No way to tell. But there are an awful lot of those incredibly beneficial inventions that the government played a role in.
That was just a footnote - I would like to see you respond to the substance of my post. Unlike statists, I don’t need to invent hero narratives and magical-invention-generating-organizations. The claim of classical liberalism (versus statism) is that human progress has nothing to do with the State because the State’s purpose is war and parasitic subsistence on the backs of the productive class. Its purpose is quite the opposite of human progress, in fact.
Clayton -
That’s your opinion, and you are entitled to it. But for an organization that takes up half the national product, there seems to be a lot more than half of major breakthroughs occuring at public universities and R&D partnerships.
So since it’s so great, surely we should completely nationalize these endeavors to make them even better.
Clayton -
There is a book about this topic. I remember everything except for the name of the book and the author. His main observation was that state funded projects are more geared toward specific applications, whereas private funding tends to be more of the “pure science” variety.
Are you sure? I’m pretty certain it’s the other way around.
The people working on things like the Large Hardon Collider or global warming research are doing it mainly with public research grants.
Linkin’ to some pasta sauce.
I searched YouTube for the interview. Someone asked him about it at about 46:00. (He’s a biochemist.)
I didn’t see him cite the claim that the private sector spends more on pure science than the government does. He stated that it has a high return for businesses, implying that they should in theory. He then goes on at 52:00 to say that “governments love funding science,” and gives his explanation about why its a bad thing.
He does mention Bell Labs, although he may not know it was a public-private partnership.
It’s fucking annoying how you appear in threads, make controversial points, and will even back it up with some evidence, but when pushed to debate you spout out shit like this. Are you honestly not aware of opportunity cost? I saw on another thread that you literally didn’t even know what the broken window parable was.
You are a damn good troll, but please stop. It’s giving me and others stomach ulcers.
In terms of “opportunity cost”, government science spending in the US takes up about 1% of GDP, less than private research spending, and the crowding out between the two is not large. Funding these scientific advances hardly requires a major cost to the rest of the economy.
The whole point of the broken window parable is that you can’t calculate the opportunity cost, because you don’t know where the money would have been spent otherwise (forget money; it’s about where the goods would have been allocated). I don’t care what papers you cite - there is absolutely no way to substantiate this claim. Btw, 1% of GDP in the United States is about 150 billion dollars. You’re telling me you can somehow estimate how productive this money would have been had the government not spent it? That’s bogus.
Yeah, by correlating what happens when the government increases/decreases spending, but we are talking about one percent of the economy responsible for rocketry, nuclear power, and transistors.
A response to Neil DeGrasse Tyson regarding NASA | by Robert P. Murphy
The Means of Innovation (by Jeffrey Tucker)
Huhuhuh… He said ‘Hardon’…
@LOL Jargon
Yes, you can correlate things that have happened at certain times in the past. That’s nice. Do you have anything more?
You say this as if you know it was desirable to use the recources in that way. But how do you know? Like, yea.. It’s nice to flash the fancy things you made compared to um.. nothing, because you don’t fucking know the opportunity cost.
You’re like the guy Hazlitt was talking about in Economics in One Lesson, throwing things like rocketry around. Yeah, rockets are cool. Rockets are real cool. But you’re comparing something that exists with something that doesn’t exist. Yes, the thing that exists is going to seem preferable intuitively. You can showcase it real good against something which doesn’t exist.
And 1% of the economy? What are you even measuring? Things are not homogenous such that you can group them that way. It inherently assumes an objective measurement of things that are percieved strictly subjectively. Actual goods, services, laborers, etc. So while government science funding may be only 1% of the economy, it could just as well be utilizing the most highly specialized scientists with the most refined equipment. This wouldn’t be reflected in GDP.
And it is in fact the case, as discussed in Rollback, that government funding does take hold of a large portion of the most highly knowledgable scientists, crowding out private use of those resources.
It’s ultimately people that make these discoveries and innovations. Is it that hard to imagine an opportunity cost to using these great minds and directing them via the political process, as opposed to using them towards consumer oriented interests?
The point remains: you can’t measure the potential wealth that could have been created had those recources been utilized in a different way.
I’m sorry I didn’t look at this thread sooner. (Perhaps a more concise title is in order.)
We already have a thread debunking this notion.
Measuring the opportunity cost in terms of research inputs (researchers, equipment, and so forth) as well as innovation outputs (like patenting or productivity) can be done at the microeconomic level. These projects are popular in the sense that the majority of consumers and scientists are highly supportive of public innovation efforts. Not many people are excited about scrapping public universities and the NSF. They are not consumer oriented in the sense that in many instances they focus on basic science rather than immediately marketable products.
Bear in mind that the government supports the public university system and a large share of research grants, funding the education and thesis research of new scientists and engineers. Any “crowding out” effect of public R&D- which is debatable whether it occurs on the balance, in light of the previously posted studies- may not take into account the benefit to the scientific establishment from public university research and grants.
Crowding out does not seem to be a major factor in private research spending. Although we cannot know what would happen if NASA never put men on the moon or Bell Labs was never incentivized to pursue semiconductors, there is reason to believe that the government does fund a large part of basic scientific research which the corporate sector is not interested in performing, and research inputs, including highly skilled scientists and engineers, receive a large part of their educational and research funding from public sources.