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Starting around the renaissance, we kind of had “open source fairies” in the form of research grants, professorships and other forms of patronage. If you look a

Starting around the renaissance, we kind of had “open source fairies” in the form of research grants, professorships and other forms of patronage. If you look at 19th century scientists, it seems like most the famous ones weren’t paid to do specific research, but instead we’re given space to do whatever research they could. This has gotten more and more restrictive: even in academia today, it seems rare for open ended grants to be given, and even when there are, there’s a lot more competition for those grants than we can sustain with current funding. Open ended research doesn’t necessarily work in a pure market system. And most open ended research probably won’t provide any concrete monetary benefit to the person funding that research. Even Bell Labs wasn’t really self-funding despite having developed some of the underpinnings of our modern economy. This is an (if not totally compelling) argument for a basic income: anyone can focus on fundamental research without worrying about covering life’s fundamentals, so long as they’re OK living a bare bones life while they can’t get outside funding for it.

syntheweave 5y ago
The market can work, but I think we've been going through a particular centuries-long period where the capital-intensive projects are most celebrated since they bring together the best of industrialization. However, there are crowdfunding platforms of various kinds now that let you sustainably finance small projects or build a marketing story that can be taken to a larger investor. When you get some proof, the funding spigot can flood in rather suddenly. I agree that open-ended research still isn't very rewarded since it goes too far from immediate wants. But I also suspect we are going to get a quality bump on "small stuff" in the coming decades, because so many of our technologies were rushed to market as soon as they were mature enough, and that was a causal factor in major quality issues like buggy/insecure software. Those issues are not cap-intensive to fix, and could subsist on crowdfunding solutions, but they need awareness.
Aloha 5y ago
Edison (et al) especially early on, had to spend huge amounts of time raising capital. Our remembrance of history is often rosier than the reality. Bell Labs in many ways was self funding, 80% of the research the labs did was unglamorous, and wasn't basic research, it was things to directly further the business of AT&T, the Labs did product development and software development directly for Western Electric, which is what the BOC's paid a license for back to the Labs for, and which funded the whole of the Labs operations. The occasionally glamorous high profile basic research that the Labs did was something AT&T did partially as a public good, and to avoid antitrust scrutiny as well as to develop new foundational innovations for its primary business. Unless you have a deep knowledge of AT&T's pre divestiture organizational structure, these facts are just not well or widely known.

syntheweave 5y ago

The market can work, but I think we've been going through a particular centuries-long period where the capital-intensive projects are most celebrated since they bring together the best of industrialization. However, there are crowdfunding platforms of various kinds now that let you sustainably finance small projects or build a marketing story that can be taken to a larger investor. When you get some proof, the funding spigot can flood in rather suddenly. I agree that open-ended research still isn't very rewarded since it goes too far from immediate wants. But I also suspect we are going to get a quality bump on "small stuff" in the coming decades, because so many of our technologies were rushed to market as soon as they were mature enough, and that was a causal factor in major quality issues like buggy/insecure software. Those issues are not cap-intensive to fix, and could subsist on crowdfunding solutions, but they need awareness.

Aloha 5y ago

Edison (et al) especially early on, had to spend huge amounts of time raising capital. Our remembrance of history is often rosier than the reality. Bell Labs in many ways was self funding, 80% of the research the labs did was unglamorous, and wasn't basic research, it was things to directly further the business of AT&T, the Labs did product development and software development directly for Western Electric, which is what the BOC's paid a license for back to the Labs for, and which funded the whole of the Labs operations. The occasionally glamorous high profile basic research that the Labs did was something AT&T did partially as a public good, and to avoid antitrust scrutiny as well as to develop new foundational innovations for its primary business. Unless you have a deep knowledge of AT&T's pre divestiture organizational structure, these facts are just not well or widely known.