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CrazyCoot Posted: Mon, May 7 2012 11:20 AM

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrY5AakRrgo

What the title says.  

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Stephen Adkins replied on Mon, May 7 2012 11:25 AM

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No it isn't. 

I wonder which government funded Isaac Newton.

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Gero replied on Mon, May 7 2012 11:33 AM

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s claim that the private sector will not undertake “large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks” is debatable. If I pick a large-scale private project, Tyson can say that it was not large enough, not expensive enough, and not dangerous enough, so we’re comparing phantom apples to phantom oranges at this point.

NASA did undertake “large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks” that the private sector may not have duplicated on its own. That means the project had more costs than benefits. Thus it failed capitalism’s profit-and-loss test. ABC News reported, “"Why are we wasting billions of dollars on the space program?" ask many visitors to ABCNews.com and other Web sites. 40 years after Neil Armstrong took that one small step on the lunar surface, NASA still provokes the same argument. "For all the trillions of dollars we have spent on the space program, all we have are some moon rocks, several tons of space junk and a dozen and a half or so dead astronauts," wrote a person commenting on a recent story we posted about a space shuttle mission. In fact, public opinion has always been split. In a July 1967 Harris poll, two years in advance of the first moon walk, 43 percent of Americans were in favor of the effort, 46 percent opposed -- hardly a rousing endorsement. And in 1970, a year after the landing, 56 percent said it had not been worth its allotted $4 billion a year for nine years.”

Space exploration may be exciting and give beautiful photos, but the cost was probably too high for the private sector at first. Over time, who knows what would have happened. It is easy to say, ‘look at the space shuttle’, but commonly unseen are the exorbitant costs.

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Autolykos replied on Mon, May 7 2012 11:59 AM

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Obviously the private sector is able to undertake large, expensive, and dangerous projects. The Great Northern Railroad, ocean liners, steel mills, mining operations, offshore oil-drilling platforms, and nuclear reactors are all examples of this. What Dr. Tyson is really saying is that he doesn't think the private sector would allocate resources the way that he and his fellow astrophysicists would want it to - i.e., he thinks it would allocate less to them and more to other things. But that would be up to the private sector, wouldn't it?

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 12:05 PM

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“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

― Murray N. Rothbard

This is all the more true of someone who ought to understand the nature of specialization, such as Tyson.

Clayton -

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Autolykos replied on Mon, May 7 2012 12:12 PM

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Either Dr. Tyson is ignorant of economics or he understands that, if he were to be honest and say "I and my fellow astrophysicists want more resources than we think the private sector would provide", people would respond to the effect of "So what?"

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 12:17 PM

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Obviously the private sector is able to undertake large, expensive, and dangerous projects.

Bigger than an aircraft carrier. There only a few dozen aircraft carriers (public sector) in the world - the private sector operates fleets of hundreds of oil tankers.

You can almost buy one of the Air Force's most expensive fighters - the flying pork-project F-35 JSF - for the price of this rig... as much as a half-billion dollars. Operating costs are around $500K per day.

The Trans Alaska Pipeline System was designed and constructed to move oil from the North Slope of Alaska to the northern most ice-free port in Valdez, Alaska.

Length: 800 miles.
Diameter: 48 inches.
Crosses three mountain ranges and more than 30 major rivers and streams.
Cost to build: $8 billion in 1977, largest privately funded construction project at that time.
Construction began March 27, 1975 and was completed May 31, 1977.
First oil moved through the pipeline on June 20, 1977.
More than 16 billion barrels have moved through TAPS.
First tanker to carry crude oil from Valdez: ARCO Juneau, August 1, 1977.
Tankers loaded at Valdez: 19,625 through April 30, 2008.
The mission of Alyeska’s Ship Escort Response Vessel System is to safely escort tankers through Prince William Sound.

$8B in 1977 roughly equivalent to $45B today, enough to buy two dozen B-2 bombers or 8 Gerald R. Ford class (most modern) aircraft carriers or build 20  NASA space shuttles at the price of the USS Endeavour.

I think what he really means is that the private sector isn't wasteful enough. QED

Clayton -

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Jonathan M. F. Catalán replied on Mon, May 7 2012 12:55 PM

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Here are some comments of mine I made on Tyson's recent essay for Foreign Affairs: Innovation, Innovators, and the Market.

Tyson is probably right that, up to date, the private sector (for the most part) would be unwilling to be liable for the risks of space exploration.  This is not a case against privatizing space exploration, though.  Tyson hasn't looked at the opportunity cost of public space exploration: all the private investment and growth we had to forego to fund NASA and other organizations and projects.  Also, it's not exactly clear what internalized benefits public space exploration has brought us.  Everyone likes to talk about how space exploration is an investment for the future generations, but it's not very clear how this is so — most people just assume that these benefits exist.  As for externalized benefits (e.g. run-off technologies), what about all the benefits (both exteralized and internalized) we had to forego in terms of opportunity cost?

What the private market does, though, is reduce the risk of an investment.  Once the costs of space exploration fall, the private market will investment towards these ends.  But, then we know that space exploration is worth it, because the consumers (society) are demanding it.

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LogisticEarth replied on Mon, May 7 2012 12:59 PM

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Oil exploration is a great counter example to that claim.  Literally billions must be invested to get large scale production.  And there is significan risk, if you're off in your calculations and plans, you could spend 80-100 million drilling into a salt dome and get a dry well.  The difference is that if you waste 80 million in the oil industry, you're fired.

Here's another great counterpoint:
http://gizmodo.com/5904081/new-asteroid-mining-company-will-add-trillions-of-dollars-to-worlds-economy

Like others have said, the fact that nobody would have produced the space shuttle privately probably means that it shouldn't have been built.  I used to love that thing when I was a kid, but as time marched on it became apparent that it was a giant boondoggle that held back space exploration for decades.  Fortunately, with the various space tourism rocket planes, other private launch craft, and the space mining company mentioned above, we will see some real progress within my lifetime.

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EmperorNero replied on Mon, May 7 2012 1:01 PM

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Shooting massive amounts of resources into space, that could have made health care more abundant for millions of people, to add useless theoretical knowledge to astrophysics journals, that less than a percentage of the population understand or care about?

...the market wouldn't do this? Damn right the market wouldn't do this! If markets frittered away societies wealth on shiny monuments like that, we would still have bronze age stagnation instead of rising standards of living. Indeed, the great thing about market allocation is that it prevents such waste from happening.

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 1:06 PM

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- The Space Shuttle of Egypt

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DanielMuff replied on Mon, May 7 2012 1:35 PM

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Clayton:

- The Space Shuttle of Egypt

 

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CrazyCoot replied on Mon, May 7 2012 3:25 PM

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But how do you convince folks that pyramids and moonwalks are impressive at a glance, but not helpful to society as a whole?  Unfortunately it's very easy to ignore the Broken Window fallacy and the unseen when you're looking at a pyramid or the Taj Mahal.

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BransonBow replied on Mon, May 7 2012 4:55 PM

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Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and the X-prize beg to differ.

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Wheylous replied on Mon, May 7 2012 5:19 PM

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I wonder which government funded Isaac Newton.

Didn't Newton participate in some scientific society which received government funding?

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Stephen Adkins replied on Mon, May 7 2012 6:01 PM

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Didn't Newton participate in some scientific society which received government funding?

That may not have been the best example. I don't know enough about the Royal Society (pretty sure that's what it's called) to say whether it was privately funded or not, but I would guess it received some revenue from the crown. But i think it would be harder to make the case that Newton and the other incredible Renaissance men from that era were so spectacular because of the funding they received from the gov. Again, though, sloppy example. 

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mustang19 replied on Mon, May 7 2012 6:09 PM

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Let me ask ya'll something.

At which institution did the following occur:

The invention of the internet? (not Al Gore's house)

The invention of the transistor?

The development of the jet engine?

The development of the space rocket?

The discovery of the double helix?

The start of the human genome project?

Bonus points: How many of these organizations were public research universities, public private partnerships, or government labs?

Extra credit: How can Neil Degrasse Tyson possibly think the government has done anything to advance science?

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 6:58 PM

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The invention of the internet? (not Al Gore's house)

 

The invention of the transistor?

The development of the jet engine?

The development of the space rocket?

The discovery of the double helix?

The start of the human genome project?

Bonus points: How many of these organizations were public research universities, public private partnerships, or government labs?

Part of the problem with this whole line of thinking is "hero worship" or "magic organization" thinking. Einstein did not devise the theory of relativity. Most of the ideas that comprise the substance of both the Special and General Theory of Relativity already existed prior to Einstein. He was more of a systematizer and he hammered out a lot of details through sheer sweat of the brow. But he he is held up in the popular consciousness as the consummate genius who gave birth, de novo, to an entire science. Juvenile rubbish.

It doesn't even make sense to say "the Internet" was invented at all. It's like asking who invented travel. Communicating is something that computers do. Communicating with each other (network) was unremarkable. Internetwork communication was an art form in its own right but it was more a matter of impedance-matching between incompatible communications protocols. TCP/IP and "the" Internet (ARPANet) was just one particular internetwork whose protocols happened to outlive others and ended up forming the historical foundation on which the modern Internet is built.

Hardly the story of Edison's lightbulb.

The transistor was the idea of specific men, especially William Shockley. They worked for Bell Labs. But the pedigree of the transistor lies in the vacuum tube which had been already developed into a science and industry of its own by thousands of specialists.

The jet engine and the space rocket - because of their dual use as military technologies - were indeed heavily funded by military research early on. However, it is a simple fallacy to argue that if any non-military uses of military goods manages to spin off of military research that all the funding is therefore justified. This is the moving-goalpost fallacy. We (libertarians) say "the government is not the source of innovation and progress" - statists strawman this into a claim that the government has produced no innovation or progress whatsoever. Well, they can hardly avoid making some inadvertent progress or innovation when they are consuming half of the national product, now can they? Doesn't make it money well spent.

It's funny that you mentioned who started the Human Genome Project as what's more interesting is who finished it. First. And it wasn't the government (extra credit if you know who it was without having to Google it).

Clayton -

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mustang19 replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:02 PM

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It's funny that you mentioned who started the Human Genome Project as what's more interesting is who finished it. First. And it wasn't the government (extra credit if you know who it was without having to Google it).

And they didn't get started until government made the initial investment and established GenBank. Neither of them "completed" the HGP. Public and private efforts complemented each other and published their own parts of the genome.

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Autolykos replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:10 PM

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mustang19 Troll:

Let me ask ya'll something.

At which institution did the following occur:

The invention of the internet? (not Al Gore's house)

The invention of the transistor?

The development of the jet engine?

The development of the space rocket?

The discovery of the double helix?

The start of the human genome project?

Bonus points: How many of these organizations were public research universities, public private partnerships, or government labs?

Extra credit: How can Neil Degrasse Tyson possibly think the government has done anything to advance science?

Let me ask you something: do you think that those projects would have never been attempted, let alone completed, without government assistance?

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mustang19 replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:14 PM

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Let me ask you something: do you think that those projects would have never been attempted, let alone completed, without government assistance?

No way to tell. But there are an awful lot of those incredibly beneficial inventions that the government played a role in.

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Autolykos replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:19 PM

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mustang19 Troll:

No way to tell. But there are an awful lot of those incredibly beneficial inventions that the government played a role in.

Your point?

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:28 PM

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That was just a footnote - I would like to see you respond to the substance of my post. Unlike statists, I don't need to invent hero narratives and magical-invention-generating-organizations. The claim of classical liberalism (versus statism) is that human progress has nothing to do with the State because the State's purpose is war and parasitic subsistence on the backs of the productive class. Its purpose is quite the opposite of human progress, in fact.

Clayton -

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mustang19 replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:41 PM

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That was just a footnote - I would like to see you respond to the substance of my post. Unlike statists, I don't need to invent hero narratives and magical-invention-generating-organizations. The claim of classical liberalism (versus statism) is that human progress has nothing to do with the State because the State's purpose is war and parasitic subsistence on the backs of the productive class. Its purpose is quite the opposite of human progress, in fact.

That's your opinion, and you are entitled to it. But for an organization that takes up half the national product, there seems to be a lot more than half of major breakthroughs occuring at public universities and R&D partnerships.

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Autolykos replied on Mon, May 7 2012 7:48 PM

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mustang19 Troll:

That's your opinion, and you are entitled to it. But for an organization that takes up half the national product, there seems to be a lot more than half of major breakthroughs occuring at public universities and R&D partnerships.

I guess I need to repeat myself.

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Clayton replied on Mon, May 7 2012 8:28 PM

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a lot more than half of major breakthroughs occuring at public universities and R&D partnerships.

So since it's so great, surely we should completely nationalize these endeavors to make them even better.

Clayton -

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Caley McKibbin replied on Tue, May 8 2012 8:33 AM

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There is a book about this topic.  I remember everything except for the name of the book and the author.  His main observation was that state funded projects are more geared toward specific applications, whereas private funding tends to be more of the "pure science" variety.

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mustang19 replied on Tue, May 8 2012 9:04 AM

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There is a book about this topic.  I remember everything except for the name of the book and the author.  His main observation was that state funded projects are more geared toward specific applications, whereas private funding tends to be more of the "pure science" variety.

Are you sure? I'm pretty certain it's the other way around.

The people working on things like the Large Hardon Collider or global warming research are doing it mainly with public research grants.

Linkin' to some pasta sauce.

Second, the share of R&D spending targeted to basic research, as opposed to more applied R&D activities, has also been declining.8 These two trends--the declines in the share of basic research and in the federal share of R&D spending--are related, as government R&D spending tends to be more heavily weighted toward basic research and science.

Page 3: government funds most basic research.

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Caley McKibbin replied on Tue, May 8 2012 11:30 AM

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I searched YouTube for the interview.  Someone asked him about it at about 46:00.  (He's a biochemist.)

The Myth of Science as a Public Good

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mustang19 replied on Tue, May 8 2012 6:47 PM

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I didn't see him cite the claim that the private sector spends more on pure science than the government does. He stated that it has a high return for businesses, implying that they should in theory. He then goes on at 52:00 to say that "governments love funding science," and gives his explanation about why its a bad thing.

He does mention Bell Labs, although he may not know it was a public-private partnership.

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NonAntiAnarchist replied on Tue, May 8 2012 7:16 PM

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No way to tell. But there are an awful lot of those incredibly beneficial inventions that the government played a role in.

It's fucking annoying how you appear in threads, make controversial points, and will even back it up with some evidence, but when pushed to debate you spout out shit like this. Are you honestly not aware of opportunity cost? I saw on another thread that you literally didn't even know what the broken window parable was.

You are a damn good troll, but please stop. It's giving me and others stomach ulcers.

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mustang19 replied on Tue, May 8 2012 7:48 PM

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It's fucking annoying how you appear in threads, make controversial points, and will even back it up with some evidence, but when pushed to debate you spout out shit like this. Are you honestly not aware of opportunity cost? I saw on another thread that you literally didn't even know what the broken window parable was.

In terms of "opportunity cost", government science spending in the US takes up about 1% of GDP, less than private research spending, and the crowding out between the two is not large. Funding these scientific advances hardly requires a major cost to the rest of the economy.

This study analyses how public R&D financing impacts companies. Our main goal is to study whether public and private R&D financing are substitutes or complements, and whether this impact differs between financially constrained and unconstrained companies. Our company-level panel data cover the period from 1996 to 2002. The statistical method employed in the research takes into account the possibility that receiving public support may be an endogenous factor. Our results suggest that public R&D financing does not crowd out privately financed R&D. Instead, receiving a positive decision to obtain public R&D funds increases privately financed R&D. Furthermore, our results suggest that this additionality effect is bigger in large firms than in small firms.

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NonAntiAnarchist replied on Tue, May 8 2012 8:16 PM

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Funding these scientific advances hardly requires a major cost to the rest of the economy.

The whole point of the broken window parable is that you can't calculate the opportunity cost, because you don't know where the money would have been spent otherwise (forget money; it's about where the goods would have been allocated). I don't care what papers you cite - there is absolutely no way to substantiate this claim. Btw, 1% of GDP in the United States is about 150 billion dollars. You're telling me you can somehow estimate how productive this money would have been had the government not spent it? That's bogus.

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mustang19 replied on Tue, May 8 2012 8:22 PM

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I don't care what papers you cite - there is absolutely no way to substantiate this claim. Btw, 1% of GDP in the United States is about 150 billion dollars. You're telling me you can somehow estimate how productive this money would have been had the government not spent it?

Yeah, by correlating what happens when the government increases/decreases spending, but we are talking about one percent of the economy responsible for rocketry, nuclear power, and transistors.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0905/0905.4272.pdf

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Nielsio replied on Tue, May 8 2012 9:24 PM

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A response to Neil DeGrasse Tyson regarding NASA | by Robert P. Murphy

The Means of Innovation (by Jeffrey Tucker)

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Jargon replied on Tue, May 8 2012 9:26 PM

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mustang19:

Large Hardon Collider

Huhuhuh... He said 'Hardon'...

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Clayton replied on Tue, May 8 2012 10:12 PM

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@LOL Jargon

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NonAntiAnarchist replied on Tue, May 8 2012 11:45 PM

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Yeah, by correlating what happens when the government increases/decreases spending

Yes, you can correlate things that have happened at certain times in the past. That's nice. Do you have anything more?  

we are talking about one percent of the economy responsible for rocketry, nuclear power, and transistors

You say this as if you know it was desirable to use the recources in that way. But how do you know? Like, yea.. It's nice to flash the fancy things you made compared to um.. nothing, because you don't fucking know the opportunity cost.

You're like the guy Hazlitt was talking about in Economics in One Lesson, throwing things like rocketry around. Yeah, rockets are cool. Rockets are real cool. But you're comparing something that exists with something that doesn't exist. Yes, the thing that exists is going to seem preferable intuitively. You can showcase it real good against something which doesn't exist.

And 1% of the economy? What are you even measuring? Things are not homogenous such that you can group them that way. It inherently assumes an objective measurement of things that are percieved strictly subjectively. Actual goods, services, laborers, etc. So while government science funding may be only 1% of the economy, it could just as well be utilizing the most highly specialized scientists with the most refined equipment. This wouldn't be reflected in GDP.

And it is in fact the case, as discussed in Rollback, that government funding does take hold of a large portion of the most highly knowledgable scientists, crowding out private use of those resources.

It's ultimately people that make these discoveries and innovations. Is it that hard to imagine an opportunity cost to using these great minds and directing them via the political process, as opposed to using them towards consumer oriented interests? 

The point remains: you can't measure the potential wealth that could have been created had those recources been utilized in a different way.

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John James replied on Wed, May 9 2012 12:18 AM

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I'm sorry I didn't look at this thread sooner.  (Perhaps a more concise title is in order.)

We already have a thread debunking this notion.

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mustang19 replied on Wed, May 9 2012 12:51 AM

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It's ultimately people that make these discoveries and innovations. Is it that hard to imagine an opportunity cost to using these great minds and directing them via the political process, as opposed to using them towards consumer oriented interests?

Measuring the opportunity cost in terms of research inputs (researchers, equipment, and so forth) as well as innovation outputs (like patenting or productivity) can be done at the microeconomic level. These projects are popular in the sense that the majority of consumers and scientists are highly supportive of public innovation efforts. Not many people are excited about scrapping public universities and the NSF. They are not consumer oriented in the sense that in many instances they focus on basic science rather than immediately marketable products.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1276/science-survey

There also is common ground between the public and scientists regarding the pivotal role of government in funding scientific research. Government institutions and agencies are the dominant funders of research, according to scientists: 84% list a government entity as an important source of funding for their specialty, with nearly half specifically citing the National Institutes of Health (49%) or the National Science Foundation (47%). Half of the scientists (50%) cite non-government funding sources as among the most important in their field.

A majority of the public (60%) says that government investment in research is essential for scientific progress; only about half that percentage (29%) is of the view that private investment will ensure that enough scientific progress is made even without government intervention.

Bear in mind that the government supports the public university system and a large share of research grants, funding the education and thesis research of new scientists and engineers. Any "crowding out" effect of public R&D- which is debatable whether it occurs on the balance, in light of the previously posted studies- may not take into account the benefit to the scientific establishment from public university research and grants.

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2h.htm

In 2009, the federal government was the primary source of financial support for 18% of full-time S&E graduate students.

• In 2009, the federal government funded 63% of S&E graduate students on traineeships, 49% of those with research assistantships, and 23% of those with fellowships.
• Graduate students in the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and engineering received relatively more federal financial support compared with those in computer sciences, mathematics, other life sciences, psychology, and social sciences.

Crowding out does not seem to be a major factor in private research spending. Although we cannot know what would happen if NASA never put men on the moon or Bell Labs was never incentivized to pursue semiconductors, there is reason to believe that the government does fund a large part of basic scientific research which the corporate sector is not interested in performing, and research inputs, including highly skilled scientists and engineers, receive a large part of their educational and research funding from public sources.