Notebook per
The Case against Public Science
Citation (APA): kealey, t. (2017). The Case against Public Science [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 1
The Case against Public Science By Terence Kealey
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 4
economic growth
Nota - Posizione 11
x A CHI DOBBAMO LA NS VISIONE DELLA SCIENZA E DELLA RICERCA?
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
The story of the longest-surviving intellectual error in western economic thought started in 1605 when a corrupt English lawyer and politician, Sir Francis Bacon, published his Advancement of Learning. Bacon, who was a man with a preternatural interest in wealth and power, wanted to know how Spain had become the richest and most powerful nation of his day. He concluded that Spain had done so by the exploitation of its American colonies. And how had Spain discovered those colonies? By scientific research: “the West Indies had never been discovered if the use of the mariner’s needle had not been first discovered.”
Nota - Posizione 15
x BACONE E LA SPAGNA. IL POTERE DEL SAPERE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 17
Scientific research, Bacon explained, was “the true ornament of mankind” because “the benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race.”
Nota - Posizione 18
x ESTERNALITÀ
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the whole human race might benefit from inventions but the whole human race does not reimburse inventors, so invention will not be rewarded by the market.
Nota - Posizione 19
x IL PROBLEMA CHE NE DERIVA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
Research, therefore, is a public good
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
(Robert Solow
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Kenneth Arrow)
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 22
Richard Nelson,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 26
The contemporary story starts with a 1957 paper by Robert Solow, which was an empirical study that confirmed that most economic growth in the modern world can indeed be attributed to technical change (as opposed, say, to capital deepening.)
Nota - Posizione 27
x SOLOW
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 28
Nelson and Arrow published in 1959 and 1962 respectively, in which they explained that science is a public good because copying is easier and cheaper than original research:
Nota - Posizione 29
x NELSON E ARROW. COPIARE È PIÙ FACILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 33
The problem with the papers of Nelson and Arrow, however, was that they were theoretical,
Nota - Posizione 33
x PROBLEMI
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in the real world there did seem to be some privately funded research
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c
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the conventional story has since been modified.
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c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 37
In a 1990 paper Paul Romer
Nota - Posizione 37
x ROMER. UN RUOLO X IL MERCATO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 39
created a mathematical model by which some original research would be rewarded by the market. Nonetheless, he still assumed that too little industrial science would be thus rewarded:
Nota - Posizione 39
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
Dasgupta and David in their 1994 paper reviewed the historical development of our universities, research societies and research conventions, and they acknowledged that such social constructs did indeed foster pure science, but because advances in basic science were too unpredictable for their discoverers to profit from them in the market, such science: “is in constant need of shoring up through public patronage.”
Nota - Posizione 45
x DASGUPTA E LA RICERCA DI BASE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 50
there is no empirical evidence
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 51
The fundamental problem that bedevils the study of the economics of science is that every contemporary actor in the story is parti pris: every contemporary actor who enters the field starts by pre-assuming that governments should fund science. Such actors are either industrialists looking for corporate welfare, or scholars looking to protect their universities’ income, or scientists (who, frankly, will look for money from any and every source— they are shameless)
Nota - Posizione 53
x CONFLITTO D INTERESSE
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1776,
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revolution,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
“A great part of the machines made use of in manufactures… were originally the inventions of common workmen.”
Nota - Posizione 63
x FONTI INVENTIVE DURANTE LA RIV INDUSTR: LAVORATYORI. IL PARERE DI ADAM SMITH
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
The second source of new industrial technology were the factories that made the machines that other factories used: “Many improvements have been made by the ingenuity of the makers of the machines.”
Nota - Posizione 65
x SECVONDA FONTE: IL COSTRUTTORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 65
“some improvements in machinery have been made by those called philosophers [aka academics.]”
Nota - Posizione 66
x TERZA FONTE: ACCADEMIA
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flow of knowledge from academia into industry was dwarfed by the size of the opposite flow
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x VONCLUSIONE
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governments need not fund science:
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c
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Adam Smith,
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x NN RIVONOBBE MAI LA SCIENZA COME BP
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 79
Yet the contemporary empirical evidence supports his contention that governments need not support scientific research. Consider, for example, the lack of historical evidence that government investment in research contributes to economic growth.
Nota - Posizione 81
x L EVIDENZA SUPPORTA SMITH
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 82
The world’s leading nation during the 19th century was the UK, which pioneered the Industrial Revolution. In that era the UK produced scientific as well as technological giants, ranging from Faraday to Kelvin to Darwin— yet it was an era of laissez faire, during which the British government’s systematic support for science was trivial.
Nota - Posizione 84
x UK DELL 800
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 85
The world’s leading nation during the 20th century was the United States, and it too was laissez faire, particularly in science.
Nota - Posizione 86
x USA 900
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 91
America, therefore, produced its industrial leadership, as well as its Edisons, Wrights, Bells, and Teslas, under research laissez faire.
Nota - Posizione 92
c
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Meanwhile the governments in France and Germany poured money into R& D, and though they produced good science, during the 19th century their economies failed even to converge on the UK’s, let alone overtake it as did the US’s.
Nota - Posizione 94
x GERMANIA E FRANCIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 94
For the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, the empirical evidence is clear: the industrial nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically— and they didn’t do so badly in science either.
Nota - Posizione 96
x CONCLUSIONI LAMPANTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 97
What happened thereafter? War.
Nota - Posizione 97
x GUERRA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 104
The contemporary economic evidence, moreover, confirms that the government funding of R& D has no economic benefit. Thus in 2003 the OECD (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development— the industrialized nations’ economic research agency) published its Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, which reviewed all the major measurable factors that might explain the different rates of growth of the 21 leading world economies between 1971 and 1998.
Nota - Posizione 107
x OGGI 1991 1998. FONDI ALLA RICERCA MO BENEFIC
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 107
whereas privately funded R& D stimulated economic growth, publicly funded R& D had no impact.
Nota - Posizione 108
x PUBBLICO E PRIVATO
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They speculated that publicly funded R& D might crowd out privately funded R& D which, if true, suggests that publicly funded R& D might actually damage economic growth.
Nota - Posizione 111
x MA PERCHÈ L IMPATTO NEGATIVO? EFFETTO SPIAZZAMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 112
“the direct effect of public research is weakly negative,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 114
The OECD, Walter Park, and I have therefore— like Adam Smith— tested empirically the model of science as a public or merit good, and we have found it to be wrong: the public funding of research has no beneficial effects on the economy.
Nota - Posizione 115
x IL MODELO CANONICO AL TEST DELLA VERITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 116
namely that copying other people’s research is cheap and easy.
Nota - Posizione 117
x LA PREMESSA SBAGLIATA NEL MODELLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 117
When Edwin Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania examined 48 products that, during the 1970s, had been copied by companies in the chemicals, drugs, electronics, and machinery industries in New England, he found that the costs of copying were on average 65 per cent of the costs of original invention.
Nota - Posizione 119
x COSTI DI VOPIATURA: 65%
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 119
And the time taken to copy was, on average, 70 per cent of the time taken by the original invention.
Nota - Posizione 120
x 70%. COPUARE È COSTOSO E MACCHINOSO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 121
acquisition of tacit (as opposed to explicit) knowledge.
Nota - Posizione 121
x IMPARARE DA CHI TACE E NN SPIEGA NN È FACILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 122
As scholars such as Michael Polanyi (see his classic 1958 book Personal Knowledge) and Harry Collins of the University of Cardiff (see his well-titled 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge) have shown, copying new science and technology is not a simple matter of following a blueprint: it requires the copier actually to reproduce the steps taken by the originator.
Nota - Posizione 125
x STUDI SUL PUNTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 127
when Harry Collins studied the spread of a technology called the TEA laser, he discovered that the only scientists who succeeded in copying it were those who had visited laboratories where TEA lasers were already up and running:
Nota - Posizione 129
x CASO TEA LASER
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 134
But if it costs specialists 65 per cent of the original costs to copy an innovation, think how much more it would cost non-specialists to copy it.
Nota - Posizione 135
x FIGURIAMOCI I NN SPECIALISTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 137
In a 1990 paper with the telling title of “Why Do Firms Do Basic Research With Their Own Money?” Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University showed that the down payment that a potential copier has to make before he or she can even begin to copy an innovation is their own prior contribution to the field: only when your own research is credible can you understand the field. And what do credible researchers do? They publish papers and patents that others can read, and they produce goods that others can strip down.
Nota - Posizione 140
x SI COPIA MEGLIO SE SI CONOSCVONO LE BASI. PER QUELLO LE IMPRESE FANO RICERCA DI BASE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 142
So the true costs of copying in a free market are 100 per cent— the 65 per cent costs of direct copying and the initial 35 per cent down payment you have to make to sustain the research capacities and output of the potential copiers.
Nota - Posizione 143
x SI ARRIVA COSÌ AL 100%
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 146
That is why, as scholars from the University of Sussex have shown, some 7 per cent of all industrial R& D worldwide is spent on pure science. This is also why big companies achieve the publication rates of medium-sized universities.
Nota - Posizione 147
x SPESA PRIVATA IN SCIENZA PURA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 148
Edwin Mansfield and Zvi Griliches of Harvard have shown by comprehensive surveys that the more that companies invest in pure science, the greater are their profits.
Nota - Posizione 149
x PROFITTO E SCIENZA PURA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 163
Industrial scientists have long known that sharing knowledge is useful (why do you think competitor companies cluster?) though anti-trust law can force them to be discreet. So in 1985, reporting on a survey of 100 American companies, Edwin Mansfield found that “[ i] nformation concerning the detailed nature and operation of a new product or process generally leaks out within a year.”
Nota - Posizione 166
x CONDIVIDERE LACCONOSCENZA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 166
in a survey of eleven American steel companies, Eric von Hippel of MIT’s Sloan School of Management found that ten of them regularly swapped proprietary information with rivals. In an international survey of 102 firms, Thomas Allen (also of Sloan) found that no fewer than 23 per cent of their important innovations came from swapping information with rivals.
Nota - Posizione 167
x EVIDENZA CONDIVISIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 170
In two papers published in 1991 and 1998, Mansfield showed that the overwhelming source of new technologies was companies’ own R& D, and that academic research accounted for only 5 per cent of companies’ new sales and only 2 per cent of the savings that could be attributed to new processes.
Nota - Posizione 172
x CONTRIBUTO ACCADEMICO TRASVURABILE
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the distinction between pure and applied science is now largely defunct,
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x DISCRIMINE
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obsession with monopoly.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 176
The economists say that unless an innovator can claim, in perpetuity, 100 per cent of the commercial return on her innovation, she will underinvest
Nota - Posizione 177
x ORTODOSSIA
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In reality, entrepreneurs make their investments in the light of the competition, and their goal is a current edge over their rivals, not some abstract dream of immortal monopoly in fictitious “perfect” markets.
Nota - Posizione 179
x LA REALTÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 181
The strongest argument for the government funding of science today is anecdotal: would we have the internet, say, or the Higgs Boson, but for government funding? Yet anecdotage ignores crowding out.
Nota - Posizione 182
x AI DIFENSORI NON RESTANO CHE ANEDDOTI CHE IGNORANO LO SPIAZZAMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 182
We wouldn’t have had the generation of electricity but for the private funding of Michael Faraday, and if government funding crowds out the private philanthropic funding of science (and it does, because the funding of pure science is determined primarily by GDP per capita, regardless of government largesse)
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x CONTROANEDDOTO
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x PIL
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it was the Cold War and the upcoming space race (Sputnik was launched in 1958) that— incredibly— persuaded economists that the USSR’s publicly funded industrial base would overtake the United States’ unless the United States foreswore its attachment to free markets in research.
Nota - Posizione 203
x CORSA ALLO SPAZIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 204
Sputnik was based on the research of Robert ‘Moonie’ Goddard of Clark College, Massachusetts, which was supported by the Guggenheims— but
Nota - Posizione 205
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 208
Cui bono? Who benefits from this fictitious economics of science? It’s the economists, universities, and defence contractors who benefit, at the taxpayers’ expense.
Nota - Posizione 209
x A CHI GIOVA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 214
Unfortunately too many people have an interest in so representing science.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 217
Replies on Public Goods and Crowding Out
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t
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 225
Victoria Harden makes a strong defence for the public funding of health research,
Nota - Posizione 225
x OB SALUTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 225
the improvements in health we have seen in the industrialized world have been occurring for nearly 200 years now, and when a person charts those improvements against the initiation of significant government funding of health research (which in the UK, for example, was launched in 1913 with the creation of the Medical Research Council) one simply does not see any deflection in the long-term trends in morbidity and mortality.
Nota - Posizione 228
x GRAFICO E CONFITAZ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 228
So much health research continues to be supported by independent foundations (Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates etc) to say nothing of that funded by private companies (the drug companies have huge budgets for R& D)
Nota - Posizione 230
x I PRIVATI NELLA SALUTE
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After all, it is interesting how little benefit the former Soviet bloc’s generously funded research programs yielded in terms of health care.
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x SOVIETICI E SALUTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 235
Patrick Michaels makes the point that government funding has introduced perverse incentives and has damaged the intellectual autonomy of the universities.
Nota - Posizione 236
x FONDI PUBBLICI E AUTONOMIA INTELLETTUALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 237
historical evidence
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 237
for example, one of the godfathers of the federal support of research was Henry Wallace (one of FDR’s Vice Presidents and, unexpectedly, Marxist in his sympathies) and he complained that the greatest opposition to his plans came from the scientists themselves, who wanted to protect their autonomy.
Nota - Posizione 239
x WALLACE E L OPPOSIZIONE A FDR
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 244
David Guston makes a different set of points: he says in effect that, okay, perhaps in narrow economic terms science may not be a public good, but there are nonetheless good national reasons other than defence why a democratic government might legitimately want or need to fund science, particularly in support of particular, perhaps infrastructural, missions. In this he was adumbrated by Victoria Harden who made the point that drug companies’ published clinical trials cannot always be trusted.
Nota - Posizione 248
x OB. IL GOV GARATISCE CREDIBILITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 252
I do agree that we can’t leave research solely to the for-profit sector and so, if for whatever reason the philanthropic sector fails to provide, then government would have to intervene, but the problem is that there is good evidence for the government funding of philanthropic research crowding out private philanthropic research, so public research even if philanthropically orientated should not be entered into lightly.
Nota - Posizione 255
x OK SUSSIDIARIETÀ. MA C È SPIAZAMENTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 256
the evidence is clear
