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"Government funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.

pkilgore 1y ago
"Venture funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.
ModernMech 1y ago
That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programming languages research gets funding is planning the economy. I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics. Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night. In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        Yeah, that's not really how I view central planning. To me, central planning is when decisions go through a central authority. The only thing centralized here is the money pot. The decision making about what gets funded is mostly distributed though. Yes the Trump administration is wielding influence but the way they are doing it is by exerting control over the purse strings, which is decidedly not constitutional. Indeed, the fact this has never happened before despite successive party changes shows that what Trump is doing is extraordinary. > In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources Okay but we are not talking about allocating private dollars for profit, we're talking about allocating public dollars for science. People are still free to allocate their private dollars as they see fit. Notably, given the freedom to do so, most people do not allocate their private dollars for public science, making public science funding all the more necessary. The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.
        IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago
        >>>The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent. No. They have not. They haven't earned anything. If they did, they would have had a connection to a company and thru their technical expertise, chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake. You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book. Say, risk management. Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds. One has battle scars. The other is soft. Soft people don't get to make decisions on how to allocate anything. No cowards for leaders, since time immemorial.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Funding approvals do have to go through partisan bureaucrats. Until recently when the Trump administration killed it, NIH grant proposals had to contain a "diversity statement."
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    NIH grant officers are not partisans, they are career scientists who manage a fair and transparent process for funding research. Their role is to ensure proposals are reviewed based on scientific merit, not political views. The way you're describing them is the opposite of how they operate. The existence of diversity statements reflect institutional goals -- namely that the NIH funds science from a diverse set of researchers, to benefit a nation made up of a diverse population, who are funding all of this research. The only partisans in the picture are the MAGA political actors who are going around saying that the NIH can't do these things for political reasons.
roncesvalles 1y ago
That's a strawman, you're not quoting anyone and the article doesn't imply anything so reductive.

"Venture funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.

That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programming languages research gets funding is planning the economy. I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.

mike_hearn 1y ago
The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics. Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night. In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      Yeah, that's not really how I view central planning. To me, central planning is when decisions go through a central authority. The only thing centralized here is the money pot. The decision making about what gets funded is mostly distributed though. Yes the Trump administration is wielding influence but the way they are doing it is by exerting control over the purse strings, which is decidedly not constitutional. Indeed, the fact this has never happened before despite successive party changes shows that what Trump is doing is extraordinary. > In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources Okay but we are not talking about allocating private dollars for profit, we're talking about allocating public dollars for science. People are still free to allocate their private dollars as they see fit. Notably, given the freedom to do so, most people do not allocate their private dollars for public science, making public science funding all the more necessary. The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.
      - IG_Semmelweiss 1y ago
        >>>The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent. No. They have not. They haven't earned anything. If they did, they would have had a connection to a company and thru their technical expertise, chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake. You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book. Say, risk management. Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds. One has battle scars. The other is soft. Soft people don't get to make decisions on how to allocate anything. No cowards for leaders, since time immemorial.
terminalshort 1y ago
Funding approvals do have to go through partisan bureaucrats. Until recently when the Trump administration killed it, NIH grant proposals had to contain a "diversity statement."
- ModernMech 1y ago
  NIH grant officers are not partisans, they are career scientists who manage a fair and transparent process for funding research. Their role is to ensure proposals are reviewed based on scientific merit, not political views. The way you're describing them is the opposite of how they operate. The existence of diversity statements reflect institutional goals -- namely that the NIH funds science from a diverse set of researchers, to benefit a nation made up of a diverse population, who are funding all of this research. The only partisans in the picture are the MAGA political actors who are going around saying that the NIH can't do these things for political reasons.

roncesvalles 1y ago

That's a strawman, you're not quoting anyone and the article doesn't imply anything so reductive.