But do businesses do research with no direct payoff? We’re talking about basic scientific research, like planetary science, astronomy and theoretical physics. New theories are often based on decades of observation and experimentation by the worldwide scientific community. Chances are there is no direct financial benefit for the people who did the original research.
What do you mean by this?
Yes, I do. Without satellites being demonstrated as a workable technology, though, would anyone in the telecommunications industry have that idea? The telecommunications industry could have developed the Internet twenty years before it hit big, and it didn’t. In fact, it actively fought convertng Arpanet to the Internet.
Well, it could be that just because the government supplies the money doesn’t mean it has to control the project.
Yes, I do. The thing you have to ask yourself is that money taken by the government for research is necessarily money that might have been used in the private sector for some other (or even similar) research. We will never know.
Here’s an interesting article on Stanford’s Bio-X program. Note the private funding and the issues that arose from government restrictions on research.
At any rate, I still don’t buy the argument that governmnet must fund something that because it wouldn’t otherwise by funded provately. There is an unproven assumption that the research in question is inherently a good thing to do, regardless of the coercive nature of the how the funds were acquired.
Oh, yeah, as to the OP… This will mark the rebirth of NASA-- until the next disaster, when it’ll die again. Unless they come up with something revolutionary (like discovering life on Mars), the public will be fickle and will sway one way or the other, with the success or failure of the latest mission.
Believe it or not, there are people interesting in these things, and I don’t mean just universities and think tanks. I’m not at all sure about the worldwide scientific community generating new theories. The theoreticals have often been done by loners from Newton to Hawking.
Well, if you build it, they will come. If government offers the money for research, that very offer deincentivizes private research. Which would you rather do, spend a million dollars of your own money or a million dollars of mine?
That rather makes my point for me, doesn’t it? See this article, for example.
So who do you mean? Which company can justify spending $1 billion to build a space telescope? You can’t make the same observations using a dozen $100-million telescopes; you’ve got to have collaborations to accomplish such big projects once in a while.
And who do you think funds those loners? I don’t know how things worked in Newton’s time, but for modern day theoretical physicists like Hawking, government grants are the main source of funding and income. And theorists have nothing to work on if it weren’t for the countless observational and experimental results published in scientific journals.
And how would privatization help? Currently the people who control the funding at least try to maintain objectivity. The checks and balances of peer review, while not perfect, seem to eventually reach the correct conclusions. How will things be better of corporate executives controlled funding for science? Can we trust oil companies to be more objective than the government in controlling funding for planetary science (aka geology)?
That balmy Italian map-maker kidnapped, enslaved and sold hundreds of people and killed hundreds more.
A billion dollars!? :eek: Damnation. I guess it would have to be a company with a nuclear arsenal and the wherewithal to put down riots. Do you have any idea how many children could be fed, clothed, and educated for $1 billion?
Well, like I said. If you pour slop in the trough, the pigs will eat. Audiatur et altera pars. Your unstated assumption is that only government is either capable or willing to capitalize research that people want.
Oh, I’m in favor of suppressing fraud. But when those who are responsible for suppressing the fraud are the same as those who are funding the research, I tend to be a mite wary.
Lib, I think your criticism of NASA’s programs is a bit misplaced. I think space research is one area where the pure Libertarian philosphy breaks down. I used to be a hardcore, “Government should do nothing but maintain courts and a militaray” kind of guy, but now I think that government needs to undertake the big, collective projects that are just too expensive for even large companies to do.
What NASA should not be doing is acting as a commercial space launch enterprise. NASA’s space science budget is actually rather small, (and quite successful). What really eats NASA’s budget is maintenance of ISS and flying the shuttle. And these are things that could have been done by private companies (or not done at all, in case of the ISS - I’m still not sure what good that thing is doing to justify its huge cost - especially when NASA flew Skylab for about 1/20 the cost which seemed to me to be just as effective at the main goal of seeing what extended stays in zero-G do to people).
But here’s one alternative for funding huge research projects like Hubble, Cassini, and the Mars rovers - prizes. The government can offer cash rewards for achieving specific goals (We’ll give 2 billion dollars to any company that can return a rock sample from Mars, etc). Then the government can take a completely hands-off attitude, and only has to pony up the money IF it’s successful, so the citizens have no risk. It also allows us to harness the creatively of the market rather than imposing big government solutions.
So you agree that private companies cananot sustain the current level of scientific research? A typical astronomical satellite or interstellar probe costs at least $300 million, and a major space observatory like the Hubble easily tops $1 billlion. If you are saying the current level of funding is too high, that would imply that you are willing to see the United States fall behind the rest of the world in scientific resarch. The US is not the only player in any field.
So if the government funding for theoretical physics research were stopped, which companies (or what kind of company) would find it necessary or beneficial to step in and provide the funding?
Umm… about the satellite technology bit.
It might be helpful if both sides understood that various private companies were formed by the US government to create satellites. They err… leveraged various large American corporations to “buy” stock in these companies. (“Leveraged” as in “twisted arms all around the country”).
Anyways, they did it this way because they wanted the private sector driving the actual research and operations but knew that any of the existing big telco’s and aircraft companies wouldn’t invest in this technology on their own. The reason for that was that the payoff was too long term (and the research price fairly significant for any one company to try and bear) and they didn’t want competing technological standards and proprietary formats. Only being able to use RCA transceivers to reach an RCA satellite, for instance. They also didn’t want any one company buying controlling interest while the technology and standards were being developed.
You can find an interesting link here.
http://www.presageinc.com/contents/experience/satellitereform/contents/issues/index.shtml
And the actual law which created Comsat is here:
http://www.presageinc.com/contents/experience/satellitereform/contents/briefingbook/technology/1962act.pdf
It’s interesting to note that the law specifies that shares of stock will be sold. What’s not really stated is that shares will be sold basically to various large telcos and not to the general public. In this way the large telcos contribute 200 million dollars towards the establishment of a master operator, if you will. Someone who has sole right of access to satellites (on behalf of the USA) both domestic and foreign which means that an AT&T or Hughes satellite has to be interoperable with whatever standard Comsat devises. And that standard has to be open.
I’d reccommend paying attention to the Section on Comsat and maybe reading a bit between the lines. It’s kind of fascinating really. It’s one of the very few companies formed by law via act of Congress.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
Why? You have to state more than an opinion as justification.
A reasonable alternative, though still not justified. If it’s going to be done, that is a much better approach. Can we make it less than $2B though?
No, we won’t ever know how an alternate history would play out. But given the history of business practices in the first world in the 20th century, it’s a fair assumption that the private sector would have spent the money on direct applications rather than basic research. Instead of the Internet, we’d have telephone banking.
I think you misread the article slightly, which says that the purpose of Bio-X is to fund interdisciplinary research, not basic research. Of nine examples of the sort of projects to be funded:
…all but one are direct applications of technology to specific problems.
You’ve put the argument backwards here. It’s not that we know what’s possible or what should happen, but the private sector won’t fund it. It’s that the private sector invests very little in the basic research that yields unknown discoveries. Without the space program and the development of satellites, telecommunications would probably be entirely cable-based. Were there private companies developing nuclear power in the forties and fifties? No, the commercial nuclear power industry exists because of government research into it that validated the idea.
To repeat my earlier point, we’ve had fifty years of the successful development of space exploration and space technology, and only now is the private sector even gesturing at funding fundamental research into its engineering–now that it’s been demonstrated to be not just possible but commercially exploitable.
John Mace wrote:
You know, it’s funny because I’m usually on the other side of this debate, arguing that private companies do plenty of basic research. And they do. Go look at the list of Nobel prize winners, and a substantial percentage of them were employed by private companies. There was a time when Bell Labs funded more research than did the entire government. Motorola, Lucent, even Microsoft and IBM do tremendous amounts of basic research, and not all of it has direct commercial applications. Let’s remember that the 3 degree cosmic background radiation was discovered at Bell labs.
Plus, we’re at the point in technology now where commercial applications REQUIRE basic science research. Nanotech, commercial satellites, genetics, biochemistry… The gap between basic research and commercial exploitation is getting increasingly narrow.
Also, there is a new class of businessman/explorer cropping up among the very rich, and they are funding tons of basic research, including space research. People like Paul Allen of Microsoft, John Carmack, Steve Wozniak, and many others are spending their billions doing things like building private rockets - not because they will necessarily make more billions with it, but because this is simply the way they choose to spend their money rather than building mansions and buying private islands. Good for them.
Nonetheless, in the case of deep space probes, I don’t see how they can be privately funded and operated. The money is just too big, and the risks are too high. My feeling is that if NASA weren’t doing these things, we wouldn’t see another complex probe around another planet for probably fifty years. The Carmacks and Rutans have their hands full just reaching space. The multiple billions required to build a space fleet capable of launching to other planets is utterly outside the scope of private enterprise for the time being.
In any event, I think we’re picking nits to go after NASA for its relatively meagre space science budget (which has given us great returns), when we should really be picking on political white elephants like ISS, and outmoded, overdesigned behemoths like the Shuttle. THESE are the programs that could be run by private industry. Commercial space launch already has a healthy private component, and the existence of the Shuttle (and the roadblocks NASA has thrown in front of private launches) has crowded private companies out of that market niche.
I dunno, but I sure wouldn’t call the Internet “basic research”. We have a paradigm in this society that if you want to do basic research, you petition the government for funding. Lib’s pig/trough analogy is exactly on target. If the government weren’t there to pour the slop, reasearchers would petition private industry, foundations, and the “Bill Gateses” of the world. You cannot assume that the behavior of individuals and corporations would remain static if the gov’t made dramatic changes to the way it did business.
It was just one example that I was familiar with. See my first point in this post.
There certainly is a legitimate argument that can be made for government funding of sattelite technology for military defense purposes. But I’m not putting the argument backwards at all. You are assuming that funding basic research is a priori something that must be done. I think private individuals are better positioned to determined where their money should be spent. There are legimate expenses for the government, but those entail things like national defense that are in fact a priori necessary for the survival of a country.
Perhaps a different question is in order: Why wasn’t the private sector competing with the government during the last five decades? Surely if they can do it alone, the presence of a huge, cumbersome, slow moving, bureaucratically top-heavy and inept competitor would be not just bearable but desirable.
Probably true, but that is not an argument that proves that particular research must be done now as opposed to 50 yrs from now. I’m a scientist by training and love this type of stuff as much as anyone. But I don’t believe it is appropriate for me to use my own personal interests and desires to draw from the public trough.