crimes against humility

The government of Canada believes there is a place for curiosity-driven, fundamental scientific research, but the National Research Council is not that place.

Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,” John McDougall, president of the NRC, said in announcing the shift in the NRC’s research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems “commercially viable.”

This is probably the dumbest thing anyone from Canada has ever said in the history of Canada, inclusive of all the Canadians on South Park. And I went to university in Canada, so I’ve heard Canadians say some extremely stupid things.

The statement (and the policy that it supports) is so spectacularly dumb, that in trying to justify subsidising research on economic grounds,  it completely misunderstands the economic argument for subsidising basic research!

A quick precis of that argument: Basic research has the characteristics of a public good - it benefits lots of people, but it’s hard for any one firm or organisation to appropriate the revenues. Because the benefits are hard to appropriate, commercially-oriented firms would provide far too little basic research; to redress that problem, governments should subsidise its production. As an aside, public subsidy for research can come in lots of ways, mainly through funding for research projects within universities and research institutes, supporting highly productive researchers or teams (scholarships, sabbaticals, etc), and helping scientists to access external funding - a big and underrated science policy initiative, especially for developing countries) On top of the direct economic benefits that justify the subsidy in the first place, there are lots of other indirect benefits from basic research - including increases in the supply of high-skill workers, the creation of new scientific instruments, and the formation of some new firms (LOL, irony) - which are nicely summarised in this paper by Ammon Salter and Ben Martin.

Imagine if we retrospectively applied McDougall’s argument to past governments, and they only subsidised research that the government deemed to have had commercial viability. The following technologies would never have existed - because their underlying principles wouldn’t have been discovered - or they would have been invented and perfected much later, as their commercial viability wasn’t immediately obvious:

• Microchips
• The internet
• Baby formula
• GPS technology
• Penicillin, most vaccines and many, many pharmaceutical products: most pharma inventions are completely ridiculous as business ideas until they advance to the stage where it’s possible to mass-produce them.

And that’s just a tiny fraction of the outputs generated by government-supported research in English-speaking countries.

This isn’t to say that governments don’t waste money subsidising basic research - there are lots and lots of silly research projects and programs out there*. But that seems like a small price to pay for the life-changingly huge impacts that some basic research programs generate. The thing about these super-high-impact research outputs, and the reason the Canadian policy shift is so flawed, is that you can’t know in advance which ones are going to have a huge impact! And you really can’t tell what the commercial viability of a research project is before you even know what the results of that project will be!

Could America’s National Science Foundation (NSF) have predicted that some random ranking algorithm two geeks came up with would’ve spawned the internet’s most sprawling commercial empire? Well, they didn’t need to - but nevertheless, the NSF sponsored Sergey Brin’s research and eventually Brin’s/Larry Page’s Pagerank algorithm has played a huge part in Google’s success as a profit-making capitalist enterprise.

By the way, does anyone else see the irony in a market-oriented science policy which subsidises only research which “the government deems “commercially viable”” [italics mine]? What happened to letting firms and individuals decide what’s commercially viable? Derp derp derpy derp derp. Canadian right-wingers are a weird breed, man.

Update: There are just so many hilariously stupid** quotes from the original article that I felt like sharing some more of them with you.

Science Minister Gary Goodyear said: “There is only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge … second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit.

1) The creation of knowledge is, err, basic science. Oh, y’know, just the thing you and your buddy said you weren’t going to fund anymore!
2) “There is only two reasons..” - I guess basic grammar counts among the things that government shouldn’t support, because it isn’t commercially viable…

Citing NRC’s “inability to respond to industry’s demands,” Goodyear explained that NRC will now respond exclusively to industry’s demands.

On what planet does that make sense? “We are pretty good at serving other groups and terrible at serving your group… so to fix that, we’ll specialise in serving your group.” What?

* And of course there are lots of commercially viable research outputs that haven’t been funded by governments.

** And by ‘hilariously stupid’ I mean ‘it is depressing and dangerous that these people have power.’

I posted this Atlantic photo-set last week, but I continue to be blown away by some of these inventions. Some of these are truly, truly amazing.

It just shows that you don’t necessarily have to have a giant fancy lab and an army of PhDs in white coats in order to be innovative. A problem, some materials and a healthy dose of ingenuity are enough to get you started.

So the real point is there is an experiment being conducted in Japan, but the experiment isn’t Abenomics (which I suspect won’t work, and could end very badly). No, the experiment is about learning to grow old with dignity, not as individuals, but as societies. It is about managing debt in a time of deflation, about giving opportunities to the young, even while the force of the ballot box rides with the old, and about finding ways to ease that rate of work force decline to give some additional room to allow productivity to help, which means again helping the young, since they are the ones who start families.

A very interesting piece summarising the state of Abe’s macroeconomic policies so far, and pointing  - convincingly - towards demographics as the main binding constraint on Japanese growth.

On Sunday afternoon I took a long nap in which I dreamed I was worried about my future. I couldn’t sleep later that night because I kept worrying about worrying about my future after I woke up.

I typed some words about a random walk I took on Sunday night. Click the link to read them and listen to a song from the new Deerhunter album.

Semifinale di ritorno di Champions League, Juventus-Real Madrid 3-1, gol di Trezeguet, Del Piero, Nedved, Zidane

10 years ago today, Juventus beat Real Madrid 3-1 in the Champions League semifinal second leg; at that point, Pavel Nedved was the finest footballer in the world, hands down. I don’t support Juventus, but Nedved is one of my all-time favourite players, and this was one of his greatest performances.

Ronay on Ferg:

…as of today he is history too: but then we already knew that, to a degree that arguing about whether Ferguson is the greatest is bit like arguing about whether the British Library is the greatest British Library ever created, whether milk is the best universally available white dairy drink, or if your left leg really is your greatest left leg. Ferguson is basically what we’ve got. His is not so much a legacy to be debated on its merits, but a career to be enjoyed as a piece of shared living history. So put away the yardstick. We’re not really going to argue about this, are we?

No, we are not.

For almost 27 years, Alex Ferguson has inhabited, directed and dictated the lives of Manchester United supporters, and consequently, the days of his life are the days of my life. It’s not easy to accept the fact that a man you’ll never meet has improved your existence immeasurably and unfathomably, but it’s also unarguable: being me is better because of Alex Ferguson.

I’ve been struggling all day with something. Struggling to express why I’ve been feeling such ludicrous emotions about a simple act; that of a man, whom I’ve never met and never will meet, retiring from his job. Dan Harris says it really nicely here:

…this gift extends far beyond football. He has a majestic turn of phrase, a wide and deep range of interests, and perhaps the most absorbing, rhapsodic, infectious, enormous smile in the history of faces. No one enjoys joy quite like him, and this, above all else, is his eternal lesson: the buzz of being alive is a good one; be damn sure to make the most of it.

Quite. Thanks, and enjoy your retirement Fergie.