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Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and

Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking. From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable. The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us? So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? (On a side note, I really want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)

johnchristopher 14y ago
> So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- macavity23 14y ago
  Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests: One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier. Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.
simonh 14y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945. Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.
- koide 14y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway. In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway. Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years. (The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)
    - koide 14y ago
      On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention. I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough. But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.
arethuza 14y ago
"has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run" Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm not aware of the results of the projects I worked on being directly used by anyone.
- eru 14y ago
  Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.
loceng 14y ago
The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).
- gaius 14y ago
  Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.
  - eru 14y ago
    You are comparing the benefits of war to the wrong base. The civilians wouldn't have just burned all the riches (like war literally does to some extent), but would have used it to develop new products, too. Nowadays the military actually uses consumer electronics.
  - loceng 14y ago
    You need to separate contexts of war and innovation. An example, this innovation could come through a budget for space exploration, or other means of transportation. The world is based on science tech. Yes, a lot was discovered in science through military budgets, but it's not exclusive to being put into the military - which I think can easily be argued has huge wastes of resources just by looking at industrial complex structures.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    >jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue Don't forget computers: Turing's work relies heavily on his experiences working at Bletchley Park, ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, and the calculational needs of the Manhattan Project drove a lot of early computer development.
larrydag 14y ago
Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.
cturner 14y ago
Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership. When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving. Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.
- eru 14y ago
  > They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects. Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.
  - cheez 14y ago
    A lot of the reason why there is no natural incentive to develop new sources of energy is that the government works hand in hand with energy companies to prevent it for example, via drilling rights, subsidized prices making it uneconomical to research better sources because the companies can guarantee their profits.
  - anamax 14y ago
    What if I don't agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing? What if I think that the tax is too high? What if I have higher priorities?
Tichy 14y ago
Being German and having voted Green most of my life (until the pirate party came along), I still watch those energy subsidies with suspicion. I am just not certain the money is spent in an efficient way here. As for the jobs in the green energy sector, apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells. So much for that investment.
- CrLf 14y ago
  "apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells" Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).
- excuse-me 14y ago
  What's the problem? You close the nukes so everyone with an "Atomkraft Nein Danke" sticker on their VW votes for you. You give huge feed in tarrif subsidy to anyone who owns a house to put panels on their roof - so the countryside votes for you. You continue to subsidize coal so the Ruhr votes for you. But burn the coal in Poland and ship the power back - so there is no acid rain to worry about. A perfect (if expensive) solution for everyone (unless you live east of Poland)
- kaybe 14y ago
  Other countries ripping the technology off is part of the plan, as far as I understood it. We can talk them into using less fossil fuels (probably won't work), or use incentives (which would again cost money), or we can create a by then cheap technology for getting Co2-free energy which will be stolen by everyone. Comparing costs from climate change adaption and avoidance shows that avoidance is far cheaper - and in both cases the developed countries will have to carry the majority. (Just imagine the situation if half of Asia and Africa's harvests fail.) The investment here is not just an economic one, it goes much further.
mbq 14y ago
The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.
xxgreg 14y ago
Not ~5%GDP. "the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and "$250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP" The sentence is a bit confusing but I think they mean this: ~5% of 2011 GDP / 8 years = ~0.6% 2011GDP per year.

johnchristopher 14y ago

> So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

macavity23 14y ago
Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests: One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier. Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.

simonh 14y ago

I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945. Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.

koide 14y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway. In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway. Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years. (The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)
  - koide 14y ago
    On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention. I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough. But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.

arethuza 14y ago

"has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run" Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm not aware of the results of the projects I worked on being directly used by anyone.

eru 14y ago
Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.

loceng 14y ago

The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).

gaius 14y ago
Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.
- eru 14y ago
  You are comparing the benefits of war to the wrong base. The civilians wouldn't have just burned all the riches (like war literally does to some extent), but would have used it to develop new products, too. Nowadays the military actually uses consumer electronics.
- loceng 14y ago
  You need to separate contexts of war and innovation. An example, this innovation could come through a budget for space exploration, or other means of transportation. The world is based on science tech. Yes, a lot was discovered in science through military budgets, but it's not exclusive to being put into the military - which I think can easily be argued has huge wastes of resources just by looking at industrial complex structures.
- hollerith 14y ago
  >jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue Don't forget computers: Turing's work relies heavily on his experiences working at Bletchley Park, ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, and the calculational needs of the Manhattan Project drove a lot of early computer development.

larrydag 14y ago

Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.

cturner 14y ago

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership. When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving. Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.

eru 14y ago
> They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects. Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.
- cheez 14y ago
  A lot of the reason why there is no natural incentive to develop new sources of energy is that the government works hand in hand with energy companies to prevent it for example, via drilling rights, subsidized prices making it uneconomical to research better sources because the companies can guarantee their profits.
- anamax 14y ago
  What if I don't agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing? What if I think that the tax is too high? What if I have higher priorities?

Tichy 14y ago

Being German and having voted Green most of my life (until the pirate party came along), I still watch those energy subsidies with suspicion. I am just not certain the money is spent in an efficient way here. As for the jobs in the green energy sector, apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells. So much for that investment.

CrLf 14y ago
"apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells" Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).
excuse-me 14y ago
What's the problem? You close the nukes so everyone with an "Atomkraft Nein Danke" sticker on their VW votes for you. You give huge feed in tarrif subsidy to anyone who owns a house to put panels on their roof - so the countryside votes for you. You continue to subsidize coal so the Ruhr votes for you. But burn the coal in Poland and ship the power back - so there is no acid rain to worry about. A perfect (if expensive) solution for everyone (unless you live east of Poland)
kaybe 14y ago
Other countries ripping the technology off is part of the plan, as far as I understood it. We can talk them into using less fossil fuels (probably won't work), or use incentives (which would again cost money), or we can create a by then cheap technology for getting Co2-free energy which will be stolen by everyone. Comparing costs from climate change adaption and avoidance shows that avoidance is far cheaper - and in both cases the developed countries will have to carry the majority. (Just imagine the situation if half of Asia and Africa's harvests fail.) The investment here is not just an economic one, it goes much further.

mbq 14y ago

The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.

xxgreg 14y ago

Not ~5%GDP. "the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and "$250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP" The sentence is a bit confusing but I think they mean this: ~5% of 2011 GDP / 8 years = ~0.6% 2011GDP per year.