fuels to replace petrochemical fuels rather than to go to war in the Middle East, but it doesn’t fit with our post-WWII, “United States as the champion of freedom and justice” point of view, regardless of reality.
Thank you, Stranger On A Train, for demonstrating again why you top the list of SDMB’s intelligent, eloquent and well-informed posters. (One almost wants to also thank the ignorant heckler for provoking your informative follow-up. :rolleyes: )
Another example of military/government spending egging on civilian development is Penicillin. It was discovered in modern times by a civilian researcher, but methods for developing industrialised Penicillin production were developed by the US Department of Agriculture during WW2 which would not have happened otherwise. IIRC Penicillin development and production was initially too expensive for Drug companies.
Precisely - because, among other reasons, employing people to build tanks (much like employing glaziers) is seen as a good thing and an immediate creation of wealth and jobs, when it neglects the opportunity costs of investing so much money and resources into building tanks rather than e.g. improving infrastructure or curing cancer.
But it was all evolutionary, not revolutionary, tech was my point. The groundwork for a satellite-based positioning system was laid down as early as the sixties, the theory is even older.
Actually, I was referring to LauncherOne - SpaceShipTwo being a silly stunt for the idle rich.
It’s not up yet, but it’s well underway (to be completed by 2016) and would put satellites up for less than 10 million bucks a pop - telescopes, imagery satellites, possibly telecom too. Other private companies own privately-built satellites and piggyback on nation-states orbital launch vehicles (Ariane, Proton, Delta…) of course. But private rockets are impressive in their own right.
No, but the military did not either.
However, large shipping or shipping insurance conglomerates as well as aerospace companies (particularly after the KAL 007 incident) would have had their own incentives to develop positioning systems if the military had not beaten them to the punch. There’s a bit of money tied up in those sectors, too.
Um… yes ? That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it ? Well, not the same obviously, cause that would be going too far. But plenty of people *are *disappointed that man’s forays into the stars have basically been gelded after a quick stunt to top the Russians.
I think you’re dipping into post hoc ergo propter hoc there. Was the development of early computers spurred on by WW2 ? Sure. Needed them to break codes and guide torpedoes. Would we have no computers whatsoever were it not for the mad little moustache man ? Come, now.
And you’re also ignoring the *phenomenal *amount of defence spending that was essentially wasted - on procuring weapon systems that were never used or not even remotely practical to begin with ; on building bases and reinforced stockpiles that rotted away then had to be carefully dismantled (how’s that for broken windows ?) ; on training, equipping, feeding soldiers that spent their lives basically idly standing on walls ; on brinksmanship stunts or truly mind boggling stupidity (Acoustic Kitty, anyone ?) and so on. When it’s not just entire pallettes of cash mysteriously disappearing because oversight is hard you guys.
I’m not going to get drawn into this repeated bitwise repetition of statements and arguments that continues until one party just gives up out of exhaustion, but there are two points on which you are fundamentally and factually incorrect:
This is just fundamentally untrue, and I’ve already stated in overall terms how it was a revolutionary advancement over previous satellite systems in terms of precision, positioning measurement, and sophistication. If you’d actually like to learn more about the system I would recommend Global Navigation Satellite Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration or Global Positioning System: Theory and Practice. Both the satellite position estimation and signals demodulation and decoding required advances in signal theory. The satellites themselves are highly robust and most have lived well beyond their design lifetimes, which would not have been achieved using commercial off the shelf components of 'Seventies or 'Eighties heritage. And much of the core technology was developed almost four decades ago when Pong consoles were just coming out. To suggest that this is something that any determined research effort could do for a nominal budget is trivializing this achievement to absurd levels.
Have you actually read this threat or of my statements in it before accusing me of “ignoring the *phenomenal *amount of defence spending that was essentially wasted”? In [POST=17217149]this post[/POST] alone I list three programs of highly questionable merit which, had they been cancelled at inception, would go a long way toward substantially reducing the national debt. I don’t even want to get into the enormous wastage that were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which not only did not merit the sheer volume of cash poured into them but also served to create another generation of angry men and women with entirely righteous anger toward the United States.
But my point isn’t and has never been that military research is cost-effective in terms of commercial return; it is that programs that are deemed of importance for military advantage or strategic defense are awarded the kinds of budgets and longevity to develop and advance technologies far beyond what any private company could do or any scientific group could maintain support for. This is an undeniable empirical observation. Pundits can secure tens of billions of dollars of funding over decades for missile defense systems which have utterly failed to show effective interception in anything approaching a real world engagement, and yet they keep getting funded. We can spend tens of billions of dollars to show up those dirty Commies by putting men on the Moon first, regardless of scientific import. We can build giant fleets of ballistic missile submarines to ‘patrol’ the broad ocean area, awaiting the command to reign apocalyptic fire on hundred of millions of innocent people.
But trying finding examples of comparable scale projects of purely scientific or non-military technical effort and you’ll come up struggling. The Superconducting Supercollider? Cancelled. Magnetic confinement fusion? Waxes and wanes. Asteroid tracking and redirection? All we really have to show for that are studies after studies which quantify the risk posed and the cost-effectiveness of a solution at even tens of billions of dollars, but no dice. (The Large Hadron Collider only got funded because of the large number of partners, and little thanks to the United States.) Or how about eradicating parasites and diseases around the world, or providing potable water to all of Africa, all projects that come in under the nine zeros mark? They can’t even get time on the review docket. But propose a new fantastical missile defense system which spits pink unicorns to skewer a threat on its horn, or a main battle tank made out of unobtainium armor, or a new submarine system which costs a paltry $2B per operating unit, and you got yourself a stew on. There is so much stupid money going into research funding that it is relatively easy to get funding for actual ground-breaking high threshold research–provided there is a military need.
So, despite your accusation, no I am not oblivious to waste in military research, nor am I arguing that in retrospect the same capability couldn’t have been achieved at a fraction of the cost, provided you know where you are going and how to get there. But the cost of building that map and all of the knowledge behind it, while still maintaining funding despite failures and blind alleys, is almost exclusively the provence of military and defense research; no private company could every afford to spend thirty-odd years and ten billion dollars or more developing and deploying a satellite navigation system and then turn around and make it free for use by everyone who can afford a receiver. To argue that it was inevitably, somehow, going to happen is not a sensible or informed position. It happened because there was a perceived military need first, and then because it was recognized that the same capability had great benefits to society at large much later.
Actually, all SOAT did was repeat the same old tired broken-window thinking, assuming that the way things did pan out was necessarily the only way things could have panned out.
It’s actually quite facile. It’s like Paul Ryan–his arguments are not particularly intelligent or insightful if you can see past the veneer; it’s just what people of moderate intelligence themselves think intelligence looks like.
SOAT argues that only the military has the political cachet to guarantee the funding needed to pursue these projects, while completely ignoring the fact that my fundamental argument is against the corrupt and warped social values that make this so.
And those values aren’t fixed and immutable–they’re social constructs, changeable and fluid.
So in the real world (as opposed to SOAT’s fantasy land where the way things are now is fixed forever and always), there’s no reason to assume we couldn’t have, or still can’t, create a world where we can do all that without justifying it as a way to more effectively kill people.
I’m sorry if I came across wrong, what I was trying to convey was pretty much :
This. Which I thought you were doing. But we’re back to what I was saying earlier - it’s well and good to point out what tangible benefits ludicrous military spending and headless chicken procurement models have ended up achieving. That hardly justifies them in retrospect.
Yes. That’s the problem.
How about simply the iterative evolution of computers, from the gargantuan mastodons taking up entire basements to do what a pocket calculator does today, to teletypes, to the 386, to modern gaming rigs and the “Deep Blue” arrays of the world ; for the most part all that development happened in private firms and universities. Same goes for the software.
Hell, these days some missile guidance systems use chips designed for the Playstation of all things, and the military is buying PS3s in bulk to build video processing super-clusters.
Actually, I would amend that and state these kinds of efforts might be the province of nation states, who do have the benefit of having both a gigantic operating budget but little or no short term profit constraints.
But apart from “that’s how we’ve done things” and “there is just so much special interest pressure lobbying for this sillyness” there’s no rational reason why governments and countries couldn’t or shouldn’t fund pure research & proofs of concept regardless of military purposes. The Concorde would be an example of such. Not the most successful example, maybe, but it was a step in the right direction IMO. So is the Large Hardon Collider (typo deliberate because I’m juvenile that way and it still makes me giggle). Oh, what university research labs could *do *with just 1% of the funding that goes into the most benign of military escapades…
What I’m getting here is that on one hand, the military is a largely wasteful R&D program, but on the other hand it is the only R&D program that can sustain long-term projects, the kind that have brought us advances that would have otherwise not been developed.
I think it might be useful here to separate out funds that actually go towards R&D, largely toward private military contracting firms like Raytheon, Boeing, GD, Lockheed, etc. I suspect; and operational funds.
But despite SOAT’s reality-free assertions to the contrary, it’s not.
It’s the one that’s actually been used, yes, but that’s a consequence of a corrupt and mutable set of social values–and fixing those values to something more constructive is perfectly within the realm of possibility.
And likewise, we have no need to be able to project force outside of our own sphere of influence, either. Now, it happens that we can do so anyway, but that’s a bug, not a feature: It does nothing for us but incentivizing us to get involved in unnecessary and harmful wars. Re-direct military spending to something more useful, and you decrease the chances for another Iraq or Afghanistan: That’s a win-win.
The major reason that NASA’s (or NSF’s, NIST’s or whatever sciencey agency you want) is not that all the money is being gobbled up by the Department of Defense and there’s nothing left for anyone else. That is fantasy-land thinking.
The reason that NASA’s budget is about one-fifteenth of the size of DOD’s is that there is a bipartisan and overwhelmingly popular will in this country to spend lots of money on national defense whether we can afford it in our budget or not. DOD is half of all discretionary spending in the United States while we were running deficits of about three times the size of the Pentagon’s non-war budget. And what has been the country’s response? Trim it back by about 8 or 10 percent, and deliberate on whether it is worth it to trim it another few percentage points.
There is only a scientific fringe in this country which wants to see NASA’s (or NSF, NIST, NOAA, NIH, etc) budget expand by 50 percent or more. If the DoD’s budget were cut by, say, $100 billion, I can guarantee you that there would be very little interest in putting more than say, $20 billion or so into S&T or infrastructure upgrades. So long as this country is facing many-multi-hundred billion dollar deficits, there’s going to be little to no appitite to throw tens or hundreds of billions of dollars more toward the agencies responsible for debacles like the James Webb Space Telescope (which has basically tripled in cost from its first cost estimate around 2000) or the NPOESS satellite disaster (which, in fairness, is just as much a problem for the Air Force as it was the civilian space agencies).
So if we’re speaking from a reality-based viewpoint, the value of DoD S&T isn’t just that they are generally well focused programs that have a pretty good track record of getting commercial applications out of things that were really designed for military use. It is also that the investment in those programs is generally sustained in good times and bad.
That cannot be said of agencies like NASA, where the budget has been either frozen (in constant dollars) for most of the last two decades, or declining by about half in terms of its percentage of the Federal budget over that same time.
If we’re going to accuse people of having “reality-free assertions,” then let’s all have a cup of coffee, wake the hell up, and realize that if there was an appetite to boost NASA’s funding (or whatever agency’s you wish to pick) by 50% or so, that’s a measly $9 billion dollars, it probably would already have been done. That amount of money in Washington, DC is verging on decimal dust.
The reason it hasn’t been done isn’t because generals and admirals are stealing all the money in cartoon bags labeled with dollar signs: it’s that there’s much greater support for defense related S&T (which can spin off to some commercial uses) than there is for the civil R&D agencies who can’t even decide what their purpose in life is.