Wondering where the money is coming from for our three wars, including the over $1 billion for the latest war in Libya? Well, as we spend billions on the wars (including one for an oil-rich nation which has refused to re-pay any of the costs), the White House is slashing domestic programs. A good comparison is that the cost to date of the Libyan war is basically what Congress is about to cut from the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The cuts from Congress are above those asked by the Administration. Trillions of cuts are being worked out in light of budget shortfalls.
Hundreds of millions will be cut from the Joint Polar Satellite System, a reorganized satellite system and hundreds of millions more will be cut from NOAA’s Operations, Research and Facilities budget. NOAA is already a lean organization with an expanding mission. Other countries are increasing oceanic and weather monitoring to protect lives and property. However, with yet another war launched by President Obama, we can hardly be tossing away money on the environment and science while tossing cruise missiles at Tripoli.
Source: Science Mag
Government-funded research has a record of mixed results and quite a few spectacular disasters such as: the Carter administration’s synthetic fuels program and the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. In 1980, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) committed over $60 million to promote the development of a malaria vaccine. In 1984, USAID announced a “major breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against the most deadly form of malaria in human beings. The vaccine should be ready for use around the world … within five years.” Fifteen years later, the world’s still waiting; The USAID program was a monumental failure.
Government-funded research produces the wrong incentives. Government-funded recipients have incentives to be overly optimistic; that’s how they get the money. Government project directors have incentives to fund unpromising research, after all it’s not their money. Recipients of government-funded research get paid before delivering a product. As such, they may be tempted to divert resources away from the contracted research toward activities that promote their personal careers, such as publishing professional articles.
Ecomomist Walter Williams
Roco,
Not at all. I didn’t mention a party affiliation once. But you sure did in a hurry. The only partisan arguments I I see are by you. And maybe your buddy kderosa. You know, there is an old saying about glass houses and stones you should familiarize yourself with.
Your reasoning is still specious though.
Have a nice day.
Yes, cut them too. We have a giant budget deficit to deal with.
As of 2006 we were tripling China’s research funding. Is that what you mean by funding us under the table?
What is the optimal level of science funding? You seem to know the answer.
Education funding has increased dramatically. Education outcomes not so much.
Your non-explanation of why I don’t know what a strawman argument is was very effective.
Gene H:
your reasoning is partisan at best.
Blouise,
Thank you. 🙂 It’s nice to be welcomed. Even nicer than it is told I’ll fit right in with the herd by someone who manifestly doesn’t fit in anywhere.
Very true, pete. Without DARPA funding there would be no Internet.
Roco,
No, actually most of the things I mentioned had their genesis in theoretical science that was either refined or supplemented by governmental spending and then made into practical applications by governmental and private spending. All science is a continuum of development. It is people standing on the shoulders of others, standing on the shoulders of others, standing on the shoulders of others, etc. If you want to make the back in time argument, all science traces back to the ancient Greeks and Chinese. I’m pretty sure neither Euclid nor Pythagoras was government funded, but try building a space shuttle without them and see how well that works. Your reasoning is specious at best.
Government funded science is a bad idea
if it wasn’t for government funded science they only person to see that line would be you
I worked for GSI one summer, according to Wikipedia:
“Geophysical Service Inc. (often abbreviated GSI) was founded by John Clarence Karcher and Eugene McDermott in 1930 for the purpose of using refraction and reflection seismology to explore for petroleum deposits. It became one of the most successful seismic exploration contractors in the industry for many years. On December 6, 1941, the company was purchased by McDermott, Cecil Howard Green, J. Erik Jonsson, and H.B. Peacock. During World War II, the company produced submarine detection devices. In 1951, the company was renamed Texas Instruments (TI) with GSI as a division. GSI was later sold by TI, repurchased, and finally sold again to Halliburton in 1988. Halliburton also acquired GeoSource, a competing geophysical contractor (formerly Petty-Ray Geophysical), and attempted to merge the two companies. Unfortunately the rivalry between the two entities endured and the merged entity known as Halliburton Geophysical Services (HGS) proved to be far from profitable. After several years of losses in 1994 Halliburton sold HGS to Western Atlas (formerly Western Geophysical until its merger with Dresser Atlas in 1987). Western Atlas was bought by Baker Hughes in 1998 and was then merged into WesternGeco in 2000 through a joint venture with Schlumberger in which Schlumberger held the majority share (70%)”
The transistor was developed by GSI and it was not for the space program.
kderosa:
dont you just love a good who dunit?
kderosa,
“No one is advocating to defund NASA or any other research focused agency. We’re talking about shaving back the budgets of some agencies that have increased greatly in the last 15 years or so.”
Really? Then I suggest you look at the military and DHS first.
What you’re advocating is cutting an already inadequate budget for the increased scope change of the NASA missions at hand and so are ensuring that failure is guaranteed from the start. If you are so concerned about trimming excess? Look at discretionary military and the abusive practices of security theater spending first instead of pure science related research and development. Not spending money on science guarantees one thing and one thing only: a loss of any competitive edge we maintain in technology. The Chinese and other governments are spending us under the table on basic science R&D funding whilst we literally hemorrhage money into a bottomless pit of a war started by the oil industry for their own profits.
Cutting the funding of science (and while were at it, education) is shortsighted and stupid. Soon “Made In America” will mean “substandard junk” and in many cases it already does. The only real basis for an economy is physical manufacturing capacity and technological superiority. By cutting and undercutting science and education spending, you are dooming the technological superiority part of the equation coming out of the gate.
It’s a good thing I don’t take what you say seriously or I might have been offended that you apparently don’t know what a strawman argument actually is.
See the shenanigans behind Climate Change “Science” for some swell examples.
Gene H:
and most of the things you mention had their genesis in theoretical science many years prior to that when science wasnt necessarily funded by government.
Blouise, how did programs that came decades after the research that brought about the IC somehow cause that research to be done? OS stated there was “but for” causation. And there wasn’t.
private companies engage in pure science all the time, I think one of them is called Bell Laboratory and Hughes come to mind.
Again it is the seen and the unseen. You do not know what you are missing by the misallocation of resources.
Government science is not free, it will always have an ideological component. No matter how much you wish it didn’t, bucks go to the connected or to the ideologically pure in spirit.
Government funded science is a bad idea.
puzzling,
“The ‘seen and unseen’ is perhaps the highest opportunity cost of a universal health care system. Innovation will slow to a crawl and people will never know the new pharmaceuticals, medical improvements, and higher quality of life they are missing.”
The seen and unseen is an illusion in that instance. Having the most simple yet comprehensive health care insurance – that being single-payer maximum risk pool not-for-profit health care insurance – will not impact innovation in medical science. The funding of pure medical research by the government is along the same lines as other forms of pure research. The funding of research by private industry will be just as it is now – whatever the corporations think is most profitable in the short term. Under universal health care, medical innovation would continue much like it is today. The slower paced results of government funded pure research would still yield long term profitability and long term net positive results from building general knowledge while the private money will still be free to chase the perfect boner medication. The only difference will be the efficiency of having a consolidated singular pay track that will eliminate a lot of redundancy in current billing systems (costs passed on to patients), the benefits of maximum reduction of risk costs by having the largest risk pool possible (everyone), the operational efficiencies of not having to pay bloated CEO and insurance company executive salaries and perks (costs passed on to the patient, usually in the form of profits taken by denying coverage and care), and pharmaceutical companies would be forced to take a more reasonable timeframe in recouping R&D and other ROI costs because they’d have to negotiate prices rather than the current system of gouge the free market until the patent expires (and if this concerns them over long term profitability, I’ll be the first to say that our patent system needs revision).
Gene H,
The “herd” welcomes you
Strawman. No one is advocating to defund NASA or any other research focused agency. We’re talking about shaving back the budgets of some agencies that have increased greatly in the last 15 years or so. You know, so we don’t bankrupt ourselves.
OS,
I don’t usually pay much attention to the new name on the block, kderosa, but his/her comment about the Integrated Circuit was so far off base that I just couldn’t ignore it … the technology was around but you were completely right in your response:
The Apollo guidance computer led and motivated the integrated-circuit technology, while the Minuteman missile forced it into mass-production
Actually the idea for IC’s came from Geoffrey W.A. Dummer, a radar scientist working for the British Ministry of Defence. He first proposed the idea in 1952 but never had any success in building a working prototype. The first working prototype was made by Jack Kilby when he was working at Texas Instruments in the late 50’s and led to the U.S. Army’s Micromodule Project in 1960. Kilby’s design used germanium as the semi-conductor embedding material for the circuits. Concurrently, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Electronics, came up with his own IC design about 6 months after Kilby. The biggest difference in the two designs were Noyce’s use of Kurt Lehovec’s principle of p-n junction isolation and the more efficient silicon as the semi-conductor embedding material. Noyce and Kilby are credited as the co-creators of the IC and neither man minded sharing the credit. However, their advancements would not have been possible without military involvement at the onset. While they didn’t get their funding from NASA, Kilby did get direct funding from the U.S. Army and both men benefited indirectly from the military funding of Geoffrey W.A. Dummer by the British MoD. In summary, the IC, like a lot of modern innovations, came about with governmental assistance at the onset.
Some people, however, seem to live in a world where only private funding brings about fundamental discoveries in pure science. This is not the case. Public funding is necessary to the advance of pure science because not all pure science results – immediately or otherwise – in marketable and profitable products. Pure science does, however, lead to other discoveries that might. It is a goal worthy of pursuing for its intrinsic nature and should not be solely premised on immediate ROI expectations. That is why government is better suited for funding pure science research than private industry.
As to the technological boon that has benefited society from the work of NASA? Cordless power tools, water purification systems, smoke detectors, high efficiency insulation materials, laser surgery, MRI’s, Digital Mammography, CCD cameras, LED’s, infrared thermometers, advanced optical systems used for everything from monitoring the physical condition of the original copies of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to learning about cosmology, respiration and “Jaws of Life” technologies used by fire fighters, geosynchronous orbit satellites and satellite stabilization that allowed for the development of GPS technology, the advancement of practical applications for digital computers, solid state high-power transmitters, advanced materials (such as graphite composites) for building satellites and all the lovely products now made from carbon fiber composites, and last but certainly neither least nor a comprehensive end to the benefits to the world provided by NASA research – satellites for monitoring and studying the weather so we can better manage crops, forest fires and flood risks and response.
now that we’ve all had a good laugh about spending money on turtles, along mostly ideological lines, i’d like to point out that NOAA (no t for turtles in there anywhere) Nation Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also monitors and studies hurricanes.
you remember hurricanes, Katrina, Ike, Andrew, Hugo, etc. these are the people who study and track them. if you live along the eastern seaboard or the gulf coast like many people do this website http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ is a very handy one to know.