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> the world leader in space science.
I also want to add that science is a critical investment area for anyone interested in engineering.
There is this common
> the world leader in space science.
I also want to add that science is a critical investment area for anyone interested in engineering.
There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.
In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?"
So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI
[0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis
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> The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.
That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.
> I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever.
Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.
> That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.
Sure, only a Sith deals in absolutes. What's your point? If you inferred from my comment that I think we should just fund everything all willy nilly I'm curious how you think I would resolve this with the lack of infinite money. I'd have to assume we have infinite money if I was suggesting to fund everything, right? And I'd have to be incredibly dumb to think there's infinite money (and resources). Right? I mean I'm dumb, but do you really think I'm that dumb?
> Where they financed by the government?
Yes
> Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets
Do you have anything to comment that isn't reductio ad absurdum?
You're not making an argument, you're just intentionally misunderstanding. Sorry, I'm not going to respond if all you want to do is troll
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government.
A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.
In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
There's also that the Royal Society [0] sponsored some of Newton's work (and Newton was even President of it for a time). That was a group also chartered by the British government (and some centuries financed by it more than other centuries).
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
I don't know that this is a good argument for science. We should fund science because we want to discover new things, not because we can draw a dotted line to an ROI. Similarly, we should fund the department of giving poor people money for food. Not because there's an ROI somewhere down the line. There's never gonna be a return on that investment, but we should do that because we're humans and we want to lift our fellow human out of misery.
Even if I agree with you, the problem is that we always need to justify our existence as researchers and this is even more difficult if the field or ideas are more exotic...
With the US becoming a fascist state in record time, I do not foresee people following your thinking, unfortunately...
Don't be a purist. It clearly hasn't been working out. Sometimes you have to speak the language of others. Especially if you know what real wealth is ;)
Government investment in science is...the only way basic science happens, really. I'd recommend reading The Entrepreneurial State [1] here: in essence, basic science pays off too slowly to interest even the most deeply-pocketed capital interests, but it pays off, so wise societies invest in it; Silicon Valley owes its existence to massive formative public investments in underlying technologies.
Not to mention that smart people generally prefer to live in places that value and protect science, so it's _also_ an indirect form of geopolitical talent recruitment. (See brain drain + brain gain impacts of science policy, for instance. There's a strong argument to be made that US mid-20th-century dominance in science and engineering was largely driven by a lot of very smart people fleeing Nazi Germany.)
Basic science isn't so much a lottery ticket as a bond with unknown maturity measured in decades, a _very_ high rate of return, a high minimum investment, and dividend-like payouts created by adding skilled scientists, engineers, etc. to your tax base.
[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state/ https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state...
> a high minimum investment
This is the only part I actually disagree with.
Science is incredibly cheap. It can have a long time to mature but interestingly that is dependent on the number of "bonds", with quicker returns when there's more "bonds" issued.
I'd say there's 4 common classes of misinterpretation:
Perception bias:
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Most of science is performed by grad students and academics. Neither of which are known to make much money and the former is known to make poverty wages lol. I can say as a recent graduate that one summer internship at a big tech company gave me more money than my university's spend for the rest of the year. And as an intern I was still much cheaper than a full employer. My equivalent yearly salary was higher than most professors in my department too.
I'd say 80+% of research is being done at this scale. A few hundred grand per year, if even that.
Amortization (time bias):
-------------------------
We often hear about the big science projects and this creates the notion that it's expensive but it's usually misleading. You might hear news like the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission, but that's spread out over many years. Work began in 2015, construction in late 2019, full assembly in early 2022, and launch in late 2024, where there's 6 years of flight and the budget is for a mission life until late 2034. Amortized that's $5.2bn over 19 years, so $274m/yr ($347m if we conservatively count from 2019).
Distribution:
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Most mega projects have a cost that's distributed over many funders. Take CERN. It cost about $10b to build, took 10 years to construct, and costs $1bn/yr to operate. That's distributed through many countries, the largest contributor being Germany, which only accounts for ~20% (so $200m/yr), followed by the UK (15%), France (13%), and Italy (10%). There are also occasional contributions by the US.
Scale:
------
All these numbers are large, but they're also the biggest projects and there's few projects that big. $100m seems like a lot of money to us because we're imagining it in our bank accounts. But that's not the same as money in a government's bank. The US budget is $6.8 Trillion! $100m is 0.0015% of that! In other words, if you had a million dollars to spend each year you're talking about $1.5k (or $1.47 of a $1000 budget). This is not a big ticket item.
===
I'm sure you agree with most of what I've said but I wanted these points "on the record" since we live in a time where we're frequently arguing about $1 from a $10000 budget instead while ignoring the $1000 items. We need to get our heads straight. It's like someone complaining about the cost of your bus ticket while they're buying the latest fully loaded Macbook Pro. I don't think their actual concerned is the budget...
Just a note you may find helpful. I feel your post is too long to be digested and responded to in a forum like this.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if so I apologise! But as soon as I saw the essay like format, I knew I wasn't going to spend time on it. I think shorter points that provoke discussion may work better here.
Just a note you may find helpful.
> I feel your post is too long
It’s about 700 words.
It’s thought through, well-written, neatly organized, and it’s a fine set up for further discussion.
If that’s too long for you on this forum, then I’d probably take a look in the mirror and ask some tough questions.
Thanks for the support. I know I can be wordy but I also come to HN to have more nuanced conversations than somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. Honestly, I think a lot of political fighting is caused by removal of nuance and the tendency to be rushing for rushing's sake.
The tricky thing is, long posts like this tend to provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing, and then either going way down into the definitional weeds or galloping to the next nitpick without acknowledging any error.
I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).
> provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing
I'd say that's where the community is made. Either the community supports this type of behavior or not.
I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.
But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.
What does the community want?
100% agree that spending on R&D is _very_ efficient in terms of just about anything you could conceivably care about - downstream economic outcomes, quality of life, geopolitical strength / prestige, etc.
For instance, in 2023 the US spent ~$190B in federal funding on R&D [1], compared to a budget of ~$6T [2] - i.e. about 3%. It's really really not a lot when you consider the aggregate impact over decades.
But it is still a lot in an absolute sense. This funding supports an entire ecosystem across both academia and industry that directly creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of which require highly specialized skills. I mention this not to create a sense of sticker shock, but to drive home the point that making this investment is a big and complex task - and one that takes a long time to rebuild. I firmly believe that the current chaos in the US will take at least a generation to repair.
[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/federal-funds-research-development/2023-2024 https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/federal-funds-research-develop...
[2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
> Where have I lied about anything here?
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that famous mathematical discoveries have not been financed by governments historically.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that this is, at scale, lottery ticket mentality. The modern scientific apparatus has flaws, but despite those it's a marvel of modern distributed resource allocation and cooperation rarely rivaled in human culture.
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
Sure, but this wouldn't obviously lead to outcomes for the public good. Even if we handwaved away IP and secrecy expectations in your scenario (is the abolishment of IP in your calculus? If not your task is even harder), there are obvious challenges you'd need to overcome:
1. How will non-experts vet the meaning or potential of research to select allocation? How will they even learn the option space to choose from? This is an incredible knowledge burden on the market that has profound implications on what can be researched. I see very little evidence that the public at large can do this, and I ask for an existence proof.
2. Even if you can get past #1, what then keeps outcomes aligned with the public interest? This is the same general objection most people have to Hayek's "the noble purpose of the rich is to have their tastes direct society" idea: the outcomes are mostly around consolidating power.
More broadly, everyone accepts this pooled resource methodology is superior. Even many anarchists[1] don't oppose collectivist resource pooling and management so long as it's voluntary and done in ways tha minimizes hierarchical extent and implications
What you're suggesting is that wealth redistribution is somehow morally wrong for the wealthy, but many of the wealthiest people are wealthy in appreciable part because of the way their endeavors have interacted with redistributive endeavors. Musk and Thiel, as living examples, both have benefitted enormously from redistribution. So why was it good for them, but now it's bad? Why isn't having an explicit force to counter economic attraction bad, given that we can provide and measure its existence?
American science supremacy is not a thing I'm interested in defending. However, it's undeniable that America's redistributive methodology has lead it to be the science capital of the world for generations, and Americans have definitely benefitted from this status more than the infinitesimal sum of money committed relative to their budget. What value are you offering in return? It seems like a "trust me" story at a time when we see not just an attack on science funding but an attack on the idea of a consensus reality contradicting corporate profit motives (e.g., Climate change, RFKs attack on medicine).
I don't know how you get around these objections. I don't even know where you go to find an example of all this working in a purely private methodology that's not counterfactual. It seems like a lot of moral grandstanding and "trust me bro" from out here. You should make these arguments somewhere we can find them if you want us to believe the conclusions.
> Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
Indeed! You're the one trying to paint it as bad, misguided, incorrect, or immoral? Even private companies benefit from public research grants. Whatever the pejorative you want to attach, the burden is on you to suggest something better.
[1] Please note we're using the historical definition here in the tradition of Goldman, Bakunin, Malatesta, Chomsky and Carson, etc.