PRIVATE RESEARCH IS BETTER THAN GOVT RESEARCH ( A HALF LIE) Half truth. (a lie a

PRIVATE RESEARCH IS BETTER THAN GOVT RESEARCH ( A HALF LIE)

Half truth. (a lie actually). Basic Research: the atomic bomb, the space program, weapons research, and the large hadron collider, the human genome project, cannot be paid for by private industry.

Private industry however can perform applied research, and is far better at it than government might ever be.

And it’s pretty clear that government ‘lending’ for the purpose of private industry’s applied research is the best of all – IFF we capture returns for the polity (directly or indirectly) by doing so.

In other words, ‘market failure’ is not really failure, but ‘market reach’ is limited. There is often extraordinary value either directly (war) or indirectly (jump starting applies research) or very indirectly (leading knowledge capture and localizing talent). That the private market has no way of capturing the benefits of directly, yet rewards the public market (commons) profoundly.

(Hell, there are quite a few of us who knew how to solve the Hard AI Problem, the issue was that no private investors would possibly fund that big an investment risk, and no government agency could tell the difference between possible solution and bullshit. So AI that we see today should have (in my opinion) been solved over a decade ago.)

—“According to the National Science Foundation, 29 percent of federal R&D money goes to universities, 29 percent goes to industry, and another 29 percent goes to researchers who work directly for federal agencies. About 10 percent goes to federally funded labs operated by private contractors.”—

That seems about right to me by back-of-the-napkin analysis. I would prefer that we provide investments and capture returns rather than ‘fund’ whenever possible, but this is merely a choice of providing incentives to whom.

My primary complaint is that we must pay to access research publications and that just needs to end immediately.