The Myth of Science as a Public Good (by Terence Kealey):part 4

[VisitingXenoc133]

I have a question; I looked up Bell Labs and found out it came out of the telephone company which was a gov't owned monopoly, now I heard Labs itself was separate and private and non gov't funded can anyone confirm this?

[J0hnnyH3mps33d]

Also, even if his argument is valid economically, is it valid scientifically?

Perhaps the economy could prosper if the governments were forced 2 stay out of science, but would the science advance as quickly? From a historical perspective, we reached a revolution a couple hundred years ago... eventually (& possibly already) the speedy advancements related 2 that revolution will slow or maybe even come 2 a crashing halt.

I think we're dealing with more variables here than he cares 2 acknowledge.

[KAZVorpal]

"Forced"?

Economic freedom doesn't "force" people to, say, stay out of science. In fact, it leaves people MORE free to be whatever they choose.

It is, in fact, government that "forces" things. Like forcing people to surrender money that would otherwise be used for productive private research, a fraction of which then ends up being squandered on ineffective government research.

[yetidetective]

i still think we should fund science with public money. nations can generate way more funding than the private sector and direct it more coherently.

We wouldn't have the same level of cosmological information we have now if NASA had been left to the private sector. (there'd be 20 different agencies each with 1/20th the progress we've made thus far)

The LHC is way too big to have been funded privately.

Some stuff is better for public and some for private, imo.

[J0hnnyH3mps33d]

Right, tho I doubt the correlation of 20 agencies each with 1/20th of the knowledge is as strong as u think.

But, I couldn't imagine what the world would be like if any Joe, expert or not, had free access to plutonium, masses of rocket fuel, or even supercolliders...

Moving on...

Look @ Virgin... many people will tell u they, & other private sector entities like them, will soon b the driving force of space exploration. Some things are better in the public's hands, others the private. Agreed.

[yetidetective]

The private space companies, i think, will be the future of human space travel because market forces and competition will drive them a lot more than gov't agencies, but the gov't funded space agencies are still going to be #1 when it comes to sending probes out just to learn stuff. At least until colonization becomes a possibility. Then real estate companies are going to start building Mars rovers.

[KAZVorpal]

This is precisely why government should not fund research:

Indeed, they spend FAR more money. Therefore they drive money out of private research, yet produce LESS than the private research they displace.

And yes, they direct it FAR more coherently, putting ten times the funding into one tenth the diversity of research...only what the "experts" agree is best.

This puts all eggs into one basket, excluding most possible solutions...yet the experts are almost always wrong in their guess of "best"

[yetidetective]

What do you mean when you say they produce less? They produce fewer pieces of technology, but they are almost exclusively the producers of the big paradigm shifts like, space travel and the internet, from which the private sector leaps.

If science were a tree then public research would be the trunk and private the branches. The branches have more leaves but that doesn't mean they don't need the trunk.

[KAZVorpal]

Actually, space travel was originally a private sector venture. When government took it over, it spent billions of dollars. The result? The most important advancement in human history, stagnant and inaccessible to real people.

Same with alternative energy, nuclear power, even cancer research.

When government crowds out the private sector, you get an industry based on waste and uselessness.

A bureaucrat can't increase his budget by succeeding, but by squandering money.

[yetidetective]

"space travel was originally a private sector venture"

please explain what you mean by that.

also, why do you think the field is stagnant? we've got robots on mars a space station in orbit and probes exploring deep space. what more do you want, and what makes you think the private sector would have delivered it by now?

And a bureaucrat can increase his budget by succeeding, that happens all the time. If preliminary research shows promise then more funding is diverted toward it.