 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Terence Keely, Vice Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Buckingham and author of, among other works, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. You make a distinction between Francis Bacon's view of science and Adam Smith's. Can you tell us a bit about that? That's a nice question because I set the whole book up really as a debate between the two and they completely disagree with each other. Francis Bacon, who by the way was in many respects a very deep and great thinker. He was, for example, the person who invented the concept of progress. And as I was saying yesterday, it's astonishing that the idea of progress is only 400 years old. So he had some very deep thoughts and very good thoughts. But on the subject of economics of science, he I think got it absolutely wrong. He suggested that the Spanish had become the world's richest power as they were 400 years ago because Henry the Navigator had set up in Sargeras in Western Portugal essentially a research institute based on pure science developing improved methods of navigation. And he suggested that technology is the source of power and wealth which we all agree with to this day. But he said the source of technology came from the government funding of pure as well as of applied science. The trouble with that idea is that it's based on a myth. Henry the Navigator never did that. He simply put out the story that he'd done all this research and development because he was trying to bolster his image in Europe. In fact, he was just a pragmatic soldier and sailor. So did he name himself the Navigator? Was that part of his self-promotion? Well, it's a nice question because he certainly was full of self-promotion. No, I think that came later. He himself never bought a ship, funnily enough. Oh, really? It was all done on land. And he also said that science is a public good and he came up with all sorts of theories as to why that should be, which is still repeated to this day. Adam Smith, unlike Francis Bacon, actually had seen an industrial revolution in action. He actually saw the early industrial revolution taking place in Scotland and he said it's simply not true that technology, applied science, comes out of pure science. In fact, in those days pure science was in such a sad state with people believing in things like flogiston, fire as a material, or the caloric theory that heat as material. He said it just isn't so. What actually happens is that technologists on the ground, in the factories, on the factory floor, make the developments and originate the new ideas. And if anything, the flow of knowledge goes the other way, that the academics benefit from the advances made on the factory floor. And so the fundamental difference between the two is this. Adam Smith says you can leave science and development to the market. It will find all the money it needs because of the motivation of companies to develop better science and technology on the factory floor. As Bacon says, technology comes out of pure science. No one will fund pure science if the government doesn't do it. Therefore, governments have to fund pure science. So that's the very striking difference between the two models. Would you say this is kind of maybe a different conception of what science is for also at the backdrop of this because you could have these sort of pure scientific thought type of theory, maybe more like bacon, whereas useful science, so Adam Smith is focused on useful science and building things that help people live better lives, but thinking about the stars and all these things like that, people think that has its inherent worth too, even if it's not useful for anything. Yes, but Adam Smith was very suspicious of people who put in claims for government money for the greater public good. He did accept there were public goods. I mean, he didn't deny that roads and schools could be public goods, but he always felt that you really had to justify government funding to private individuals who claimed to be doing it for the public good. And he would have argued, I'm sure what we know because he did talk about this, he would have argued that there is enough private funding of science either through students paying fees to universities who can then via that money into research or coming straight out of the research of industrialists that you just don't need to burden the taxpayer with that. That's what I think he would have said. And the story is bigger than that too, because in your book, Economic Laws, Signed of Research in particular, it goes back to antiquity. I mean, you think the Phoenicians had a thing different than the empires and moving up through there. Can you talk a little about how they had a leg up too and why? Well, the ancient world is very, very interesting on this subject. The thing that he was particularly keen on, Francis Bacon, was the extraordinary explosion of science under the Hellenic Greek period. After the classical Greek period had come to an end, you then had the Hellenic Greek period, often based on what was going on in Egypt. And he describes that the Ptolemies in particular invested a fortune in science and research, and they paid for the museum and they paid for the library and they sponsored a whole host of fantastic science. There's no question. They did fantastic science along the lines that you suggested, and some of the people that they funded worked out the diameter of the earth to win an extraordinary degrees of accuracy and Archimedes and all these people. But the point that Smith would make about all that is that it didn't end up with any economic development whatsoever. And in fact, all that science simply impoverished the peasants of Egypt who were being burdened with the taxation to pay for that science, but none of it translated into technological economic growth. And so the ancient world actually shows a very good example of how the funding of pure science in the absence of a market because there was no real market in those days is simply a waste of people's money. This isn't a lot of especially pure science, a really long game in the sense that we put all of this effort in. We make these discoveries, but it may take 100, 200, 300, 400 years before those discoveries snowball with others made along the way and then radically improve the lives of people. And so I could see an argument that it's like, sure, the peasants at the time did not benefit, but on the whole the world is far better off today or at some point since this research was done because the research was done. And if we had been focusing only on what we know would better our peasants today, then we never would have seen the enormous progress. Well, it is of course true that you get developments in science that sometimes are not really translated into economic or technological benefit for 100 or 200 years. That statement is quite correct. The question is actually, do you need government funding to achieve those? Or if you lived in a world where there was no government funding, would in fact, as we now call them philanthropists and institutions fund those separately and independently? And the Adam Smith argument was that they would have. He himself, for example, got a student ship to do his work at Baylor College, Oxford, because a philanthropist had endowed a student ship that he was able to capture. And in his day, there was a significant, rather like American universities today, there was a significant philanthropic world around Oxford and Cambridge and universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and coupled with the fact that these institutions could charge really quite significant fees of their students. He argued, I mean, I'm not saying he would have argued, he did argue that there was no need, even for those long-term developments that you described to be funded by the government, because in fact, there were a sufficient number of private individuals around who would have funded them. And we see the revolution, too, that Adam Smith is the industrial revolution, the beginning of it and an agricultural revolution. Before that, all these seemed to create technology that was more useful, very slowly, more useful for people in creating innovations, especially in the industrial revolution. Yes, I mean, one of the really interesting stories is why did the industrial revolution take place in Britain then? I actually think it's the other way around. I think the question is, why didn't the industrial revolution take place much, much earlier? If you look back through history, you see constantly really exciting periods of time when, for example, Renaissance Italy was a ferment of fantastic commercial development. They invented double-entry bookkeeping. They invented all sorts of technologies for commerce. And just as Italy was about to take off, unfortunately, it got invaded by the French and the Spanish and the Austrians. And so, again, I think that there was no Spanish and the Austrians. And so, the history of the world really... China is another very good example. China had some fantastic technology. They invented printing or they invented... Gunpowder and... Yeah, long, long, long before we did in the West. But unfortunately, time and time again, they get these emperors who just crush everything. So, I think the question is the other way around. The industrial revolution happened in Britain because we'd had the Glorious Revolution in 1688. And frankly, there was no one around to stop it from developing. We did have coal. We did have steel. That was all terribly helpful. But I think England, after 1688, would have developed something glorious anyway. And what Adam Smith would have said is, the market generates both the need and the incentive. If we three sitting around this table were competing in a market, we would each of us have a strong incentive to do research and development to beat the other two. And because research and development is always unpredictable, who knows what discoveries you ultimately end up making. You don't need government to incentivize the three of us to try to defeat each other in the market. What about something like a good... Right around the time we're talking about now, a good counter-example possibly is the longitude prize. This seems like something in the story we tell that this was solving a very difficult problem that was very important in using public money but with competition behind it. Could government do something like that or did it do it successfully with the longitude prize? Now, that is a very good question. And I think you've slightly got me on slightly the backflip. I think you've got me on slightly got me on slightly the back foot. But let me just make a few points about this before I can see defeat. First of all, the government energy and you put the money afterwards. So Harrison had to develop his clock in the anticipation. And the government also cheated and didn't actually pay up for about 20 years. They didn't give Harrison his view. I remember that, yeah. But I think although what you say is quite true, that's not really government funding research. It's more government acting on behalf of society to identify a need. It's more corporate state. Because let's have a counterfactual. If the government hadn't done that, would there still have been a need for better determination of longitude and would someone like Harrison eventually have developed a better clock? The answer is obviously yes. So I think what the government was doing was actually anticipating the market signals. Though it is a good question that all government money is always wasted. Oh, absolutely. Even a broken clock is right sometimes. What? Twice a day, I guess. So the question I guess we can get to is to frame the rest of the conversation is science a public good? Oh, no. What is the argument that it is and what's wrong with that? That is a very interesting argument and it's one I've dedicated too many years of my life to. But I'm now very clear that it's absolutely not a public good. It's very simple. Imagine the three of us are competing in the marketplace and I go out there and do lots of research and development which is very, very expensive and I develop a better product. You two can copy my product more cheaply than it cost me to make it. So you can get the information you can either go to the library and read the papers or you can go to the patent library and read the patents or you can just take my machinery and put it to bits and work out how to copy. And I think in innovation that when you do copy you end up with much more capital in your company than I have because I've already spent all my capital and so you'll drive me into bankruptcy. That's the public good argument. The trouble with that argument and the reason it's actually wrong and you can state categorically it's wrong there's lots of evidence that it's wrong is that actually it's very expensive to copy. The studies have been done. The direct costs of copying technology ready to take to the marketplace are about 65% of the cost of innovation averaged out across a number of industries and a large number of companies but that's only the direct costs the indirect costs bring it up to 100% because to copy you need to have skilled scientists, skilled researchers still technologists who actually understand what it is they're trying to copy. You if I were to take you and put you in the middle of Unilever and say copy that product you wouldn't be able to do it you need to be a chemist to be able to do that and to be a chemist able to copy is sufficient quality that you're actually generating your own science and if you're not generating science of the equivalent quality in the same sort of field you simply are not qualified to copy. That's just the pragmatic reality of it and we know that sometimes companies like DuPont for example try to stop their scientists from publishing for sort of decades of time and the scientists cease to become productive and the company's fortunes collapse because they weren't able to import the science and technology from other people because no one in the company if you want to copy you've got to be an active scientist yourself so you've got to contribute to the pool of knowledge that's the payment to the pool of knowledge and it's absolutely not a public good it's a good that's really only available to other people who contribute so just earlier this year Martin Ricketts and I he's a professor at Buckingham published a paper entitled in Research Policy which is the top journal in this field entitled Modeling Science as a Contribution Good and we model that against science as a public good and the empirical data fits the fact that science isn't a public good there's no evidence that government funding of science is actually ever stimulated economic growth so we have to discard the public good model but the public good model is simply based on the misconception you can't just copy other people's science only active scientists who contribute can copy other people's science Let me ask a question about those costs of copying versus costs of innovation because it seems like one big difference so in both cases you need skilled people putting a lot of time in and participating but a big difference between innovation and copying is with copying you know there's something at the end of the process whereas with innovation there's going to be a lot of blind alleys and dead ends and so yeah you may get something but you may have gone had all sorts of starts that went nowhere but the copier says there it is I can see it I just have to figure out how to do it so those costs have kind of I guess failed innovation or innovation that didn't happen was it petered out factored into the cost of copying On the direct cost of copying no on the indirect I think they are because there's another consequence of the fact that research is unpredictable sometimes you produce very good things that you never thought you were going to produce in the first place I mean a classic example is Nokia you know it started off as a forestry company ended up making mobile phones or cell phones as you call them here because that was the way their technology ended up so everyone is engaged in R&D for a number of different purposes one of which is to try to create innovations of their own another of which is to copy and each of them that has a spectrum of activities all the competitors are all engaging in their own full starts because they are not engaging in their own primary research ultimately they are not going to be able to copy anyway so the costs of the full starts are actually shared between everyone in the industry it's just the costs of doing business so you're absolutely right some of those calculations costs are not taken into account but the indirect costs so the direct costs of copying is 65% but the full starts come within the indirect costs within the 35% that I talked about the tacit knowledge and all the other material you have to invest into before you start the business of copying does this apply though to things I mean maybe I feel like everyone would be thinking about things like the super colliders and these sort of things that could only come through public funding maybe the answer is if they come from public funding maybe they shouldn't even be built maybe they're just too expensive and not worth it and then people will say well what is your fascination with the universe don't you just want to know about smashing atoms together let's take that point because what's often forgotten is how huge science was funded in this country in the United States of America there was no public funding of science at any significant value whatsoever before 1940 and yet you had the 100 inch and the 200 inch palomar telescopes you had Mooney Goddard getting his rockets up to 7000 feet and developing all the technology that NASA and I regret to say the Nazis ultimately used all this funded by the Carnegie Foundation in that case and the Rockefeller Foundation and what's interesting is that before 1940 there's an enormous outpouring of philanthropic support for science in this country so for example when the Manhattan project started and the scientists out on the west coast needed a cyclotron they actually got a cyclotron funded by one of the east coast philanthropic foundations because the government at the time didn't understand the need for a cyclotron because the government at the time didn't understand the need from an atom bomb so the early part of atom bomb technology although it was a government program was actually been funded by philanthropists who understood better than the government what was needed so the answer to the point is ultimately that if there really is a human desire for knowledge that you described you either leave it to people like Bill Gates who made their fortunes of investing in foundations or you say to people well you got the American Heart Foundation you got the American Diabetes Association you know what's the stop individuals coming together let me give you an example of SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI has a budget of $7 million a year there's not a trivial amount of money given to them by multi-millionaires who really believe that we should be looking for little green men out there so I just don't see any evidence of the philanthropic failure You say that we could just come together form organizations that would then fund the American Heart Association and SETI and whatnot but isn't that as our friends on the left would say precisely what government is government is us coming together and deciding we want to in this case fund science Yeah but the difference is that the government can send policemen to my house at 3 o'clock in the morning and arrest me if I haven't made my contributions to science and lots of people don't want to contribute to science there are lots of Christians for example fundamentalist Christians who think science is very threatening to their faith who don't believe in evolution so I think that the trouble with the government is that it has coercion I mean I'm in the middle of the Cato here you know this and the question is should people be coerced into supporting this sort of thing and I think the answer is no You can make the argument that government is however imperfectly answerable to the people we elect people we vote on issues government therefore represents the will of the people and the funding it might in some aggregate represents the will of the people but if we kick it over entirely to rich people or foundations then science what gets funded and the kind of scientific progress we might make is now subject to the whims of plutocrats Now that is a very good argument and I half agree with it I do only half but I do half agree with it I think there is a role for fully funded science and I think it's simply summed up in one word cigarettes would we have discovered what we know about cigarettes and the damage they do without government funding or science well actually we probably would have funnily enough because Richard Dole he did work for the medical research council in England so he was funded under government program but I actually think that if you go back at the time there was sufficient concern about the growth of lung cancer lung cancer just came from nowhere and Richard Dole were looking at it it was absolutely in the air where lung cancer suddenly come from it was this explosion of cigarette smoking that took place in the 20s and 30s after the first world war so I actually think that there is sufficient evidence that the foundations would in fact have addressed that problem however I do accept your point as a fundamental point that a democratic government should fill in the gaps if they see areas that either the philanthropists or industry aren't funding but it's the role of democratic government but it's relatively inexpensive that's not fundamental in sort of science to create economic growth and secondly don't fool yourself into thinking you're going to create economic growth that way because you won't but you may well need to meet a social need that neither philanthropists nor industry will meet and there I'm with you Can we trust even the apparatus of democratic government to be funding sometimes it might be funding smoking anti-smoking campaign research into smoke into the causes but at other times it might be funding something based on politics that ends up being bad science or in bad because the whims of the democratic body politic are definitely not very scientific Now you get gross abuse I mean this pork barreling you know roads in Alaska the bridges that end in the middle of nowhere and there are huge numbers there was a fascinating debate in America between 1945 and 1950 which really has now been forgotten but it illustrates this point beautifully By 1945 there was universal bipartisan agreement that America needed the government to fund more science because before 1940 the American government funded no science and there was bipartisan agreement that with the Cold War and the new world we're moving into we should fund science I don't believe in that but forgetting that that's what the American people and their representatives believed but there was a fascinating and totally sterilizing argument which for five years stopped anything from happening because there were two schools of thought there was the school of thought that came behind Vannevar Bush who was the famous intellectual who wrote Science Endless Frontier and he said that scientific money should be distributed only by scientists two other scientists based on merit on the other hand against him Senator Kilgore with the complete support of President Truman said that's undemocratic money should be distributed only by politicians and it should be according to national needs so every state would get as much money for its research in proportion to its population nothing to do with merit and so Massachusetts which has this extraordinary collection of brilliant science in Boston would get no more money than Colorado which is Arkansas which is a different and Congress looked at this and decided that President was wrong and that Kilgore was wrong and in 1947 passed a bill to create the National Science Foundation where money was distributed by scientists to other scientists based on merit and merit alone and it was vetoed by Truman and his veto it's all in there actually and the veto states this represents a lack of faith in the democratic process but hey we all know about public choice we all know about pork barreling we see what our representatives actually do they're the last people to distribute research grants and so in 1950 when the crisis developed because of the Korean war and other crises coming out of the Soviet Union the executive surrendered to the legislature and we ended up with a system we have now and to be fair to the system we have now if you can keep democratically elected politicians out of it and just leave it to elite scientists funding other elite scientists I don't think it does as well as the market does but it certainly isn't a disaster and the quality of American science these days is a course of international excellence Is it possible that in certain situations maybe I'm thinking for example dietary research the U.S. Department of Agriculture and suggesting different things for dietary purposes but being influenced by say the meat lobby in terms of what they're going to recommend are they going to recommend no trans fat are they going to recommend less red meat but then the meat lobby comes in and puts some pressure on this in terms of science and where the funding is going and then starts to skew the dietary science and I mean if you think about the history of what the American government has recommended for diet at different points it seems to be wildly all over the place and based a lot on on research that maybe was wrong as we now think butter is okay for example Well actually that is a very perceptive point because one of the problems of democratically funded science is that it makes you vulnerable to lobbyists I think dietary research is in a terrible state I mean for example we're all told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day it's not unrelated to the fact that almost every study that says that is ended up ultimately funded by general mills or Kellogg's or post I mean and that doesn't mean that this is corrupt but it just means that there's clearly an incentive to find those sort of findings and so one of the great dangers of democratically funded science is that you end up with a government actually acting on behalf of the lobbyists because they're told that's good for employment in Minnesota and so it is a double danger whereas the Rockefeller Foundation could do the same dietary research and wouldn't give a dam about employment in Minnesota it would just try to find what the truth was so democratic science can be very dangerous But I'm struck that your example of how democratic science could go wrong was made by pointing to studies funded by private companies and showing how those how the private funding influences the studies in perhaps the wrong direction so isn't this precisely the kind of problem that would also exist with public with private funding of science that you would have general mills and Kellogg saying we're going to fund stuff but only if it looks like it's going to tell people to eat more Wheaties. I would actually go the other way I would actually say that the great foundations like the Gates Foundation or whatever will be much more likely to look fairly at dietary research if they didn't feel the government was already doing it for them and the trouble is the government isn't doing it the government appears to be doing it in an objective and dispassionate way but actually is far too susceptible to this terrible bit of funding so this comes out of the question you asked ten minutes ago is there a role for government funding of science to act as a third lobby against philanthropists and against industry to which the answer is yes but unfortunately it doesn't do it very well it's far too susceptible to this pressure from lobbyists so very often government ends up amplifying the message that lobbyists want and it's a very dangerous thing. What about incidental effects I think a lot of people are probably thinking okay sure dietary stuff lobbyists are researching specific things but isn't the case that for example the American military has just just by researching its own aims has given huge amounts of innovation to the world and especially the space program you know whether it's Tang or space ice cream or all these computers and all these things that have come out of this they were pursuing one thing but then all these amazing things came out on the other side. Well people have done studies on this and I can give you references I mean military research is only about ten percent as valuable as civil research it's a complete waste of money the whole NASA program has been a complete waste of money I mean what benefit did we actually get from landing men on the moon it's it's it was all a defense initiative and a national projection of pride the Americans were deeply offended in 1957 that the Soviets launched Putnik first but what good did that do the Soviet Union which which collapsed with the economic complete failure 30 years later the whole model of these ground projects creating these spillovers that benefit society actually it doesn't work the benefits of NASA have been trivial I mean and it's not true about stick you know the the non-stick frying pan that had nothing to do with NASA The only thing that is relevant here is you know the internet and it's absolutely true that CERN you know which is your which is the super collider that we have in Europe did produce an individual who did make this extraordinary development in what was then called distributed computing to which I would say if you look at the gargantuan gargantuan some as the money invested in these research programs of course something's going to come out of it the question is would something come out of it if there had been none of these gargantuan programs the money therefore retained within the corporations within society at large I think the answer is absolutely yes I mean the classic example is the airplane there was a race in the very very early part of the 20th century between the Wright brothers and Langley and the Smithsonian now the Wright brothers won that race but if Langley had won that race everyone would have said well we wouldn't have the airplane but for government funding and science he was funded by the government so and yet of course we know so no one ever makes that argument and the airplane of course we now understand and because the airplane is provided by private funding Edison was privately funded Tesla was privately funded somehow people forget all that they only look at what has been funded by the state assuming somehow that that wouldn't have been funded but I would say to you that just as the private sector produced the airplane so the private sector would have produced distributed computing the internet if it only it hadn't been crowded out by government funding you say that NASA was incredibly expensive and produced little of value and I'm reminded of a lot of arguments that came up a little while back when I think NASA shut down the space shuttle program was it because and the argument was you know we this is very expensive we can't do it and it's not you know people would say we shouldn't be spending money on this because it's not producing things of concrete value but the response was often there is a huge value call it even like a spiritual value in these massive flights of exploration in reaching for the stars in trying to go beyond our planet in exploring and learning and that those are deeply central to what it means to be human and so we would be kind of less of a people we'd be less of a people we would be atrophying ourselves to if we stepped back from that and said look we're only going to spend money on these kinds of things that we know we're going to produce the internet and whatever else and if we stop looking beyond the horizons there's something like anti-human about that let's do the counterfactual what would have happened if the Second World War hadn't broken out? Moonee Goddard up in Massachusetts had developed all the fundamental technology that NASA and the Nazis then took over and his rockets were going up to 7,000 feet by 1940 he developed the liquid fuels he developed the gyroscopes he developed the whole thing and the only reason he didn't put the first artificial satellite into space sometime in the early 1940s 15 years before the Soviets did it was the Second World War broke out and he was pulled out of that and told the developer Bazooka because we needed the Bazooka to kill lots and lots of Germans but for that the philanthropic sector would have got the first and then of course once you got one in space then people like Richard Branson come in and develop all the sort of stuff that they wanted to do so what I think I'm saying here is if you look at things like the Palomar 200 inch telescopes and the fantastic investment in space that was felt by the philanthropists that you have described so beautifully I think those things would actually have been met by a sector I mean it's very hard to show anything in astronomy that wasn't actually funded independently by the private sector because what you've described really relate people respond to that and people like Bill Gates would be funding it if it wasn't being done for him by NASA I'm pretty sure about that Now in terms of whether or not this actually public funding of science contributing to economic growth contributing to better sands of living there's some pretty good data on this that pretty much shows that it doesn't correct the OECD studies that have shown it's quite good talking a little bit about how that data what it shows and how clear it shows it It's really important because it shows it beautifully the OECD did a study called Sources of Growth in OECD Countries 2003 that's what it's called and it was published in 2003 and it's on the web and they looked at the 21 leading countries of the world the 21 members of the OECD and they looked over a 26 year period and they simply did a very careful multivariate analysis and of course they had such a long period of time as longitudinal so they were able to say country A in 1978 does that what does this GDP look like 5 years later 10 years later 20 years later so they were able to get to the nearest you can with cause and effect what they found and they looked at a whole host of parameters OECD has a vast amount of data available to it and many of the parameters they looked at was the public and private funding of research and development R&D is bigger than just science it also incorporates industrial research as well as academic science and the finding was dramatic and because it wasn't expected by the OECD and it's indeed it wasn't welcomed by the OECD it has much more value because this wasn't we're not talking about confirmation bias here this was lack of confirmation bias which upset everyone and what they found very dramatically the first to do that there's an individual in the city called Park at American University looking at the same data came up with the same findings and indeed I had myself at the same time as well but what the OECD did more comprehensive than anyone else they showed that there was a direct correlation between the degree of private funding of R&D and subsequent economic growth there was zero correlation between public funding of R&D and subsequent economic growth in fact they suggested there was a slightly negative correlation it looked as if the public funding of research and development actually slightly damaged economic growth presumably by crowding out private funding or by pulling privately funded researchers out of the private sector into the public sector where they may have done very nice science but it didn't benefit anyone economically and that is a really damaging attack on the concept of science of public good there are other damaging attacks but that's a particularly powerful one and so we have this National Science Foundation we have this pretty good idea that we are created in the in the scientists giving science grants and we've talked about lobbyists in different industries you know creating and influencing how the science is being done what is the National Science Foundation the question I think is what is the harm other than the resources taken out of society but some say oh you libertarians are always talking about that you're always talking about no taxation takes resource out of society the National Science Foundation I don't know what the budget is I'm sure it's very small it's a rounding error in the US budget compared to Social Security and Medicare and military spending so what's the harm well that's a fair question I think the number of the harm you're absolutely right the NSF and NIH obviously do good work and to some extent they're simply doing work that would otherwise have been done anyway in the private sector tough for the researchers and therefore they have to produce high quality science I think the harm is a symbolic harm really it gives the impression to society at large that without government we wouldn't have science and also perhaps more importantly because everyone understands the link between science and economic growth it also suggests that without government we wouldn't have economic growth and so it's damaging at a spiritual level really because it means that we are handing over government the belief that good things, good cultural things and good economic things can be delivered only by government it therefore empowers government and in this country more than any in the world founded by people deeply skeptical of central government it actually hits at the very root of what made the United States America the United States America United States America is all about the individual or the state but certainly not about the federal government but what we've done is we've legitimized federal government in a really important area of life you were talking earlier about the spiritual benefits of going to the moon and stuff if those are all captured by the government then actually in a funny sort of way the individual is minimized and government is legitimized let me for example give you an example the sequence in the human genome that was a largely private sector activity in Britain it was largely funded by the World Contrast which was a huge charity in this country it was funded as much by Craig Venter as it was actually by NSF and NIH but who declared the triumph in 2000 it was Tony Blair and Bill Clinton standing together on the podium which is connected simultaneously on different podiums but it came out to the world as one image celebrating this as if it was a government funded program ultimately legitimizing Bill Clinton and Tony Blair well you know I don't want to legitimize Bill Clinton and Tony Blair more than they deserve that. I'm curious about different avenues of research and how they might play with public versus private funding so are there areas if we have a lot of public funding right now that we're not getting as much research in as we might if things were more privately funded that there might be benefits for us pursuing those paths and then the flip side are there if we got rid of public funding are there areas of science that we would expect to see dry up as a result? Well I think with public funding you do get significant misappropriation of funds I mean if you think the purpose of science is to benefit society there's no question that the marketplace ultimately tells us what society needs better than do inward looking group societies what inward looking group societies do take public money and they work out the most interesting science that's available to them and they go into that and of course as we've agreed it's high quality and it's not without its value but it's not what the private sector would have been funding I mean for example NIH has received I don't know how many trillions of dollars over the last 50 years and yet we actually are in a situation where the drug companies are producing fewer and fewer new drugs something has gone wrong with that funding into NIH because where are the new drugs they're certainly not coming out of NIH and so I think that what has happened is that science is being driven by the priorities of scientists who have been allowed to work unchecked really by the needs of society and I would like to see I believe that if the NIH didn't exist we would certainly have more R&D taking place within more drug companies and I think that benefits human health would actually be better because drug companies do invest a great deal in pure science it's simply not true that they would neglect pure science so I think the answer to your question is by having government funded science and again I almost go back to Truman we're getting into a situation where you have to use a cliche in Ivory Tire of scientists funding other scientists for science that they think is the most interesting looking at the opportunities available to them but it does get divorced from the needs of society we need more drugs and there are very few of them coming out of the antibiotics, there hasn't been a new antibiotic for 20 years that is not reflecting society's best interest and it seems that we could imagine the results the inputs and the pressures being skewed towards certain things and we think about medical science for example AIDS research heavily funded because AIDS became very politically a very political thing in proportion to other diseases that maybe don't have the same level of political will behind it so maybe we could say that AIDS research was overfunded compared to cancer that the politics push it in that direction and create a skewed system and maybe with global warming and stuff too we see it today in Ebola we all know about the deaths in Ebola in Africa but at the same time every day for every patient who dies from Ebola sadly two patients are dying from malaria and we've known that for a very, very long time and so you're absolutely right AIDS was deeply politicized a huge amount of money went into AIDS and actually to be fair fantastic benefits came out of it I mean AIDS is a completely different disease and it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago well 30 years ago, astonishing but AIDS could also have been handled at a different level I mean epidemiologically people could have been more careful about practices, their private practices and also about blood transfusions and things so there were a number of different ways that disease could have been addressed yes I think AIDS did receive disproportionate amount of public funding on the other hand to be fair to AIDS it has worked remarkably well and whether industry alone would have done it as effectively I think the answer I'd have to say to be honest would be no but whether the number of AIDS sufferers in this country would have reflected the proportion of the investment probably not because of course AIDS became very sexy in terms of science the scientists have first discovered the virus got the Nobel Prize and all that sort of thing because it captured a sort of public mood it's a difficult question it's a difficult question but the analogy may do Ebola as I think a good one because on a market driven research if you were creating a product to make people's lives better well there's far more bigger consumer base of malaria sufferers than Ebola sufferers you couldn't create a business around Ebola drugs by themselves which is maybe a demonstration that it's not where you should be putting your efforts you could sell a lot of Ebola vaccines to panicked Americans yes that is true so maybe you could but maybe that just demonstrates that that's not where you should be putting your efforts not Ebola you should be looking at influenza and malaria things that don't get wall to wall media coverage well sure that's true these neglected diseases I mean to be fair to the scientific community there is a lot of malaria research there are no opportunities no one can understand the scientists can't understand how you handle this because you know as you know the malaria organism is very clever at changing its antigens all the time and so if there were better opportunities there I'm sure the scientific community would have moved in there more but there is a vast potential market for malaria but it could definitely be left to the private sector when the opportunities arose as for Ebola I mean the tragedy about Ebola yes of course vaccines and stuff are very important but actually you control Ebola just by better public health measures in fact it's a reflection of the poverty of those societies unfortunately and in the other instance too I know that our colleague Pat Michaels in front of all of ours I mean he definitely thinks that government funding of climate change research in a one specific way and not toward another side is skewing the results in a way that's undesirable for truth and it seems like that's the kind of thing we would expect it to be pushing in one direction oh he's absolutely right I mean climate gauge you know when they discovered all those emails it was very clear he was a group of scientists absolutely determined to defend their funding and governments have it's strange really how governments have bought into the global warming so comprehensively I think they've done so because it really legitimizes the role of government I mean really only government could address these issues carbon taxing and all the rest of it and so government had a very strong interest in global warming being a really serious issue because it puts politicians centre stage and there is no doubt that the whole global warming community is very much biased towards one direction so if you challenge it you know you're called a denier with all the overturns that that has and you're not going to get government funding and you certainly won't get government funding and you have difficulty publishing your papers I mean I have always believed long long ago this is why Pat and I get on so well that the best analogy we have with global warming is the scare over eugenics eugenics is a really terrible story and between 1900 and 1945 I mean in this country in the United States of America something like I mean in the state of California alone a hundred thousand mentally defective people were compulsory sterilized against their will in that 45 year period and lots of other appalling things took place in the name of eugenics in America in Scandinavia forget what happened under the Nazis but under huge tracts of Europe and North America eugenics legitimized some really dreadful practices you had people like H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw actively advocating the gassing and elimination of genetically inferior people can you imagine, can you imagine D.H. Lawrence actually said thank god for poison gas I mean the culture the atmosphere out of which Hitler did was actually being laid out by western scientists and western thinkers I repeat D.H. Lawrence H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw really top public intellectuals advocating the elimination of people who carried the wrong genes and out of that you get a very unfortunate culture that Hitler was not a unique person he was responding to his culture and that's very dangerous and I think global warming is in the same area of a group of scientists who can see real benefit to their own research with politicians who can see real benefit to themselves feeding on each other to create this mass panic after all it's not at all clear and I'm sure there is global warming I'm not at all sure it's a bad thing I'm not at all sure it's anthropogenic either but in as much as it is it's more good than harm You say that government funding government will prefer that people that people's research supports things that then government wants to do so if your research says government should get involved and stop this problem then that's the kind of thing that gets more funding I'm curious how that plays in with one of the biases we hear about in scientific research more broadly which is the bias towards positive results but if you do a study and find a positive correlation that's much more... Yeah, cancer from coffee or something like that You find that coffee causes cancer that's much more likely to get published than you find that coffee does not cause cancer Which is just as important as the positive results And this happens across science but would public or private funding make that problem better or worse? Well it's a problem that comes out of competitive grant awards because grant giving bodies are simply I mean I think this is much an internal scientific problem as one caused by government funding The question is if you apply for funds in the competitive way who's going to get those funds and the scientist who makes a positive discovery somehow captures the imagination of his fellow scientists or her fellow scientists or the grant giving bodies So I think that is frankly the consequence of competitive funding of science and it might just be the cost of doing science I'm not quite sure how you address it except that you as a community as a scientific community can recognize that this is a tremendous skewing and that negative results should be published just as fully Now to be fair there's a huge move to register surveys like this in advance and make sure they're always being published. It comes out of the corruptions of the pharmaceutical industry and the pharmaceutical industry has done some bad things I mean who hasn't, we all do bad things and the pharmaceutical industry has certainly done bad things so for example one of the tricks the pharmaceutical industry got up to let's say you got a drug A which is probably not very good for a disease B actually probably slightly damages it but if you commission ten different surveys then about seven of those surveys will show it's done you harm a couple of surveys will show nothing but one might show benefit in the nature of statistical error that's the one you publish and so in response to that there's a huge move now that all these processes all these surveys should be registered in advance and there's an obligation on you to publish the findings whatever they are and perhaps that should go across the board so the scientific community can address its own problems that everything should be published including negative findings but it's of course it's accentuated and aggravated not so much by government funding of competitive grants but by the shared process of having competitive grants just look at this and say what does the world look like without public funding of science and why is it a better place there are two answers to that the first one is the world without the government funding of science empowers the individual more it means that individuals as individuals but also individual corporations individual universities do not feel in any sense that they are inferior to the state we don't have a situation where the state is legitimized because only it confronts us and for me that's a major cultural thing I do not want to legitimize the state because it's an organization that uses coercion beyond that which it absolutely needs to do that's why I'm a libertarian so anything that legitimizes the state if it's not necessary I'm opposed to and since the state does not have the fund science I would prefer a world in which the state funded no science and that was an area of legitimization that was lost to the state what would science look like well the universities wouldn't do so much research there's no question about that there would be much more research than they otherwise would have done they would therefore focus much more on teaching they would still do research and they would still have PhD students to train people up to become the scientists of the future but they wouldn't be turning themselves places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton practically research institutions with a few undergraduates attached and you could argue that's real distortion of what the emission of this institution should be so there would be much less research taking place in universities but there would still be sufficient because we know that from pre-1940 to train all the scientists that society needs there would be much more science taking place in industry in companies but there would also be more philanthropic science there would be more Gates foundations around and I would argue that that would be a healthier mix of research because one of the things you've really got to avoid and what we have unfortunately to some extent in this country but also in Europe is NIH and NSF have too much power too much monopolistic power imposing too much one particular vision on the world and you get a much healthier scientific community there are lots of competing funding bodies with their own different cultures you're more likely to get a richer mix of science with a complex mixture of funding bodies Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org