Please post your thoughts about Neil deGrasse Tyson's assertion that state funding is necessary for scientific progress

[mustang19]

I think I know which OECD study he’s talking about (The Driving Forces of Economic Growth), which provides a pretty isolated finding, that public R&D does not increase innovation. Another OECD study looking at R&D investment specifically and controlling for country-specific factors and endogenity (i.e., do countries spend differently in the first place depending on their growth rates?, etc.) finds that public R&D does increase per capita GDP levels.

Considering the particular instance of the United States, there does appear to be a pretty significant role for the government in R&D. Looking at agricultural R&D gives especially interesting results, as in this paper including a calculation of shadow prices (covering opportunity costs of any sectoral crowding out that occurs) and input/output indexes.

The model fits the data reasonably well, with a system R2 of 0.896 and adjusted R2 for each estimating equation greater than 0.8.

…

All in all, even if we provide estimates of the rate of return to public R&D in agriculture lower than previously suggested, an average return of 29% on public funds is still impressive compared to the 9% and 12% average returns of the S&P500 and NASDAQ composite indexes during the same period.

[vive_la_insurrection]

Both scientism and progress are bunk in the way they are being used.

“Scientific prgress” has no more imperative than “society acts” - or “we all need 15 green tomatoes in our home”

All “progress” can mean, if it is to have any worthwhile meaning at all, is that the past has no relevance as a “thing” and is just used as a “necessary fiction” to make useful some current task at hand with a specific context; but this is not the way most people think to use the word - they use it as a rather peculiar objective value.

[Autolykos]

@~~mustang19~~ Troll

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.

First glaring flaw from the paper you linked to:

Two of the most often mentioned rationales for government support are both based on the market imperfections that lead to underinvestment in private R&D.

This implies that there’s an objectively optimal level of investment in private R&D. You already admitted elsewhere that there’s no such thing as objective optimality in investment. Hence this is a matter of you and your ilk wanting to impose your own, necessarily subjective, value judgements on the rest of us, as I already mentioned earlier in this thread.

[Autolykos]

@~~mustang19~~ Troll

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.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0905/0905.4272.pdf

As I said before, correlation does not imply causation. (Please note - if you haven’t already - that I’m using “imply” to mean logical implication.) Statistical regression can determine the probability distributions of dependent variables as functions of independent variables, but that in no way establishes a causal link. All it can do is help one make more accurate forecasts. Otherwise, one must conclude that reducing the number of pirates over time has been a, if not the, cause of (alleged) global warming.

Note that the above doesn’t take into account any flaws with the variables under consideration (such as GDP, in the context of econometrics).

[Autolykos]

I found another methodological error in the paper. The authors restrict their investigation to only whether government R&D funding “crowds out” private R&D funding. I see no reason to make this restriction. There are all sorts of other economic activities that at least could be “crowded out” by government R&D funding. Indeed, the “crowding out” issue doesn’t concern spending at all - it concerns taxing.