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US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not
by Retric 2y ago
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
- jack_h 2y agoEven if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their operating costs though; I agree with that.
- Retric 2y agoNoting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear. People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.
- generativenoise 2y agoIt is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention. The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.
- monknomo 2y agoI mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
- consumer451 2y agoI agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example. To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment. The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
- exe34 2y ago> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
- WeylandYutani 2y agoYou know NYC is already minority white right?
- consumer451 2y agoMy most controversial take, even though it is 100% true: The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing. If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
- tw04 2y agoHave you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company? I’m assuming not or you’d know “inefficient allocation of resources” isn’t a government issue, it’s a large organization issue that’s as bad if not worse in the private sector.
- wskinner 2y agoThere is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.
- linksnapzz 2y agoThere was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
- FredPret 2y agoWhile true, you overstate the problem. Look up the companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50. There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long term survivors.
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- Retric 2y agoThat overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety. Instead it’s the same kind of shakeups you regularly see in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA is a merger of the Health Services Administration (1973–1982) and Health Resources Administration (1973–1982). However currently one of its major functions is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed up in 1990.
- Robotbeat 2y agoThere is a LOT more personnel churn in private sector than federal government.
- jasonhong 2y agoOptimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal". Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning out into companies is enormous. While the system could use some tuning, it also works pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- CamperBob2 2y agothat doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources. When's the last time someone in the Trump administration "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?
- linksnapzz 2y agoAs a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.
- didgetmaster 2y agoAnd yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick. As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
- sapphicsnail 2y agoThe point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
- chewbacha 2y agoDoge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion. They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
- noworriesnate 2y ago> They are operating a coup Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance? Which elected officials have they fired? If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a coup.
- patagurbon 2y agoNo system will optimally allocate resources. However projects are typically funded under competitive grants and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but methodically in the right direction. Even when it doesn’t, it is training researchers who can enter systems which have different incentives like private research and development. That is a massive positive externality.
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- Robotbeat 2y agoThe solution is a straightforward but painful increasing of the retirement age to like at least 70.
- philwelch 2y ago> US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. There's an assumption here that deserves some closer examination. If we are taking this as a justification for federal science spending, we would have to also support a policy of awarding research grants on the basis of expected long term return on investment, which is not the criteria applied now. Furthermore, we would have to justify this spending in competition with whatever economic investments the government could make elsewhere, or that the American taxpayers would make if we let them keep their money in the first place. From the standpoint of scientific research I don't think this is necessarily what we want, but even if it was we would have some hard questions about the last few decades of federal research funding.
- jasonhong 2y agoFirst, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA vaccines, most recently featured in COVID-19 vaccine, which also recently won a Nobel Prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 Second, while there are always improvements to be made, the system as is (or was) worked pretty well in practice without knowing what the expected ROI was. The PageRank algorithm which led to Google was funded in part by an NSF grant on Digital Libraries. The ROI on that single invention just from taxes, jobs, and increased productivity likely exceeds NSF's annual budget. DataBricks and Duolingo are also based in part on NSF research. Yeah, the system is imperfect, as all human-oriented systems are, but for the most part it works pretty well in practice and has been a linchpin in the US economic growth and national security.
- philwelch 2y agoIf we're going to count the COVID-19 vaccine as a benefit of federal research funding, surely we need to also count COVID-19 itself as a cost, given the strong evidence that the virus was a product of US-funded gain of function research.