Now prove it’s absurd.
Define “scientific research.”
I’m assuming you have a dictionary, so find it yourself.
According to my dictionary, Ford, et. al. don’t do any scientific research. In fact, they don’t do science at all.
Then what is done at Ford Motor Co.'s Scientific Research Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan?
Then what is this?
Oh, I know, I know! Pick me!
How about atmospheric physics? Does that count? Ford has one of the best atmospheric physics labs in the world. How about materials science? Does that count? Thermodynamics? How about chemistry? Ford employs an awful lot of chemists.
How about working with NASA? That’s pretty scientific. Here’s a joint research program between Ford and NASA.
But I don’t know why I bother. Chumpsky’s gotta be a troll. No one is that blind to the facts. I mean, it’s one thing to say that government spends more on research than private industry. It’s wrong, but an understandable mistake. But to go on to assert that private industry does almost NO scientific research crosses the line into lunacy. All you have to do is look around you. Hell, I work for a company that spends about 3 billion dollars a year on pure research. Look at the drug industry - it spends more than the entire federal government research budget, and almost all of it is in ‘pure’ science.
Chumpsky seems to think that car companies don’t do basic science. I wonder where he thinks all those new-fangled pollution controls came from? Or the modern materials used in car bodies? Or the supercomputers used to model vehicle dynamics?
Was it the government that invented the MRI scanner? Or the artificial heart, or kidney? Was it the government that discovered the electric lightbulb, or the airplane, or made breakthroughs in mining technologies? Was it the government that mapped the human genome, or cloned the first animal? (It was PPL Therapeutics, a private company). Is government responsible for searching for extra-terrestrial life? (The SETI project is privately funded).
How about Nobel Prizes? A Nobel prize in physics went to a scientist at Texas Instruments in 2000. The year before, two researchers from Bell labs won. And the year before that, Bell Labs also shared the Nobel in physics. Bell Labs has won 6 Nobels.
In 2000 a scientist from DuPont won the Nobel in Chemistry. IBM won a Nobel for the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. IBM, by the way, employs a lot of particle and solid-state physicists, and they do a ton of research in quantum mechanics and molecular physics as well.
A scientist from General Eletric won the Nobel in chemistry in 1932. And of course, GE was founded by Thomas Edison, who was no slouch in the research department himself.
Carbon nanotubes were discovered through private research, and now another private company is planning on using them to build an elevator into space.
But really, this is pointless. Chumpsky is willfully blind.
Hmm.
You claim that public financing of scientific research amounts to only $72 billion per year, while private financing amounts to $200 billion. It is not quite clear how you arrived at these figures. Does the $200 billion account for all research and development? Most of the R&D done at private companies is merely engineering. It shouldn’t really be counted as scientific research, although a very small portion of it could be. Having worked for a major corporation doing what was called “scientific research,” I can tell you that most of it isn’t. Most of it is just fine-tuning the real research that has been done at public expense at universities and national labs. There is a very simple reason for this: research is expensive, and usually unprofitable.
You say the $72 billion “includes NASA, the NSF, other research grants, etc.” What about funding for universities, the Department of Energy, national labs, etc. Funding for national labs through the DoE amounts to some $26 billion per year alone. cite The amount of the NASA budget for scientific research is around $9 billion. cite Some of the $6 billion for human space flight also counts as scientific research. The NSF budget is $5 billion cite. Some $51 billion is spent on research and development through the Pentagon system. cite The National Institute of Health recieves some $27 billion. Other publicly funded scientific organizations include the US Civilian Research and Development Foundation and the USDA. These alone put the figure for publicly financed research at well over $100 billion.
Then there is also funding for the university system, where a large portion of pure scientific research takes place. This is much more difficult to quantify in terms of public financing for scientific research. How can you place a dollar value on it? For one thing, almost every scientist who works doing scientific research has been a beneficiary of publicly funded education. Federal student aid alone accounts for some $12 billion, a large portion of which goes to train future scientists. So, for example, when Celera hires scientists, they get the benefit of their education without having had invested in it. That is publicly financed training for Celera. Then, much of the basic research is done at universities. Celera could not have existed were it not for the research done at universities. Again, they are the beneficiaries of publicly financed research, even if only indirectly.
I don’t have the patience to go through the budget of every state for public funding of higher education. Perhaps somebody knows of a study? I am guessing that public financing of higher education amounts to many tens of billions of dollars.
It is only when an avenue of research shows itself to be profitable is it pursued by private industry. Most scientific research is not profitable. The public takes the risks and pays the costs for unprofitable scientific research. Then, when it is shown to profitable it is handed over as a gift to private power.
You’re just wrong, Chumpsky. I’ve provided plenty of information about scientific research done by private companies. It’s a myth that companies only engage in engineering and not basic science. Just what is Microsoft getting from the Sloan Sky Survey? They’re helping to fund it, you know. What did Bell Labs have to gain from studying the background radiation in the universe?
Anyway, you’re not playing fair. Now you’re trying to classify all private spending as mere ‘engineering’, but you’re widening the scope of government spending on ‘research’ to include education funding for people who might become scientists one day? That’s a pretty transparent distortion of the facts.
But if you want to go down the educational funding road, how about we add all the foundations like the Carnegie Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the Nobel foundation, etc? Because there is a HUGE amount of private funding for post-secondary education. And I speak as someone who went through university in part on a scholarship from Motorola.
You can’t win this one, Chumpsky, because the facts aren’t on your side and we’re all smart enough to see through your lame attempts at skewing them. Best to just cut and run. After all, that’s what you usually do after you get nailed to the wall with facts.
So, how many university students are in scientific programs, and how many are in business, arts, history etc. If you’re going to claim tens of billions of government dollars spent on research through higher education, a breakdown would be nice.
Oh, wait, I forgot. You don’t have the patience to back up your claims.
Great argument you’ve got there Sam: I’m right, you’re wrong. Brilliant.
Well, for Microsoft, it’s basically for PR. Since they enjoy a state-enforced monopoly, they can afford to engage in unprofitable enterprises and push the cost onto the consumer. Likewise, as I already explained, for Bell Labs. When AT&T was a state-enforced monopoly, they could afford to do unprofitable scientific research, but once their monopoly was broken up, the labs were slashed.
It is pretty generally true that companies tend to engage in activities that are profitable, unless they have the luxury of enjoying a monopoly. Since most scientific research is not profitable, most of the basic scientific research is done at public expense. The public takes the risks in scientific research that may never turn out to be profitable, and private power takes the benefits when something is shown to be profitable.
There are all too many examples. Aviation technology, computers, the internet, etc., were all developed at public expense, but once it was determined that they could be profitable, they were handed over as a gift to Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, etc. True, these parasites did take the technology and improve on it, but they never would have existed in the first place had it not been for public financing of scientific research.
Microsoft enjoys a state-enforced monopoly?
In Chumpsky’s world it does.
Yes.
See?
So, Chumpsky, how would you classify wind tunnel studies undertaken by the various car companies? Simply “engineering” or would you consider that to be “pure research”? In any case, it makes sense for universities to turn over their discoveries to private corporations for two reasons:
1.) Private companies donate a lot of money to universities (they get tax breaks for that, you know).
2.) I don’t know of any university that is set up to mass produce anything other than students.
Oh, and the reason Bell Labs did the study that led to the discovery of the 3-degree background radiation was because they wanted to know where all the interference in their transmissions was coming from. So would that change their discovery from “pure research” to “simple engineering?”
Here’s an interesting Cato study that refutes just about everything Chumpsky has said. From the cite:
16 out of 16. Oil and Chemical companies. Old industry. And THEY are doing ‘basic research’.
Here’s more:
How about that? Of the top 10 biggest producers of research papers in the biological sciences, NONE were purely government funded, and only 3 out of 7 accepted any government money at all.
Since then, you can add the biggest charitable fund of all, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Chumpsky, I know you think he is Satan, what with being a businessman and all, but that didn’t stop him from donating 100 million dollars to AIDS research last year. But that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the 5 billion other dollars the foundation is spending. Granted, not all of it is for research, but a good chunk is. Go look at the site and see.
Continuing from the Cato report:
This is a big factor. Average People donate a lot of money to charitable causes, many of which spend the money on pure research. The amount of individual donations to research by average people adds up to well over a billion dollars a year.
Then there’s the efficiency aspect. Judging government by how much money it spends is a lousy way to tell if it is doing good. After all, the government spent over a trillion dollars on the ‘war on poverty’, but I still see lots of it.
From the article:
And here at the AAAS website is the view from people who are not as freakin’ whacked as the Cato Institute for heaven’s sake. Note the extensive discussion of the views of Vernon Elders who is one of two physicists in Congress and is even a Republican [albeit admittedly a moderate rather than one of the completely crazy ones 
].
[Bolding mine.]
So, who do we trust, a paid hack from the Cato Institute or a report from AAAS…Hmmm, that’s a tough choice! (Although I must admit that I am always amazed to find out just how deceitful these folks from Cato really are when you look into their claims…Geez! Oh, and in case you were curious, Cato was the #2 cited think tank in year 2000 by the “liberal” media.]
Sam, you know if you had been reasonable and just tried to argue that industry has done important R&D…even some very good basic science in the past (although unfortunately the trend has been away from funding the more basic research at least in the physical sciences), then I may simply have joined in in saying that Chumpsky is being too strident in claiming that industry doesn’t do some important research. But your distortion of the facts to read that basically all important research is done by industry is so ludicruous that, while the truth lies someone in between your two extremes, I think that Chumpsky is closer to reality than you are.
So, here for people who want some objective sources on industry and government funding of research, is some links to various other stuff on the AAAS website:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.htm
http://www.aaas.org/spp/yearbook/
A few comments: the graphs on the first cite show that industry funds about 70% (trying to estimate the numbers off the graph) of all R&D in the U.S. (Interestingly, it was more like 50-50 until the mid 80s or so.) When one turns to what is defined as basic research, however, that number drops to about 1/3 of the funding, with the federal government up at about 1/2 and the rest accounted for by all other sources (state and local governments, non-profits, and college’s and university’s own funds).
As an example of what one can glean from the second cite, here is a quote from Chapter 19 of the 1999 AAAS Science and Technology Yearbook:
Happy reading!
None of that contradicts what I was saying. I said that total R&D spending in 2000 was 200 billion private, 72 billion government.
I was presenting the CATO study as a counterpoint to Chumpsky. My own position is more moderate - I don’t have a big problem with the amount of government funding for basic science. In fact, it should probably be increased.
I’d really like to hear more about these potential abuses and what the laws might be like. Without that, there doesn’t seem to be much to argue about.
Why exactly do you consider the Human Genome Project a fiasco, and what would you propose to do?