4 ms·

The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn

The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?

jdasdf 3y ago
No, because the time value of money is a thing. Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.
dmix 3y ago
The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.
- ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
  Our R&D today will go towards items that are today’s equivalent of 1950-60s rocketry. You clearly recognize the giant leap in hind sight. Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That is why it’s worth it both in advancements and ROI.
  - apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
    > Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life. For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today. For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time? Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
    - tehjoker 3y ago
      I think one of the next big leaps will be in technologies that are not possible without extensive international cooperation. A few examples: - shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet - ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates) - intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel) - preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer - interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch - high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service Our competitive framework is currently inhibiting our incredible technology from working at full effectiveness.
SllX 3y ago
Not without a focus. The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise. Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  Going to Mars with real live squishy humans would no doubt be cool. Getting them back in 1 piece would be even cooler. I'd argue capturing near-earth asteroids and starting to build a functional zero-g industry around earth is more useful though. I think those two things are pretty orthogonal.
  - piva00 3y ago
    I'd love to see a Mars space race between China and the USA. If there's another cold war brewing let's at least only keep the cool aspects of the last one and leave the saber rattling bullshit behind in history...
    - t0bia_s 3y ago
      Invest ridicolous amount of money, time, effort and passion to space colonialism instead of solving problems with my neighbours sound hypocritical for me.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  Science budgets are already so absurdly low that this idea of getting people to Mars will just sap them further. This just isn't wise spending given the priorities that we have, like not destroying the planet further. For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.
echelon 3y ago
> blank check by-all-means research Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer. One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either. If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Even the Manhattan project didn't have an unlimited pool of top-level scientists. At some point, pouring in more money [ADDED: especially to somewhat vague goals] doesn't give a lot of incremental results. I'd be a lot more convinced if there were evidence that there were top-level, productive scientists in important fields that would be producing world-changing results if they were only given more money. (Of course, they all would like more money and resources.)
- bena 3y ago
  Don't confuse results with effort. "Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances. And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough. And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking. Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60. And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly. So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils. Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal. And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return. "Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.
throw0101b 3y ago
> The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs […] Cold War spending probably kickstarted Silicon Valley: * https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Diggsey 3y ago
The research was a side effect of a very well defined goal, which was achievable albeit extremely hard. Investing in achieving a goal (with the research being a side benefit) is different from just investing in research because it changes the motivations of the researchers (from "how do we get our next research grant" to "how do we solve this problem"). That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way... There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in. Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere. Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.
Fernicia 3y ago
I'm generally supportive of this type of spending, but it's important to realise opportunity costs and the fact they are both invisible yet very real. Invisible in rich coutnries like the US, I mean. The USSR space raced itself into recession.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  > The USSR space raced itself into recession. Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.
- msla 3y ago
  The USSR had massive internal contradictions and inefficiencies. By the end it was brittle, and it couldn't weather shocks, like the late 1980s to early 1990s oil shock, very well, and attempts at reform magnified internal dissent until the constituent republics and satellite states could only be satisfied with complete independence. http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm > To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    That document is 90% assertions without evidence. >It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase. Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually. >There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures. >Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies. So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force. The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.
mywittyname 3y ago
The US government does this a lot, maybe not blank checks, but certainly very large checks. The military in particular hands out astonishing volumes of money in the pursuit of pie-in-the-sky dreams. Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants. One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.
- thrashh 3y ago
  I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it). How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    > I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development. Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business. I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.

jdasdf 3y ago

No, because the time value of money is a thing. Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.

dmix 3y ago

The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.

ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
Our R&D today will go towards items that are today’s equivalent of 1950-60s rocketry. You clearly recognize the giant leap in hind sight. Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That is why it’s worth it both in advancements and ROI.
- apocalyptic0n3 3y ago
  > Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life. For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today. For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time? Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.
  - tehjoker 3y ago
    I think one of the next big leaps will be in technologies that are not possible without extensive international cooperation. A few examples: - shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet - ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates) - intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel) - preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer - interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch - high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service Our competitive framework is currently inhibiting our incredible technology from working at full effectiveness.

SllX 3y ago

Not without a focus. The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise. Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.

idiotsecant 3y ago
Going to Mars with real live squishy humans would no doubt be cool. Getting them back in 1 piece would be even cooler. I'd argue capturing near-earth asteroids and starting to build a functional zero-g industry around earth is more useful though. I think those two things are pretty orthogonal.
- piva00 3y ago
  I'd love to see a Mars space race between China and the USA. If there's another cold war brewing let's at least only keep the cool aspects of the last one and leave the saber rattling bullshit behind in history...
  - t0bia_s 3y ago
    Invest ridicolous amount of money, time, effort and passion to space colonialism instead of solving problems with my neighbours sound hypocritical for me.
light_hue_1 3y ago
Science budgets are already so absurdly low that this idea of getting people to Mars will just sap them further. This just isn't wise spending given the priorities that we have, like not destroying the planet further. For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.

echelon 3y ago

> blank check by-all-means research Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer. One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either. If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.

ghaff 3y ago
Even the Manhattan project didn't have an unlimited pool of top-level scientists. At some point, pouring in more money [ADDED: especially to somewhat vague goals] doesn't give a lot of incremental results. I'd be a lot more convinced if there were evidence that there were top-level, productive scientists in important fields that would be producing world-changing results if they were only given more money. (Of course, they all would like more money and resources.)
bena 3y ago
Don't confuse results with effort. "Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances. And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough. And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking. Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60. And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly. So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils. Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal. And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return. "Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.

throw0101b 3y ago

> The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs […] Cold War spending probably kickstarted Silicon Valley: * https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Diggsey 3y ago

The research was a side effect of a very well defined goal, which was achievable albeit extremely hard. Investing in achieving a goal (with the research being a side benefit) is different from just investing in research because it changes the motivations of the researchers (from "how do we get our next research grant" to "how do we solve this problem"). That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way... There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in. Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere. Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.

Fernicia 3y ago

I'm generally supportive of this type of spending, but it's important to realise opportunity costs and the fact they are both invisible yet very real. Invisible in rich coutnries like the US, I mean. The USSR space raced itself into recession.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
> The USSR space raced itself into recession. Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.
msla 3y ago
The USSR had massive internal contradictions and inefficiencies. By the end it was brittle, and it couldn't weather shocks, like the late 1980s to early 1990s oil shock, very well, and attempts at reform magnified internal dissent until the constituent republics and satellite states could only be satisfied with complete independence. http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm > To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  That document is 90% assertions without evidence. >It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase. Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually. >There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures. >Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies. So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force. The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.

mywittyname 3y ago

The US government does this a lot, maybe not blank checks, but certainly very large checks. The military in particular hands out astonishing volumes of money in the pursuit of pie-in-the-sky dreams. Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants. One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.

thrashh 3y ago
I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it). How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation. I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development. Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business. I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.