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I'll always see that phenomena as a societal failure. It seems that overall, the country prefers to be divided with everyone not helping the government, not pay
by jokoon 11y ago
I'll always see that phenomena as a societal failure. It seems that overall, the country prefers to be divided with everyone not helping the government, not pay taxes (because for some reason, "government is the problem and can't get things done" (C) Reaganomics libertarians), and not even throwing money at scientific research.
It seems that wherever you look, things revolves around the accounting of money, but not around the thing that money can do, like run society and build things.
It's weird because now companies like Tesla and SpaceX are seen as disruptive, but the only thing they do differently is just avoiding business as usual and expanding markets. Ideally, capitalism should be dedicated to creating new markets all the time, but for some reason it stopped. Just like Neil Degrasse Tyson talked about NASA, it seems that without public agencies like NASA, nothing gets done.
- namlem 11y agoGiven the mountains of evidence for the economic evidence of science funding, it baffles me how little we spend on the NSF. Their entire annual budget is a measly $7 billion. NASA, at least is not doing so bad, and have seen an increase in public support and funding. The NSF, unfortunately, is a much more behind-the-scenes bureaucratic organization, and doesn't have sexy images of Martian sunsets and Plutonian topography to generate PR. Yet I would argue their work is much more essential, as the academic breakthroughs of today create the game-changing technologies of the future. The most depressing part is that we even have a surplus of PhD's who would make good use of NSF funds.