It's simple: we have de-funded science just like we've de-funded other liberal pursuits.
People like Peter Thiel are right about the drought of fundamental innovation since the early 70s, but they are wrong in other ways that ultimately render their arguments void and hypocritical. Thiel backs the same right-libertarian economic policies that caused this problem in the first place. The reason we stopped going to the Moon and inventing new paradigms in computing is because we stopped funding it.
The simple fact is that only three kinds of entities can fund basic research in most fields:
(1) Governments.
(2) Gigantic corporations with entrenched monopolies so profitable that they can afford to spend like governments (e.g. the old Bell Labs). Usually deep lasting monopolies of that sort are government-granted... again Bell Labs is a good example. So this goes back to governments or alternately government can be seen as the ultimate super-monopoly.
(3) Individuals with absolutely stratospheric net worth (over one billion at a minimum). The problem is that there are few of these and fewer who really get science and care about it that much.
You can't -- and shouldn't be able to -- patent a law of nature. Discovering a fundamental principle that led eventually to practical fusion power, interstellar travel, or radical life extension (to give examples) would be among the most valuable acts in human history, but its economic value would be pretty darn close to $0. There is no way to directly monetize it. As a result, markets cannot efficiently fund basic research. There is no way to securitize it -- no marketable financial vehicle for valuing it, capitalizing it, or delivering returns on it.
Monetize-ability doesn't come in until later -- until engineers have assimilated the new scientific discovery or principle and designed practical and workable technologies based around it. Usually these are different people than the original discoverers. Sometimes this process takes generations.
Science won't come back from its present abyss until and unless we get over market fundamentalism and realize that there are some classes of human endeavor that markets just aren't very good at funding.
It's a fact that's been true throughout history too. All the wonders of the ancient world (pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, etc.) were built by governments. None were built by commerce. All the wonders of the modern world -- the Moon landings, the Internet, the ISS, the Human Genome Project, the harnessing of the atom -- are either wholly government funded or were set into motion by a substantial initial investment of government money. The only big set of counterexamples I can think of are mostly out of Bell Labs, which was funded by a government-backed telephone monopoly.
If you think Xerox Parc is a counterexample, go find the Engelbart demo. Parc was doing stuff that was trail-blazed by a DOD-funded SRI project a decade earlier. If you think Elon Musk's ventures are counterexamples, understand that both Tesla and especially SpaceX are built directly on massive amounts of government R&D over the past 50 years. SpaceX is basically commercializing a lot of NASA (and Soviet, and German) technology. Elon himself says this, to his credit.
Most libertarians are simultaneously pro-tech and anti-state-investment. This requires an act of willful blindness and ideologically driven self-delusion on the same level as believing that the Earth is 6000 years old and mankind coexisted with dinosaurs. There is simply zero historical evidence that you can have that cake and eat it too. This is a special case of the more general "public good denialism" of right-libertarian and conservative ideology. Market fundamentalism is, quite ironically, America's own version of Soviet dogma.
The deeper underlying reality is that to make a huge step forward like this requires enough capital to effectively insulate a group of smart motivated people from the market (and other forces and demands) long enough to enable them to try something fundamentally new. Nothing like that is ever profitable from the get-go. You can't bootstrap it. It must be a "pure act," almost Nietzschean, undertaken for the goal itself and nothing more. "We will go to the moon" or "we will build a pyramid" because... we decided to. Period. Only once the trail has been blazed can commerce come in and line the street with shops and houses. At that point you've de-risked the path enough that bootstrapping and venture funding and similar things become thinkable.
I'm not anti-market. I reject that fundamentalism too, and generally reject fundamentalism as a way of thinking. Governments can fund basic research because they can, but they stink at taking it beyond the discovery or prototype phase. I'm just saying that markets are good at some things, but not others. Market should be free to act where they are effective, but they should be part of a larger political landscape that encompasses multiple mechanisms that are (hopefully) given jurisdiction where they work best.
Everything I wrote here will remain true until someone figures out a way to profitably fund such things within a market framework. Given the monstrous challenges involved I'm not holding my breath. Patents would be a poor mechanism, since they would have the perverse effect of shutting down research in a whole area for a long time.
Wow, I wish I could upvote this comment even more. It's a much more well-thought out version of what I wanted to say on this topic. Thank you.
I'll just add that it seems to me (in the US at least) that one's compensation is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions and the size of those transactions, rather than it is to your overall value creation for society (contrary to what most libertarians, especially those in Silicon Valley, like to argue.) This is why financiers and executives make by far the most money while teachers and scientists make peanuts despite producing great value for society.
> is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions
Wow! I had precisely the same realization years ago -- compensation is based in part on proximity to the transaction and the relationship seems exponential. That's why salespeople quite often make more than inventors, engineers, etc. and why the final commercializers of tech make orders of magnitude more than those that develop it (e.g. Zuckerberg vs. Tim Berners-Lee).
The other factor is equity ownership and other forms of leverage.
There's an old atheist joke: that we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists. A similar effect caused me to lose my faith in at least naive and right-leaning forms of libertarianism. I worked for a while in business consulting. The only thing that kept me from becoming a full-on socialist was then working for a while as a government contractor. Both business and government are sausage factories. You just don't want to know.
In the end I ended up cured of most forms of political fundamentalism. If there were quick easy sound-bite answers to these things, we would not be struggling with these same problems over and over again. They would be solved and we'd be walking around in some kind of sci-fi white toga world.
Interestingly, funding fundamental research is one of the key areas where Peter Thiel's views diverge from the majority of libertarians. He's said a fair amount on the necessity of funding fundamental research. He has significant complaints about the volume of researchers, but that's quite different from what you've suggested. My view of his positions would be that he favours earlier aggressive weeding leading to smaller graduate programs, fewer postdocs, fewer tenure track positions and potentially fewer tenure positions, but the positions that exist getting higher per capita funding to do quality work on important problems. He's likely close to assuming deterministic-optimism if you believe the best research is far closer to random we're probably currently funding in a fairly effective way. However, if you believe there are 10x scientists in the way there are 10X programmers, and also believe that 10X scientist strongly correlates with being successful in other fields, then we're probably funding in a system that strongly encourages those 10x scientists to work outside academia and potentially outside of science entirely.
We probably agree a lot on political philosophy: I believe markets are the best mechanism for solving many problems, but there are many problems they suck at and the purpose of government is to intervene in those problems. Fundamental research falls into one of the major categories of problems markets are poor at solving: high value creation with zero-to-little value capture results in markets being unable to create the high value. Other interesting categories include severe negative externalities, and prisoners-dilemma type issues where we often need incentives to break getting stuck near individual 'optima' that lead to societal suboptimal solutions.
I sounded rough on Peter, but I loved Zero to One. It's one of the best non-fiction books I've read in years. I think he's right on most things.
I still sympathize with the end goal of libertarianism: a society in which force and fraud are relegated to history. The problem is that we are nowhere even close to that. Our world is still absolutely ruled by force and deception. Governments are basically large gangs of people with big guns and their authority and power comes from their willingness to use them.
When you pluck isolated ideas out of some future moral utopia and try to apply them here and now, you run into problems around unintended consequences. Getting from here to there requires deeper thinking that takes context into account. We have to chart a course from our current state of affairs to one that is more civilized.
In more concrete terms: when you take a world that's ultimately run by violent gangsters and then take away compensatory "hacks" like wealth redistribution and regulation and public goods expenditures, what you end up with is actually a step back from the kind of future humanistic libertarianism actually envisions. It's basically unilateral disarmament. The gangsters are now free to get more powerful, and they will not return the favor.
De-funded science? Not to any dramatic extent in the US, at least. AFAICS US science funding has roughly plateaued or declined only shallowly since about 2003, after decades of post-war increases. The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.)
>The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.)
The reason is much more fundamental: the Profzi Scheme, http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144. As long as scientific labor is pyramidal, foisting most of the actual research work on "trainees" while professors mainly write grants, there will always be a structural necessity of far more trainee workers than there can ever be permanent positions. Thus, most trained scientists will always be employed outside their field or not at all, simply because a finite world cannot accommodate an indefinite exponential (recursively reproducing) increase in the number of scientists.
(That said, science funding as a percentage of GDP has dropped, and actually dropped in inflation-adjusted dollars with the Great Recession.)
LOL, I needed to find the actual .jpg. Forgive a scientist's desire to "jump straight to the data" -- searching anywhere for NIH funding as % GDP should get you the same graph.
This is known as the "public good" problem. Hard-line libertarians and conservatives deny that such a thing exists, while moderate conservatives acknowledge the possibility, but define it so narrowly as to be meaningless. Other right-leaning individuals acknowledge both the existence and value of public goods, but have such distrust of government that they'd rather go without, or failing that, allow a single company to impose its own form of taxation.
IMO if the US were willing to throw money at science like it's willing to throw it at the military and entitlements, it would generate a pile of junk science and enough occasional gems to more than pay for it in the long-term, something I can't say of the things I initially listed. Our national priorities down to the individual just flat out suck across the board and that's everyone's fault.
As someone who identifies as a pragmatic libertarian generally in favor of smaller government, I've upvoted your comment. Markets are great for a lot of things, but they undersupply public goods, and scientific progress is a critical public good on which everything else depends. Underfunding science is a grave - perhaps fatal - error.
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.
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.
Ha, 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".
I agree. The problem is I believe, a society does some great things and then the bureaucrats step in. Game over. People lived in Egypt long after the pyramids were built, and they didn't build any more.
Giving money to Washington or Brussels isn't likely to fuel innovation right now. Until governance (in the West anyway) is streamlined and focused again, I don't think they are going to be capable of any major research that society can afford. They can barely roll out a major website, and even that costs way too much.
People like Peter Thiel are right about the drought of fundamental innovation since the early 70s, but they are wrong in other ways that ultimately render their arguments void and hypocritical. Thiel backs the same right-libertarian economic policies that caused this problem in the first place. The reason we stopped going to the Moon and inventing new paradigms in computing is because we stopped funding it.
The simple fact is that only three kinds of entities can fund basic research in most fields:
(1) Governments.
(2) Gigantic corporations with entrenched monopolies so profitable that they can afford to spend like governments (e.g. the old Bell Labs). Usually deep lasting monopolies of that sort are government-granted... again Bell Labs is a good example. So this goes back to governments or alternately government can be seen as the ultimate super-monopoly.
(3) Individuals with absolutely stratospheric net worth (over one billion at a minimum). The problem is that there are few of these and fewer who really get science and care about it that much.
You can't -- and shouldn't be able to -- patent a law of nature. Discovering a fundamental principle that led eventually to practical fusion power, interstellar travel, or radical life extension (to give examples) would be among the most valuable acts in human history, but its economic value would be pretty darn close to $0. There is no way to directly monetize it. As a result, markets cannot efficiently fund basic research. There is no way to securitize it -- no marketable financial vehicle for valuing it, capitalizing it, or delivering returns on it.
Monetize-ability doesn't come in until later -- until engineers have assimilated the new scientific discovery or principle and designed practical and workable technologies based around it. Usually these are different people than the original discoverers. Sometimes this process takes generations.
Science won't come back from its present abyss until and unless we get over market fundamentalism and realize that there are some classes of human endeavor that markets just aren't very good at funding.
It's a fact that's been true throughout history too. All the wonders of the ancient world (pyramids, Roman roads and aqueducts, etc.) were built by governments. None were built by commerce. All the wonders of the modern world -- the Moon landings, the Internet, the ISS, the Human Genome Project, the harnessing of the atom -- are either wholly government funded or were set into motion by a substantial initial investment of government money. The only big set of counterexamples I can think of are mostly out of Bell Labs, which was funded by a government-backed telephone monopoly.
If you think Xerox Parc is a counterexample, go find the Engelbart demo. Parc was doing stuff that was trail-blazed by a DOD-funded SRI project a decade earlier. If you think Elon Musk's ventures are counterexamples, understand that both Tesla and especially SpaceX are built directly on massive amounts of government R&D over the past 50 years. SpaceX is basically commercializing a lot of NASA (and Soviet, and German) technology. Elon himself says this, to his credit.
Most libertarians are simultaneously pro-tech and anti-state-investment. This requires an act of willful blindness and ideologically driven self-delusion on the same level as believing that the Earth is 6000 years old and mankind coexisted with dinosaurs. There is simply zero historical evidence that you can have that cake and eat it too. This is a special case of the more general "public good denialism" of right-libertarian and conservative ideology. Market fundamentalism is, quite ironically, America's own version of Soviet dogma.
The deeper underlying reality is that to make a huge step forward like this requires enough capital to effectively insulate a group of smart motivated people from the market (and other forces and demands) long enough to enable them to try something fundamentally new. Nothing like that is ever profitable from the get-go. You can't bootstrap it. It must be a "pure act," almost Nietzschean, undertaken for the goal itself and nothing more. "We will go to the moon" or "we will build a pyramid" because... we decided to. Period. Only once the trail has been blazed can commerce come in and line the street with shops and houses. At that point you've de-risked the path enough that bootstrapping and venture funding and similar things become thinkable.
I'm not anti-market. I reject that fundamentalism too, and generally reject fundamentalism as a way of thinking. Governments can fund basic research because they can, but they stink at taking it beyond the discovery or prototype phase. I'm just saying that markets are good at some things, but not others. Market should be free to act where they are effective, but they should be part of a larger political landscape that encompasses multiple mechanisms that are (hopefully) given jurisdiction where they work best.
Everything I wrote here will remain true until someone figures out a way to profitably fund such things within a market framework. Given the monstrous challenges involved I'm not holding my breath. Patents would be a poor mechanism, since they would have the perverse effect of shutting down research in a whole area for a long time.