Capitalist Science(arxiv.org) |
Capitalist Science(arxiv.org) |
> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large.
Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.
> Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests,
No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations.
> channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life.
Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.
> Yes, but increasingly less so.
IMO opinion the real problem isn't that basic science is becoming less publicly available as much as it's becoming less basic, and really less science also.
If "capitalist science" meaning holding scientists to the same production quotas that Frederick Taylor gave steel workers, then above and beyond the problems seen with steel workers, there's the additional problem that bad science drives out good since it's easier to produce.
Though it is lamentable that publicly funded research papers are often encumbered by a fee for access, the general knowledge contained within is still free for the public benefit.
Furthermore, the content within most papers is not patented or even patentable.
His fundamental assessment is still true: publicly funded science is currently a socialist enterprise.
Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process.
Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for.
Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap.
(Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)
But that's not what ends up happening. The funding doesn't get allocated such that the total utility would be maximized. Instead, it is directed toward those areas having a constituency that's better organized.
The result is that AIDS research -- its victims being fairly focused in a particular demographic -- gets about 350x more research funding per victim than does COPD. It gets 112x more than Hepatitis C, and 33x more than Alzheimer's disease. [1]
Government funding equals political funding. And this is what leads to scandals like Solaris, too. The government is not able to make rational decisions, as much as we might tell ourselves that it does. In a democracy, the funding will go to those causes that can muster the most votes.
[1] Source: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm
(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)
This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.
Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.
Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete.
This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence.
I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this.
Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either.
Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement.
I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs.
Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!
> "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible"
What's up with the citation to the above paragraph:
> "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example."
I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand.
This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?
One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that.
"Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research."
Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.
That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.
Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general?
Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.
See also:
They've utilised their monopoly of force in order to contract themselves to these responsibilities. Most likely in order to use the glory to justify their existence.
I'd argue the exact oppsite: that the current private research work done especially in the field of medicine would yield vastly more benefit for lower costs if it were completely replaced by state funded research.
I'd like to open by saying that I have nothing but respect for Virgin Galactic. I still get chills thinking back on watching the SpaceShipOne flight. I also largely agree with your stance.
That being said the argument could be made that all Virgin Galactic is doing is taking all the hard work and science done by the old state funded model and trying to repackage it in a simple cheaper form for "mass marker" consumption. That's not Science, that's business and engineering. And no one would disagree with that fact that Capitalism is great at business and engineering.
Capitalism rocks at taking concepts out of obscure theoretical journals and putting them in a form that affect our daily lives (often for the better), no argument there. I'm somewhat less convinced that capitalism rocks at getting those concepts into those obscure theoretical journals in the first place.
There are already examples of private investment achieving in these areas despite all of the above. I think private enterprise will eventually take over, but it will be a long battle.
Companies are good at research when there is a payoff in sight. What about the fields with no quick return? Or the fields that don't yet exist?
Be careful with those broad strokes - they're likely to be a result of selective perception unless supported by external fact.
I actually read the paper (not just the abstract), and I'll be the first to agree that ant that the paper is a little basic, and it makes too many "economics in a vacuum" assumptions.
If you're going to take the time to disagree, though, you really should be prepared to back it up with something. Anyone can spout their opinion ("Capitalism is bad at science") as fact, but that alone is meaningless and adds nothing to the conversation.
Really, though, I'm not sure the conclusion would do much to convince people. The debate between socialism and capitalism has never been purely economic. Most people's positions have a lot more to do with their core values and what they believe is fair.
You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.
It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent.
Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication.
Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems.
Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children.
the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest
Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results.
Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
Certainly everyone's mother was killed by cancer who works on cancer. And no, not everyone who works at a Big Pharma company is terrible, but the problem is more that Big Pharma is concentrated on improving their current prescription systems, rather than finding a cheap one-off cure. If Big Pharma wants to stop acting like a giant faceless evil monster, I will stop treating it as such. But how can you really justify current medical costs without saying that someone, somewhere in that industry is doing something disingenuous?
> The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
The problem is that there isn't enough demand to justify the cost, if we're doing it in a "if a person is diagnosed, they pay for it" manner that capitalism demands. Cancer research costs many, many billions of dollars due to many factors [1]. Say we're talking about leukemia research. 40,000 cases were diagnosed this year [2], but should each of those cases have to pay for the extremely high costs of research? Or, could we distribute it in a way such that each citizen pitches in a much smaller amount to help cancer research? In my opinion, the latter makes more sense, rather than punishing those who get sick.
Lastly as for credibility in the research world, there are definitely lots of examples I could look up. And also plenty of examples to look up for your cases that you mentioned as well. I think it would be too hard to count, no? But when you see things like the Tobacco Institute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_cu...) it's hard to say that we should research everything privately, because the conflict of interest is just too high. In my opinion, publicly funded research could / should be reformed, but there's not as obvious of a bias one way or the other there.
[1] http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm [2] http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html