In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Sunday, friend of WUWT Matt Ridley argues that basic science research does not lead to technological innovation, and therefore isn’t deserving of taxpayer funding.
Ridley writes:
“Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. … The implications of this new way of seeing technology—as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge—are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.
Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. … It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics.”
Read more here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-basic-science-1445613954
Wow, the horse evolved for riding by progressive Mongols so compound bows could technologically evolve to better kill other humans still hung up on out of date chariot technology. That explains it.
2 billion of the world’s people still live on less than $2 per day, but we are supposed to believe that rapid scientific progress and the resulting economic windfalls are inevitable in the modern world?
The author talks about the “munificent funding” of science, and that’s just befuddling. The March of Dimes was the first major attempt at “crowdfunding” research. They raised millions of dollars, an unheard of amount of money, to help cure Polio. But in practice, less than 2% of the money went toward actual research, most of it went to palliative non-curative care for people with polio. It took many years to develop the vaccines that eradicated polio in most of the world. How much faster might they have been developed if 5% of the money went to research? 10%? How many hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily contracted polio in the interim?
Today the US spends close to $3 trillion per year on health care, but the NIH only has a budget of ~$30 billion for biomedical research. We’re actually further out of whack than the March of Dimes was during the polio era.
I don’t call ~1% of the health budget going toward research and 99% going toward current standards of care as “munificent”. And ultimately the highest hurdle that companies seeking to develop new medical devices and treatments must clear is the government’s own regulatory burden, so having the government put money into research that helps build up the scientific foundation needed to clear their own regulatory demands makes sense.
Higher standards of peer review would help and a total reform of the patent system. Meanwhile the entertainment biz gets away with non-sharing and pure profit.
It seems most people are not aware that computer networking became operational with SAGE and BUIC. It used modems, etc. AUTOVON and AUTODIN seem to have also been forgotten as precursors that made DARPANET possible.
I remember the huge computer complex at the University of Chicago way back in 1953. I was a three year old and when my dad was using the computers for astronomy and other (nuclear bomb) stuff, I would play under the desk and could hear him whack away at the keyboard entering data.
Remember those things? HUGE. With a zillion buttons on it! When the thing was retired, my dad used it as a foot massager. I did too. It was quite relaxing.
In the good old days (the ’60s-80s) the Geological Survey of Canada set out to establish calibration sites (Bells Corners, Cavendish, Nighthawk) for many of the geophysical companies (surveyors and instrument sellers). This is something that would be unlikely to be picked up by private industry. The same for geological mapping and regional geophysical surveys destined for the public domain.
Looking back, these people really cared about what they were doing and helped set the stage for many years of successful exploration. The mineral outcrop at Voisey’s Bay was mapped by a Provincial geologist and later followed up by private prospectors (using that map) which turned into a multi-billion dollar mine.
Talk about myths! Economics, a mythical science promoted by central banks, designed to mythologise the role of money and banks in the real world. Technology isn’t self evolving; yet!! Without mankind there is no technology and there would be no economists and no economy. The consistency of globalist talking points scares me. They are all reading from the same playbook, one that is based on a feeble grasp of reality, that is then projected into unrealistic models of the future!
Technology is not an entity with a will. It is not evolving as a living organism. Technology does not find inventors at night, like a fairy tucking something under a pillow. Innovation has come from individuals trying to solve real problems, and who have noticed the world around them — esp. when something unexpected happens. In order to value, understand, and be grateful for everything we use, it is better to understand the individuals from all backrounds who have given us the items we use every day.
It is counterproductive to believe that Technology is an animal that gives us nice things. It might make people unappreciative, spoiled, drugged, ignorant of the labors and sorrows of inventors and amateurs — and worse, willing command Technology to suddenly give them a low carbon economy and free energy. God save me from college graduates.
The theory of evolution is not just a competition for survival of the fittest. It is also the preferential death of the unfit. Humans stopped evolving sometime around the introduction of agriculture. When we developed enough surplus to keep the less fit alive and reproducing, we deactivated evolution. We are not allowing bad genes to be eliminated. Genetic decline is inevitable for us until we have GMH (genetically modified humans). Cultures continued to evolve, with memes the equivalent of genes. When technology, a subset of culture, is seen to be self organizing, it will also be seen to be competing for survival (funding from us). As a territorial survival strategy big government, big budget technology offers prestige and power. Private funding technology offers profit. Whichever offers the more attractive flower will attract the most bee$.
“We developed enough surplus to keep the less fit alive
We deactivated evolution
We are not allowing bad genes to be eliminated”
And so on and so forth.
It occurs to me that when a Boomer says “we” you really need to reach for your wallet, don’t make eye contact, and get to the door.
A term that generation is always using is the compelling “we,” eg “We must save the planet.” But the word used is just as often the “collective.” They are real experts in “collective memories,” “collective unconscious,” “collective imagination,” and the ubiquitous “collective consciousness,” which of course must be raised, or relocated, or obeyed, or some other such action.
The reason for this is, I believe, that the Cannabis Generation read so many of the same cheap paperbacks under the influence of drugs, watched the same tv, and compulsively adored the same personalities, that they cannot comprehend others who are not caught into trends as deeply as they have been. It is just no sense to try to come between Baby Boomers and their fashionable intellectual trends. For this you will receive no thanks, and probably abuse.
So with no reward expected or wanted, I will tell you all, you are wrong about this racial darwinism and about population control.
Zeke,
I’ll raise an eyebrow with you at the portrait of evolution with a target, but your objection to the proprietary use of the pronoun ‘we’ doesn’t survive the banality of your own generational stereotype.
I’ve thought about for a day or so mebbe, and I really don’t believe you are ignorant of Paul Ehrlich or of his influential paperback book The Population Bomb. Nor are many of that generation ignorant of where Ehrlich is today.
Or to put it succinctly, we are not controlling the technology – the Internet is telling us what it wants us to do fo it.
Meme evolution is faster and more flexible than genes. Genetically modified humans are meme creatures, no? What expectant parents would not pay $200 for 200 IQ gene tweak? Not do it and see your child fail like a Neandertal at a Mensa conference? See the movie GATTACA. (SIRI just told me the spelling).
There will never a confrontation. Humans will rush toward the new life form as their fondest wish. Who can resist an iPhone that makes you superhuman?
One more argument for calling economy a “dismal science.”
I perfectly agree with Berényi Péter :
‘So, of course it is futile to spend public money on “climate science” until its physical bases are understood. And once this genuine scientific riddle is solved, I bet there would be no need to spend any ;)’
I hope other people will also support that. CMIP6 model run initiatives, next IPCC report and nemerous meetings abroad and funding on model improvement etc. are pointless. Wasting of public money should be stopped immediately.
Lincoln is still the only US President to hold a patent, and he had this to say…
“[The patent laws] began in England in 1624, and in this country with the adoption of our Constitution. Before then any man [might] instantly use what another man had invented, so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this, secured to the inventor for a limited time exclusive use of his inventions, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”
The current US President believes that “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
I’ll take Lincoln, thanks.
Look at the bright side. B. Hussein Obama made U.S. a leader against global warming.
Geez, are you guys really that ignorant. Al Gore “developed the internet”. Now, that everyone is laughing, Al Gore was responding to a question by Wolf Blitzer, for an example of something he had done while in Congress. He said, “When I took the initiative in creating the internet.” Now I am a “slightly to the left of Attilla the Hun conservative. I defend Al Gore for saying this. Although it was POORLY STATED. He voted for and promoted specific funding to expand the EXISTING FOR over 20 years, DARPA NET to civilian usage. (Although actually by showing up at a military base and asking to use the DARPA NET, you could…I used it working on my MS, to access MAXYMA at Harvard…sponsored by DARPA. INDEED that funding (and the allowing of private firms to expand the DARPA NET, led to the current internet. ALSO, a few years later, the need for a way to “coordinate” information on the Web became apparent. The funding for Modzilla came up from a congressional budgeting, and Al Gore did promote that too. I might despise Al Gore for his “Gorebull Warming” efforts, but this is the DIFFERENCE between the “lefties” and “liberals” and conservatives. I know the history. Al did do the RIGHT THING. Did really have VISION in this realm, and gave use something very worthwhile, and there is NO strong evidence this would have been developed with just private funding.
Was Al Gorey the only one that voted for it ???
When my dad and his fellow scientists at various universities were seeking funding AL GORE got it for them and this created the internet. The funds didn’t come from businesses or Bill Gates or anyone, it was from Congress. I was there when this happened, I saw it close up.
I still love Al Gore even though he went off on the global warming stuff.
The author argues that in modern society, money is better spent working on something new rather than trying to copy the work of others.
Tell the Chinese…
http://news.usni.org/2015/10/27/chinas-military-built-with-cloned-weapons
People interested in the impact of basic research to technological advances should read this:
http://cds.cern.ch/record/816674?ln=en
abstract:
“Several studies have indicated that there are significant returns on financial investment via “Big Science” centres. Financial multipliers ranging from 2.7 (ESA) to 3.7 (CERN) have been found, meaning that each Euro invested in industry by Big Science generates a two- to fourfold return for the supplier. Moreover, laboratories such as CERN are proud of their record in technology transfer, where research developments lead to applications in other fields – for example, with particle accelerators and detectors. Less well documented, however, is the effect of the experience that technological firms gain through working in the arena of Big Science. Indeed, up to now there has been no explicit empirical study of such benefits. Our findings reveal a variety of outcomes, which include technological learning, the development of new products and markets, and impact on the firm’s organization. The study also demonstrates the importance of technologically challenging projects for staff at CERN. Together, these findings imply ways in which CERN – and by implication other Big Science centres – can further boost technology transfer into spill-over benefits for industrial knowledge and enhance their contribution to industrial R&D and innovation.”
Also this :
http://sos.teilchen.at/RapportAnnuelTT.pdf .
anna v,
Personally, I am all in favor of gov’t support of basic research like CERN, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the ISS. There are things which are just too expensive for a single company to fund. They’re so expensive that it often takes a coalition of governments.
But when government gets into things that can be politicized (like its current demonization of “carbon”), then it will be politicized. Government is, after all, a political body. And they have the police power of the State to force their subjects to pay for propaganda like that.
And that’s where industry comes in. They know who has the cookie jar, so they begin their incessant schmoozing. We see the result: giant GE windmills polluting the view and chopping millions of birds and other wildlife, all across the country. So the governement is the problem. Industry just does what companies rationally do.
The government could insist that everyone must paint their foreheads blue “for the common good”, and with enough money and our tame media, eventually most people you see on the street would have blue foreheads. The ones that didn’t would eventually be demonized as ‘not of the tribe’, and they would lose thier jobs, or at least miss out on promotions and pay raises, and the young guys without blue foreheads wouldn’t get the hot girls.
Think I’m kidding? Remember Fidel Castro? Not a person in Cuba dressed in anything but green army fatigues. So just replace ‘blue foreheads’ with ‘skeptics of man-made global warming’. There isn’t very much difference, is there?
That’s what is happening. Proposals to remedy the situation welcome…
I tell you what. For a lot less than 8bn I will give you a God Particle.
Lets review the technology you are using right now.
Microprocessors: industry creations
Network standards – Ethernet/WiFi: industry consortiums
Telecom standards: ITU, industry consortiums
Internet protocols: DARPA grants (1980s), universities, latter on industry
Media standards: MPEG 1/2/4 – industry consortiums
Discovery of electricity: academic. Discovery of electron: academic. Development of quantum mechanics: academic. Pauli principle underlying all semi conductor energy bands: academic.
Discovery of electricity (lightning/thunder), electrostatic phenomena – perhaps better say quantified rather than discovered if you are meaning formal explanations for it. And all these you mention are fundamental phenomena that are of no use by themselves. They are pre-technology and in many cases development of technologies can proceed without fundamental knowledge of the physics – as mentioned above, the steam engine arose from observation of behavior of a boiling kettle lid or some such. One could harness the steam with no knowledge of thermodynamics. It is most fascinating that thermodynamics followed the study of the steam engine (also mentioned above).
Your case is for government funding fundamental (non-applied) research I gather. It certainly doesn’t mean that technology (the domain of the engineer), is not largely private sector driven. Also, the progressives “collective” whimsy about ‘technology choosing the people’ and that they don’t deserve to profit from it (Sorry Matt, I can’t buy this economists’ theory of technological development – they aren’t wrong that it keeps growing but not in the fashion stated). Let’s look at the steam engine (he lived in a coal mining town):
“In 1807, George Stephenson…. began working nights repairing shoes, clocks, and watches, making extra money that he would spend on his inventing projects. In 1813, George Stephenson became aware that William Hedley and Timothy Hackworth were designing a locomotive for the Wylam coal mine. So at the age of twenty, George Stephenson began the construction of his first locomotive …- every part of the engine had to be made by hand, and hammered into shape just like a horseshoe. …
After ten months’ labor, George Stephenson’s locomotive “Blucher” was completed and tested on the Cillingwood Railway (horse-drawn RRW) on July 25, 1814…. (His) engine hauled eight loaded coal wagons weighing thirty tons, at about four miles an hour. This was the first steam engine powered locomotive to run on a railroad and it was the most successful working steam engine that had ever been constructed up to this period (others were used as stationary pumps),… He (built) the world’s first public railways: the Stockton and Darlington railway in 1825 and the Liverpool-Manchester railway in 1830.
…Stephenson invented a new safety lamp that would not explode when used around the flammable gasses found in the coal mines.
…Stephenson and William Losh, who owned an ironworks in Newcastle patented a method of making cast iron rails.
…In 1829, George Stephenson and his son Robert invented a multi-tubular boiler for the now-famous locomotive “Rocket”.”
I say let’s give such a guy some cash and a way to profit from his invention. The new cultural marx brothers philosophy of the progressives would take all this away as part of their return to nature and killing civilization.
NUTS.
Private industry did all that research etc. WITH GOVERNMENT FUNDS. They went to Congress for it. I was there, I used to lobby Congress for research funds, etc. on behalf of my father.
emsnews,
Maybe so. But before the gov’t got involved with shoveling out taxpayer loot to its pals in industry, there was an unending parade of fantastic inventions, not the least of which were airplanes, smallpox inoculations, canned food, and many thousands of other things invented by solitary groups or individuals.
I suspect that if the government had invented airplanes, we would be debating whether monoplanes or biplanes are the best way to go.
Eric, the DARPA involvement spanned the 1960s and 1970s with ARPANET becoming active in 1969 tying four major universities with important classified research programs. ARPANET consisting of physical linkages of the four university networks and the TCP/IP protocols was the nucleus of the later internet. Some useful search tools like Archie, Veronica and Jughead appeared in the very, very early ’90s and ties to the usenet news network (UUCP) were also implemented fairly early. The first web browser appeared later when it became obvious that visual displays and greater band width were becoming available. Now we’re stuck with “Flo” popping up and gabbling about insurance.
Matt Ridley writes, “People are pawns in a process” and “technology is developing [a] kind of autonomy”.
He seems to be blind to the all-deciding factor of freedom for the individual. That imust be the ultimate driver of the “process”. Free people are never pawns. The process Matt Ridley talks about would cease if freedom were to cease. It is certainly not an automatic occurrence. The mighty creative force of the human individual will only thrive given freedom. And where we have humans we also meet with the concept of ethics – that is another decisive factor in the “process”.
Indeed Andy. If Ridley were correct it would be difficult to explain why most serious technological development in, for instance, the 20th century was done in the West and not equally so in the Soviet Union.
The only area where the soviets kept up with the US was in the narrow field of military technology which absorbed such a large portion of the national effort that it brought down the economy and took the system with it.
AndyE says, “The creative force of the human individual will only thrive given freedom.”
++++AndyE So agree. The extraordinary genius and energy of amateurs and inventers you are talking about developed because of the freedom of the individual.
Specifically this freedom is supported by the ability to borrow money or raise capital to make the new invention and to offer it at a price that will attract people to try it.
To illustrate, Cyrus McCormick improved his own father’s idea for reaping and bundling grain with a new machine, saving many many hours of manual labor in the field.
http://teachers.henrico.k12.va.us/tucker/strusky_m/webquests/VUS6_Expansion/mccormick%20reaper.jpg
He was able to patent this, demonstrate its effectiveness to skeptical farmers, and then to produce it in a plant up north, if memory serves.
Or George Eastman for example was able to save and borrow enough money from relatives to develop a chemical process that eliminated packing around huge tents and plates when taking photographs. Both of these examples were young men from farms.
Literacy for all has been a great contributor to technology, and this was a entirely new concept developed in the Colonies, esp. the Puritan charters. The South was not a huge observer of this ideal. In the mother lands, literacy was for males and for the wealthy.
Private property has also been essential. A farmer or rancher can improve his methods at any time on his own property. Under systems which collectivise farms there is no ability to graze or plant in a new way. This was what trapped people in the medieval methods for so long, but new types of planting and breeding and improved animal nutrition were developed by English farmers who had their own land. Otherwise land was rotated between grazing and planting in the same way each year.
I am really shocked to read that so many people consider the advancement of knowledge to be something unimportant…
And many of them have no idea how research is funded via the Pentagon. Many a private lab sucks down government money. Ask any lobbyist pestering Congress for funding.
You are culturally disposed to misunderstand what you are reading here.
From 1967-71 I was a grad student at the University of Toronto under Prof. John Polanyi, who deservedly won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work on infrared (IR) chemiluminescence, using IR spectroscopy. Ironically, on the day his Prize was announced, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) here in Ottawa closed down the section on photochemistry where Polanyi had been a post-doc under 1971 Nobel Chemistry winner Gerhard Herzberg. Without support for basic research in molecular physics, there has been no prominent voice arguing that “emission from the atmosphere” that everyone in the climate change literature talks about is physically wrong. The main gases of the troposphere (78% N2, 21% O2, 1% Ar) are composed of non-polar molecules (with zero electric dipole moment), so the amount of IR they can absorb and emit is negligible. There is some IR emission to outer space at 667 cm^-1 (central CO2 bond-bending vibration frequencies) and ozone, but this amounts to only about 19 W/m^2, nowhere near the 240 W/m^2 needed for energy balance. And this 19 W/m^2 emission is powered by incoming Solar UV and visible radiation which is absorbed by ozone in the stratosphere, resulting in the observed temperature inversion from 10 to 50 km altitude. This emission is definitely NOT powered by IR photons radiatively exchanged in the 10 km of the troposphere (we know this because the “220K CO2 emission” appears when satellites look down on 210 K Thunderstorm Anvils, and net heat cannot flow upward from a colder 210 K to a warmer 220 K layer). So knowledge of basic science can be used to show that the “settled science” of the climate change literature is anything but settled, and that the skeptics are right. I can send more details to anyone interested if you contact me at rtaguchi@rogers.com .
In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development … found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked.
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It all has to do with efficiency and the inability of anyone, private or government to predict the future. When a private company gets it wrong, they go bankrupt. Their bad ideas die.
However, when governments get it wrong, they continue, because there is always an excuse to be made. The only person that can die is the taxpayer.
As a result, government funding is not self-correcting, and it delivers very little net value. A lot of government funding ends up paying people to dig holes and fill them in. It appears very productive on paper, but in the end does nothing.
This opinion you express is based on the idea that the quality or interest of research is determined solely by its economic impact.
Yes. The chapter missing here is the one on “mission creep”, or “How government institutions, refunded at higher rates each year, refocus their mission statements under diametrically opposite political ideologies when new administrations take over, gradually losing sight of their initial goals”. (It’s a long, boring chapter, too.) I’m no expert, but wasn’t NASA originally given the mission of going to space? It seems a rather tortuous path they followed to end up with their political advocacy of AGW under James Hansen’s leadership.
Ridley observes that government funded institutions may actually do harm by doing the “wrong research”, and muscling out the smaller, privately-owned business ventures which would otherwise be at the cutting edge; they are a black hole for money that could be going toward provably efficient results.
Government initiatives seem designed to please constituents. Money earmarked for “climate research” gets granted to those who write the proposals clearly designed to prove AGW exists. Such spurious goals don’t nurture innovation. They just create meaningless projects.
A government faced with a real technological problem – say, a catastrophic series of shipwrecks on its coasts, due to the inability to correctly measure latitude at sea – might legitimately spur research into innovation by sponsoring a prize with measurable results. The idea of a chronometer to solve that problem only came about because William Harrison, an inventor, was already working on it privately, and began to devote himself to the project full time.
Important technological ventures likely get submerged as government staffs attempt to keep their heads down and survive one partisan administration after another. Those administrations morph, they bifurcate, they redesign their reasons for being, but the funding keeps on coming. Private institutions, on the other hand, are like people. They must learn to adapt, compromise, cut their budgets, secure their funding, and survive by their wits and their successful, efficient flow of innovation.
It is really amazing that someone in right mind would seriously expect practical outcome from the basic research. All history of science is the proof that basis science was done without expectation that it will spin off some technology. If a scientist proposes basic research and explains what practical outcome will be generated, this scientist is either God himself or a shyster. Ironically, all the NSF funded proposals contain such a justification “Greater Impact”. No wonder that basic studies funded by NSF type organizations are done by scientists like Jagadish Shukla and Michael Mann type. However, the idea that funding of basic research should not come from taxpayers money and, instead, should come from the private sources is worth of support. These funding sources would not be industry though, but it would be individual philanthropists or the academia system, as it was for ages before WWII.
Y’all should read Lubos Motl’s views on this book
http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/10/basic-science-vs-matt-ridley-bumpkin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+%28Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame%29
Thanks. It’s brilliant, if a little savage. As usual from Lubos Motl.
Quite possibly he has now been removed from the Ridley family’s Xmas card list!!
This may be why the West advanced with gunpowder while China kept using it’s invention for fireworks. On the other hand the West used a leaky, open academic campus for nuclear bomb development while the East used spies under the bridge outside the campus to spread the news faster than the White House got updates.
I admire Ridley and agree with much of what he has to say, but he is demonstrably wrong on this issue. The multibillion dollar biotechnology industry was created by the ability to manipulate DNA, first with restriction endonucleases. These magical enzymes were characterized by basic science research designed to understand how bacteria resist attack by bacterial viruses (bacteriophages). No one could have possibly predicted that research on bacterial viruses could possibly lead to anything practical, let alone the birth of a multibillion dollar industry that has already saved many many lives by virtue of biological therapies for cancer and other diseases. Basic science must be supported, or the cool new technological stuff will slowly stop appearing. Industry can’t do it because they can’t justify basic research to stockholders. Support of basic research by government leading to remarkable advances developed by commercial operations has worked amazingly, remarkably, unarguably well for a long time. Even the abuses of climate science shouldn’t lead to throwing out that successful formula for the rest of science.