[Borodog]

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OK, the 16 yo comment was out of line. I had just gotten back form a cognac tasting [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]
But your main retorts are "prove it" "where are your calculations", etc.
You never present your side. I didn't reject your points out of hand. I and some of my colleagues have experience with both public and private funding and drew a conclusion based on that, so don't be so quick to jump on that boat. That's lazy debating.

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I was never asked to present "my side." You made certain assumptions, (to paraphrase, "So there's not going to be any basic science or interstates?") and when I tried to point out that these were simply assumptions, you pretty much flipped out on me.

And as far as I can tell, I did present a small line of reasoning, which you ignored. Namely that fundamental science is valuable, and in a free market capital will flow to it. I asked you what mechanism would prevent this. I'm still waiting for an answer.

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And if you compare publicly funded research (university, etc.) with for-profit research (biotech, drug companies, etc.) I can't believe that anyone would believe that the for-profits are doing better science. By any measuring stick - Nobel Prizes, citations, opinions of prominent field members, etc.
There's a huge issue now with scientists and even journals having problems getting all the data from studies the drug companies perform. The bottom line definitely affects science. Have we learned nothing from Johnny Mnemonic ?

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The only thing I learned from Johnny Mnemonic is that I wanted my $6.50 back. But be that as it may, I believe you are making a couple of errors.

1) You conflate "privately funded" with "for profit." This is not always the case. Most "not for profit" science has been monopolized by governments.

2) You are comparing extant coercively funded science with extant privately funded science, saying that privately funded science "sucks" in comparison, and extrapolating that all science would suck if there were no coercive funding of science. Yet you offer no justification for why the level of funding of private science must be constant in the two drasticly different environments. I contend that there are two simple arguments that demonstrate that this is not a fair comparison, one for we'll call it "for profit" science, and one for "not for profit" science, i.e. basic science for which you may argue there is no strict profit motive, perhaps astrophysics. Although even this I would argue with; I think there is profit in even the most inapplicable of sciences. That's a side point though.

The first argument is the capital argument stated before. Regardless of whether there are issues with getting drug companies to share their research data, you cannot argue that tens of billions of dollars of private capital flows to private companies doing research for profit, including drug companies, biomedical device companies, medical equipment research, prosthetics research, medical imaging research. Private funding exceeds government funding in all of these areas. Claiming that the science done by these companies "sucks" is unjustified.

The second argument goes to the idea of "not for profit" science, let's call it. I.e., fundamental science that you may argue cannot be "sold" for an immediate profit. For example:

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All (or nearly all) of the major advances and paradigm shifting discoveries in neuroscience (again b/c that's what I'm most familiar with) have come from universities or other "non-profit" organizations funded by tax dollars.

For profit science really restricts exploration. I have considered what scientific funding would be like without the major government funding agencies and it would be scary. Basic science would all but disappear. Science would degenerate into the factory-line approach common to the biotech firms.


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Basic science would not "all but disappear." There is a demand for basic science. That you cannot see this startles me. If there were no demand for basic science, do you think politicians would fund it? No, they would not. The existence of a large number of lay-sources of science information demonstrates the demand that the general public has for basic science. Many of these sources are even profit driven. I.e., people are already paying out of their own pockets for basic science. The very existence of people like you and I demonstrate the public demand for science. There are thousands of research scientists doing basic science research. For every one of these people there is probably a hundred or a thousand lay people who are just as interested in what they are studying, but for any number of reasons didn't go into the sciences themselves. They can't do the research, but they still want to know. These are the consumers of science.

In addition, basic science forms the input to the for-profit science of the next decade. Often in many companies there is a short-term bias against investing in long-term research. This is produced by distortions in the profit motives of business due to government regulation, a topic too large in scope to go into here. Suffice it to say that if government regulation did not make current stock price more important than long-term profitability, corporate investment in pure science would be significantly higher.

Furthermore, private donations for basic science research are largely curtailed by the very existence of government funding sources. This is what I mean when I say basic science has been monopolized. There are a number of reasons for this, including the confiscatory level of taxation that leaves few people with excess funds to donate to neuroscience research for example, the "that's what I pay taxes for" mentality, and the institutionalization of the process for receiving hand-outs from the taxpayers' pocket.

Let's take level of taxation and the "this is what I pay taxes for" mentality. If you doubt the existence of these effects on private basic science funding, you could make an analogy with private charity. The is an incontrovetible inverse correlation between level of taxation and welfare and entitlement program spending and the level of private donations to charities for the poor. In the European tax-welfare states, charitable giving lies far below the level it does in the United States with it's relatively less intrusive and burdensome tax and welfare policies. Private charities in the US spend more charitable dollars helping the poor than do governments (all though governments spend more dollars total; the bulk of this simply finances the bureaucracy). Compare that with basic science in the US, which has been largely monopolized.

The other side of the coin is the fact that scientists are now addicted to government grants. There are private foundations, thousands of them, that could fund basic science research through grants, much like they fund charitable efforts and non-profit organizations. But they are in competition with a government till. Many, many government tills. And the process for sticking your hand out and receiving the public largesse has been fine-tuned to the point that many scientists spend an ever larger fraction of their time writing grant proposals. In effect because the government doles out all the money, private foundations cannot compete, and form such a small component of funding that they are not worth pursuing when I have all these government grant proposals to finish writing! This is the feedback process that has killed privately funded basic science.

It wasn't always like this, you know. Did you ever see the film Awakenings with Robin Williams? I believe it was set in the 1960s, although I could be wrong. There's a scene where Robin Williams makes an impassioned pitch to a group of wealthy donors to fund his research in . . . neuroscience, if I remember correctly. That wouldn't happen today. He'd just write a grant proposal. Private donors make up an ever shrinking fraction of the budget of prestigious research institutions.

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Please explain to me your theory on how you would fund science. And throw in the road thingy too.

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There's a few thoughts on science funding. The last thing I'd like to point out is that funding for science can only come at the expense of something else. So even though I think I've demonstrated several effects that would either a) drive private science funding in the absence of coercive government funding or b) are currently depressing private science funding relative to current coercive funding, I am not claiming a priori that the level of science funding would go up. It might even go down. I think it's impossible to say, as it is impossible to make quantitative. predictions. I can say this. There would be just as much basic science as the market demanded, and there is clearly a demand for basic science.

This has been a long post. I think I'll leave the discussion of private interstates until after I see if you flip out and start insulting me again.

Have a good one.