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Basically this. In order to do heavy duty blue water research, you have to consider values in the 20-200 year range, which only gigantically long-lived institut
by pnathan 12y ago
Basically this. In order to do heavy duty blue water research, you have to consider values in the 20-200 year range, which only gigantically long-lived institutions or the rare individual can do.
You have to burn incredible amounts of money, with illdefined returns that are highly risky, and then keep doing it, constantly, for a long period of time.
so it goes.
- api 12y agoAnother way of thinking about it is this: Governments can make these kinds of investments because (as you say) they might still be around in 200 years, and because they can recoup ROI on them via overall GDP growth captured through taxation. They can capture the upside by doing so at the scale of the entire national economy instead of worrying about monetizing minutia. So it is a form of venture capital, in a sense, just at the national scale.
- pnathan 12y agoHa, I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of "The people decided that they wanted a better life in the 200 year term, so they paid for research to make life better".