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I was running errands in my 9-5 on Monday, and happened to hear the same segment on NPR, which probably inspired much of your post. I couldn't help having a chuckle at those bureaucratic administrators sanctimoniously demanding that the choicest lamb that they receive is sacresanct. The theory that government is necessary, or even helpful, to scientific research can be rebutted in multiple ways:
The short version, one that almost engages the scientific method itself, is quite simple: how come Soviet Russia, India, China and Japan, with all their robust centralized government support for scientific research, produced next to nothing for half a century? What happened to the Japanese ministry of technology that was supposed to lead Japan into superemacy over the US in the 90's? Somehow it got mired in big iron mainframe computers, and missed internet and biotech altogether, heck even failed to come up with microprocessors that could compete with Intel, AMD or Cyrix. It's quite obvious that the theory fails the A/B test quite miserably.
Now the longer version: what is scientific research? Is it about putting in the number of hours going through the motions and accumulating "resource spent points" to get to the next level of pre-ordained "advancement" like in some computer games, or is it a bona fide discovery process that nobody knows the outcome apriori? If it is the latter, how exactly would apriori bureaucratic central planning help? It doesn't. Bureaucracy might be somewhat workable in an industry that is already very mature and economization comes from consolidation (until the next new discovery makes the existing way of doing things obsolete). Scientific discovery is the exact opposite of that. Having a government-run bureaucratic monopoly to run scientific research is guaranteed to maximize waste while minimize returns.
It is no co-incidence that with more and more government intervention in scientific research, we have more and more pseudo-religious studies where the pseudo-"scientific" theories are not scientifically testable ("falsifiable"), such as the beginning of the universe and anthropogenic global warming. Fundamentally, government bureaucrats can not distinguish what's real scientific theory, what's merely debate on how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin. The less real life relevance there is, the easier it becomes for the established bureaucrats to perpetuate their own ideas without having to face challenge. Dishonesty also becomes rampant in those pseudo-religious fields of "study."
What government funding produces is not scientific research (results), but bureaucracy itself, just like government funding for everything else. That's why the huge amount of man-hours that Soviets, Indians, Chinese and Japanese devoted to scientific research produced very little. After merely half a century, we here in the US are already witnessing the phenomenon of university administrators raking in 500k-1mil/yr, professors taking home 200k-500k spending all their time pushing papers looking for funding, whereas the grad students who do the actual research get paid only $20-30k a year. Education and research have become a pyramid scheme of social promotion under the aegis of government funding.
Such a bureaucratic system is a huge waste of human talents. BTW, just because something is discovered/re-discovered or invented/re-invented by the bureaucracy doesn't mean it would not have been discovered/invented by the competitive market economy at much lower cost. NASA promoters are fond of taking credit for inventing plastics . . . yet Henry Ford was using plastics to furnish his cars back in the 1920's, more than a quarter century before NASA was created. DoD was famous for its research into flight simulators, yet decades of its research was overtaken by the competitive game makers in a couple years; the advantages of competitive market doing R&D was becoming so obvious that DoD decided to outsource from the game industry. Because government bureaucracy take resources from the competitive market place at gun point and allocate those resources in ways that are not competitive, its presence actually retards innovation and progress. IMHO, scientific research would do much better without the stifling government-funded bureaucracy. "Fundamental science" discoveries are not patentable precisely because the discovery itself is rewarding (intellectually and egotistically). Private individuals had been conducting and funding non-commercial scientific research efforts for centuries before the government came along and took away their resources to feed an ever-growing bureaucratic monopoly.
Here is a timely article on the nature evolution of bureaucracy:
"http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-lifecycle-bureaucracy"
posted by 96.233.42...
, Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:54:30
, Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:46:32
, Thu, 25 Nov 2010 07:43:14
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