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The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? And: is my characterization of the problem correct? Why not start a new firm th

The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? And: is my characterization of the problem correct? Why not start a new firm that better compensates researchers (and tool makers) for their valuable work? It seems like big tech (especially Google, and perhaps Microsoft) comes in from the commercial side and invests in R&D at reasonable rates for just this purpose! But surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit. Perhaps the characterization is wrong and the EV (expected value) of this work is far lower than you think (this seems likely), and/or there are externalities like regulation, or the leverage of prestige that traditional orgs (e.g. universities and publishers) wield, that warp the profit incentive. Or (and this is my cynical view) pure science was always best left to the hobbyists. Historically the most important discoveries have come only rarely and to those who loved doing science in their free time or, more rarely, when a talented individual found a patron. Building a science factory and hiring science factory workers not only sounds distasteful, but it doesn't seem to work very well. (The exceptions being those very capital intensive projects like the LHC which require a large pool of professional scientists and engineers to do the experiment.)

hackernewds 4y ago
They expected value theory is very plausible. there are a lot of r&D projects that basically produce zero output for decades. high risk high reward
dgb23 4y ago
There are plenty of firms that sell software to academia and many of them make a ton of money. I bet there are great opportunities in that space. I guess the issue is that most business educated/oriented people are both too disjoint from both engineering and science, so competition is rare.
psyc 4y ago
I'd guess that the expected commercial value being low would be the norm, and discoveries making millions relatively rare, just as this is in every other context. However, the second half of your second paragraph is where my mind went to first, because what gp says happens does happen, albeit at a normal (low) rate. The motivation of people working in science is different, as it is in say the games business. Game developers have historically been paid lower except at a tiny handful of companies. Not 33 cents on the dollar, but maybe 50 to 70 (bearing in mind that FAANG/unicorn salaries are not the norm either)
fennecfoxen 4y ago
> The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? You are the vehicle by which neo-liberal capitalism fixes the problem. By leaving academia to work for a firm directly, you are responding to a price signal sent by the industry, relaying that price signal to the academic labs. You might object, this is slower than most price signals! That's because the university environment is somewhat insulated from the ordinary pressures of capitalism (and thus better able to exploit young research programmers).
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > you are responding to a price signal sent by the industry, relaying that price signal to the academic labs. Which means absolutely nothing unless a ton of other people do it as well. A handful of people here and there can be replaced.
someguydave 4y ago
why should anyone pay when the government is keeping it all alive today?
throwmamatrain 4y ago
"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go to the pub." -- Me, consoling a grad student after experiment failure #24. More seriously, if you're in basic science, your skills are valuable in transforming the work into a more useful thing to be used later. Using your science factory model, you have created a reusable widget that other people can use. The science factory model does work, you can see its results in things like MIAME: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 Where large pooled datasets are used to get insights otherwise impossible. There's not a ton of low hanging fruit in some fields, as time has gone on the edges are harder and more expensive to see to be at the cutting edge. Ex: you spend $2M on a microscope that does a cool thing and two years later the new model is all that, a bag of chips, and a soda for the low price of $750k. You hope you have a good enough relationship with the vendor that they will either mod or upgrade your system, or that those two years were enough for you to get ahead. It probably wasn't. And you now have a not as fast ferrari for more money than the fast ferrari. There is a massive glut of international students willing to work for basically nothing, beholden to your PI by their visas. I say this not as xenophobia, but I was the only working class American (my parents do not have degrees) in the department. All students/postdocs that I worked with were from other countries, or if they were American, their families were doctors, or a faculty member. More generally, the kind of people that might own horses :D. No firm would take this work on, as the profits are not clear, and the time scales for success range from two years to never. In this case success is "great job publishing, we'll give your lab another 2-3y of funding." After which, you better get good at writing books and eating pasta.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I would also say, and I'm surprised this needs to be said in a community that is so connected to the Open Source and startup cultures, that just because something is valuable doesn't mean it's possible to make a business out of it. Imagine research into a technique for getting better blood pressure readings from people who are so nervous around medical settings that their blood pressure spikes (or more basic research into the mechanisms of blood pressure and anxiety). This is a valuable thing to society (more accurate data informing treatment decisions for individuals, screening for physically demanding jobs, life insurance, forecasting medical spending for Medicare and the like), but it's not worth a lot to anyone in particular. For the field you described originally, complex imaging devices, there are only so many users of that research so it's conceivable that work could be taken up by a corporate R&D department. There are all kinds of other very useful research topics that are very valuable to humanity as a whole but it's not clear exactly who should pay for it (I'm not saying you aren't aware of this BTW, hopefully I'm adding support to your argument). In those cases it makes a lot of sense to take a fraction of a cent from everyone and pay for it that way, as we currently do.
dahart 4y ago
> surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit. Other good replies here, but this part of the comment reveals some assumptions that need better definition. Having been both, I can comfortably say that academics aren’t “workers” in the same way that industry programmers are “workers”. The parent comment is not correct about the norm; programming for research projects is not usually sold for profit later to industry. It happens occasionally, but most academic work stays academic. Sometimes when it does happen, it’s in the form of a spinoff company that brings the original authors of the software, and so they end up getting some of the proceeds… when the business survives. Also the top comment didn’t say ‘undercompensated’ - in business this has a clinical meaning that someone is being paid lower than market rates. We know that adademics pays lower, but we do not know that it’s lower than market rates for academics. It’s plenty true in industry alone that you can make a lot of money at Facebook or very little money at a small indie game dev shop. That doesn’t mean the indie game devs are undercompensated, it means they’re in a different market. Starting firms to compensate researchers better is what pharmaceuticals (for example) are. The problem with your suggestion is that the need for income can undermine the ability to do research that is unbiased, risky, controversial, critical, or just free of agenda. If you pay researchers in line with what Bay Area programmers get, it will put an enormous burden on the PIs to make many multiples more money than their peers, and compete with them using a small fraction of the number of people of peer groups.
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
>why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? The whole point of academia is to subsidize research before it gets to an application phase. How can a private firm compete with academia who benefits from government funding and are tax exempt? Trying to pin this problem on "capitalism" is just lazy.
- javajosh 4y ago
  No, lazy would be straw-manning a stranger's argument for no good reason to elicit an emotional reaction. It's a style of communication that seeks conflict rather than understanding, and there is plenty of it on twitter and reddit, but not here.
M2Ys4U 4y ago
>The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? Neo-liberal capitalism fixes problems?!

hackernewds 4y ago

They expected value theory is very plausible. there are a lot of r&D projects that basically produce zero output for decades. high risk high reward

dgb23 4y ago

There are plenty of firms that sell software to academia and many of them make a ton of money. I bet there are great opportunities in that space. I guess the issue is that most business educated/oriented people are both too disjoint from both engineering and science, so competition is rare.

psyc 4y ago

I'd guess that the expected commercial value being low would be the norm, and discoveries making millions relatively rare, just as this is in every other context. However, the second half of your second paragraph is where my mind went to first, because what gp says happens does happen, albeit at a normal (low) rate. The motivation of people working in science is different, as it is in say the games business. Game developers have historically been paid lower except at a tiny handful of companies. Not 33 cents on the dollar, but maybe 50 to 70 (bearing in mind that FAANG/unicorn salaries are not the norm either)

fennecfoxen 4y ago

> The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? You are the vehicle by which neo-liberal capitalism fixes the problem. By leaving academia to work for a firm directly, you are responding to a price signal sent by the industry, relaying that price signal to the academic labs. You might object, this is slower than most price signals! That's because the university environment is somewhat insulated from the ordinary pressures of capitalism (and thus better able to exploit young research programmers).

the_only_law 4y ago
> you are responding to a price signal sent by the industry, relaying that price signal to the academic labs. Which means absolutely nothing unless a ton of other people do it as well. A handful of people here and there can be replaced.

someguydave 4y ago

why should anyone pay when the government is keeping it all alive today?

throwmamatrain 4y ago

"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go to the pub." -- Me, consoling a grad student after experiment failure #24. More seriously, if you're in basic science, your skills are valuable in transforming the work into a more useful thing to be used later. Using your science factory model, you have created a reusable widget that other people can use. The science factory model does work, you can see its results in things like MIAME: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 Where large pooled datasets are used to get insights otherwise impossible. There's not a ton of low hanging fruit in some fields, as time has gone on the edges are harder and more expensive to see to be at the cutting edge. Ex: you spend $2M on a microscope that does a cool thing and two years later the new model is all that, a bag of chips, and a soda for the low price of $750k. You hope you have a good enough relationship with the vendor that they will either mod or upgrade your system, or that those two years were enough for you to get ahead. It probably wasn't. And you now have a not as fast ferrari for more money than the fast ferrari. There is a massive glut of international students willing to work for basically nothing, beholden to your PI by their visas. I say this not as xenophobia, but I was the only working class American (my parents do not have degrees) in the department. All students/postdocs that I worked with were from other countries, or if they were American, their families were doctors, or a faculty member. More generally, the kind of people that might own horses :D. No firm would take this work on, as the profits are not clear, and the time scales for success range from two years to never. In this case success is "great job publishing, we'll give your lab another 2-3y of funding." After which, you better get good at writing books and eating pasta.

jrumbut 4y ago
I would also say, and I'm surprised this needs to be said in a community that is so connected to the Open Source and startup cultures, that just because something is valuable doesn't mean it's possible to make a business out of it. Imagine research into a technique for getting better blood pressure readings from people who are so nervous around medical settings that their blood pressure spikes (or more basic research into the mechanisms of blood pressure and anxiety). This is a valuable thing to society (more accurate data informing treatment decisions for individuals, screening for physically demanding jobs, life insurance, forecasting medical spending for Medicare and the like), but it's not worth a lot to anyone in particular. For the field you described originally, complex imaging devices, there are only so many users of that research so it's conceivable that work could be taken up by a corporate R&D department. There are all kinds of other very useful research topics that are very valuable to humanity as a whole but it's not clear exactly who should pay for it (I'm not saying you aren't aware of this BTW, hopefully I'm adding support to your argument). In those cases it makes a lot of sense to take a fraction of a cent from everyone and pay for it that way, as we currently do.

dahart 4y ago

> surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit. Other good replies here, but this part of the comment reveals some assumptions that need better definition. Having been both, I can comfortably say that academics aren’t “workers” in the same way that industry programmers are “workers”. The parent comment is not correct about the norm; programming for research projects is not usually sold for profit later to industry. It happens occasionally, but most academic work stays academic. Sometimes when it does happen, it’s in the form of a spinoff company that brings the original authors of the software, and so they end up getting some of the proceeds… when the business survives. Also the top comment didn’t say ‘undercompensated’ - in business this has a clinical meaning that someone is being paid lower than market rates. We know that adademics pays lower, but we do not know that it’s lower than market rates for academics. It’s plenty true in industry alone that you can make a lot of money at Facebook or very little money at a small indie game dev shop. That doesn’t mean the indie game devs are undercompensated, it means they’re in a different market. Starting firms to compensate researchers better is what pharmaceuticals (for example) are. The problem with your suggestion is that the need for income can undermine the ability to do research that is unbiased, risky, controversial, critical, or just free of agenda. If you pay researchers in line with what Bay Area programmers get, it will put an enormous burden on the PIs to make many multiples more money than their peers, and compete with them using a small fraction of the number of people of peer groups.

JacobThreeThree 4y ago

>why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? The whole point of academia is to subsidize research before it gets to an application phase. How can a private firm compete with academia who benefits from government funding and are tax exempt? Trying to pin this problem on "capitalism" is just lazy.

javajosh 4y ago
No, lazy would be straw-manning a stranger's argument for no good reason to elicit an emotional reaction. It's a style of communication that seeks conflict rather than understanding, and there is plenty of it on twitter and reddit, but not here.

M2Ys4U 4y ago

>The next thought should be: why doesn't neo-liberal capitalism fix this problem? Neo-liberal capitalism fixes problems?!