Libertarianism and Science

Economics Economics Questions
1

I’ve always wondered about this: in a country where there’s as little as possible state intervention in the economy, how does scientific research get funds?
For example, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) cost several billion EUR. How would the libertarian system treat the financial needs of research?

I’m only asking because I was appalled to see a video entitled: “Alternative Medicine - The Libertarian Alternative” where they suggested new-age voodoo tricks are the libertarian solution to the “old”, state-sponsored science-based medicine.

2

The organization that currently has the biggest research budget in the world is not a government agency - it’s IBM. The benefits of research and development are clear - why on earth does anyone think we need governments to “force” us to do something that so clearly brings us benefits? Why would private institutions (like IBM) not undertake research to get ahead of their competitors in the absence of government intervention?

That doesn’t mean all research projects currently being undertaken would otherwise have been undertaken in a free market. It could well be that no one (if they actually had to put their money where their mouth is, and not someone else’s money) actually believes that many of these projects will pay off in the long run and, in actual fact, that the costs of these projects (it is thought, rightly or wrongly) out weigh their benefits according to all current best estimates.

3

CNET 2006: Paul Horn, the director of IBM Research and a physicist by training, faces one of the toughest math problems… how to divide a $5–6 billion yearly research budget across hardware, software and—increasingly—services.

Jimmy is on the right trail…we’ve yet to see what real competition does to research budgets or research productivity. Note also that university education and research tracks are negatively distorted by govt money, attitude, and requirements. There too, we can’t guess how great the improvement would be.

4

Interesting. I did not know that.

What about research in fields that aren’t potential cash cows, like IT is?
I mean quantum physics, evolutionary biology and the likes?

Thanks :slight_smile:

5

Those will disappear.

6

I think a lot of those things still have potential and people will see profit opportunities in them (for example: researching quantum physics for quantum computing, etc).

7

FWIW, Tibor Machan has a book on this. Just search his name on Amazon or check the praxeology reading list.

8

The realm of physics of any kind has large potential return, and is highly likely to get investment.

For example, consider nuclear fusion power. Once it was demonstarted that it is possible for two atomic nuclei to fuse together, and that they produce massive amounts of electromagnetic and heat energy when they do so, what reason would businesses have NOT to invest in it. Given the return is not measured in years, but decades…the amount of return - fuel amounts in grams per year instead of kilograms per month or metric tons per day - would in the end gain massive investment as soon as the idea becomes feasible, that is the other technologies needed to make it work are available. The problem in the past was always “how do you harness enough energy to start and sustain the reaction.” Now that the question has largely been worked out, where do we go from there. Furthermore, private market investment avoids the waste of billions of dollars that is inherent in the current system. For example, the first laser-based attempts at a fusion reactor which failed miserably because - as was predicted by the scientists involved - the lasers would use more energy heating the fuel to fusible temperatures than the fusion would produce. That was ignored by beauracrats and on the order of several billion dollars were wasted on the project in the 1980s. Same thing with the old “magnetic pinch bottle” concept. The technology became workable, though, with the ability to model Tauroids using computers in the late 1990s, and the first of such reactors went up and sustained.

Furthermore, using market, rather than government controls avoids having beauracrats deciding which programs to fund. This avoids a lot of the funding bias that has become a problem today where anything with “global warming” attached to its name gets millions - or even billions - of dollars in public funds, but real projects barely scratch by at the end of the budget year.

9

You have got to be kidding me…No money to be made in quantum physics and evolutionary biology? Try information technology and medical applications.

10

An interesting post, that’s actually relevant: Free-Market Science vs. Government Science

11

I think it should be uncontroversial to say that private companies are more risk averse than the government, and also more profit minded. I don’t see why that wouldn’t have any implications. Perhaps non-profit organizations will fill part of the gap?

12

Never assume anything [;)]

By profit, you mean profit to to whom? Government is generally quite concerned with creating outcomes that profit all sorts of people - but without fail that profit comes at the expense of others.

If companies are risk averse, who is to say they shouldn’t be and that the “right” thing to do is to plough head on into schemes that in all likelihood won’t bring any benefit to anyone? In case you’re about to suggest that companies are only concerned with monetary profits where government can take other (non monetary) benefits into account, how exactly do you suppose government will go about evaluating these “other” (spiritual, fun etc.) benefits and evaluate whether these benefits outweigh the costs/risks of the project? Further more, if there are so many non monetary benefits to these activities, why should people need governments to force the research of these things? Surely they’d really want to study them for all of the non material benefits that they gained from the reserch?

Essentially, it comes down to this. Bill wants to research x. Bill doesn’t have the cash to fund the research of x and so he asks Harry to fund it. Harry says no I don’t think that’s worth it. Bill goes to uncle Sam and says Harry didn’t want to fund x. Uncle Sam goes to Harry and says Harry, I know you don’t think x is worth funding and I know you don’t think it will bring you any benefits but, with all due respect my views on the matter are more important than yours, so fund x or I’ll shoot you. Then uncle Sam tries to justify his policies by saying that x was really very good for Harry, but he just wasn’t able to see all the non monetary benefits that x would bring to him because he was so consumed with greed for “money” that he was blinded to all those benefits (which Sam, the omniscient leader, could see).

13

I find it very interesting that from roughly 1600 to 1900 physicists(or better, natural philosophers) did very well using rather modest means. Today international bureaucracies spend billions of dollars in experiments that will teach us…what ? How the universe was created ? Can’t so called ‘scientitists’ be a bit less arrogant ? I’ve got an intuition. It seems to me that the emperor has no clothes.

14

Their discoveries were rather modest compared to what’s going on today.

cost / scientific advance follows an exponential curve because you need pretty advanced tools to explore what hasn’t already been explored.

No, really. That’s kinda what they’re doing :).. recreating the conditions that were around in the first moments of the Universe.
Science needs public attention and this motto is a great way to do that.

The scientists who work at the LHC are not beaurocrats. They are some of the most notable international physicsists with great contributions to experimental physics.
It’s not their fault that such great costs are required.

15

Scientific advances have grown exponentially along with the global division of labor. Advanced tools do not imply exponential growth.

That doesn’t tell us the value of their work. They may consider themselves highly valuable, but we don’t.

Why should these greats costs be suffered instead of applied to other pursuits?

16

Yes but they could be just as brilliant without having their projects funded by money taken at gunpoint, on their behalf, by people who are bureaucrats.

The argument isn’t whether scientists are stupid or not, that’s a perfectly pompous idea. The argument is that each scientists is no more or no less an entrepreneur than any of us. If he’s so convinced his research will bring benefits to himself or those around him then he can put his money where his mouth is and forego the use of the scarce resources that are required to fund his research. If he’s not willing to fund his own research then why the hell should I be?

OK, so not many people can afford Large Hadron Colliders. Fair enough. But there are a LOT of scientists in the world. Why don’t they all pool together and come up with the funds for the LHC? It just might be the case that quite a lot of the scientists out there want to conduct experiments that have nothing to do with the LHC - they’re concerned with the migration habits of airborn insect species in Botswana or something. Why should those scientists pay for the LCH? They’re pretty much persuaded they’ll get more benefit from a better knowledge of some species of fly that’s currently killing tens of thousands of tribal africans, and who’s to say they’re wrong? It sounds to me like they have a pretty strong case.

We live in a world of limited resources and we can’t study everything (even if we recognize that investing in tetsi fly research and investing in the LHC could both liklely bring benefits). So we have to choose what to research. And indeed, for precisely the same reason (scarce resources), we can’t invest 100% of our savings in scientific research. We have to spread those savings and investment across millions of different projects (some research, some housing, some food etc.) - plans that have been conceived by individuals and groups of individuals. Will all of those plans/projects bring benefits to “society” as a whole? Probably not - a good portion of them probably won’t even bring any benefits to the people who conceived these proejcts. But some of them will, and only the market can sort the brass from the gold - in science as with anything else.

In what way are the plans of scientists not constrained by the same scarcity of resources that other plans are constrained by? Is it held that the LHC should be funded by government because it will bring benefits to “society” at large? Surely if we feel we need government to decide to research such things, the logical conclusion is that we also need them to decide on the relative values of Nike and Addidas shoes. Both of these companies produce fine shoes… so surely more Nike shoes and Addidas shoes would be of benefit to “society” right? It could only be good for “society” if we had lots more Nike and Addidas shoes right? Wrong - because the making of those shoes requires resources which, if not forced at gunpoint, “society” might have spent on Addidas shoes and Nike shoes, but might have spent on something else entirely (depending on what it was “society” really valued).

In a free market, society will actually invest in Addidas shoes, as it happens, but it does not invest the entirety of it’s savings on these things - the exact percentage of society’s savings/investment which is directed to Addidas shoes is a representation of society’s values - the aggregate of people’s wants and desires. This fraction is the aggregate portion of the annual labor of all people that these people, rightly or wrongly, think they should dedicate to the manufacture of Addidas shoes. Who am I (and indeed who are you or who is government) to tell these people they’re wrong and that they should spend more on Nike Shoes than Addidas shoes? And by that same logic, on what moral ground do we stand when we tell them that they are have placed undue importance on food and shelter, or time with their families or vaccations in Tahiti over, for example, scientific research? Why should I be even remotely concerned how many muons make up a proton? Why should I value this more than a few extra days in Tahiti on my honeymoon (and thus redirect resources that I might have spent on my honeymoon to this purpose)? If I don’t value this more than my honeymoon, on what moral ground exactly is it that you would stand to point a gun to my head and force these resources from me under the guise of taxation and “benefits” to me that I’m “too ignorat” to see?