Dennis Overbye, in the New York Times, has some thoughts about science . You should also read the letter by David Gross and Eric Kandel on the Financial Times about why the stimulus package should also include science research.
You should also be aware of the findings of the National Academy of Science ( I linked to the executive summary page) regarding the future of Science in the US.
Here are some further random comments that I picked up (with the understanding that I don’t really know who the writers are).
Mydd.
Nowpublic.
Of course, there is Cosmic Variance as well (and I know who these guys are).
I have a plethora of opinions about this subject, not just because I am a scientist and fashion myself as an armchair economist (and who isn’t?). However, I would need to spend quite a lot of time articulating them and I have been rather short of free time lately. In the meantime, I look forward to more debate on the issues and I pray that this part of the budget doesn’t get scrapped as part of the usual horse trading in DC.
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2009/1/20/saupload_scary_1.jpg
Federal borrowing through December 2007
http://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2009/1/20/saupload_scary_2.jpg
Federal borrowing through December 2008, same graph rescaled
We are a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It is exponentially beyond anything associated with 1929. It is outside economics. The simple solution to 1929 was WWII. Are we planning to battle the entire solar system?
http://www.spaceweather.com/
Setting new records for cumulative zero-sunspot days every succeeding day, Global Cooling is upon us. The 2009 growing season will be short and cold. The Green Revolution will sputter, stall, and collapse. Famine will be the rule planet-wide and nobody will know what happened. Unpredictable!
One desires an engineering solution to each fundamental problem with no concern for whose noses get tweaked. US politics is 2(pi) steradians in the opposite direction. All compromises will be mathematically unavoidable disaster,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/comprom.htm
We all know the help Acorn gave the Democrats in
stealingwinning the last election. What was in it for them? Is 4 billion dollars enough?Democrats attempt to pay off Acorn
I’m personally unimpressed with the stimulus package, despite being pro stimulus for economic reasons.
Anyway, not enough stimulus *now* as opposed to later, where it becomes unnecessary deficit spending.
Surely they could have also come up with some better public work ideas. Only about 17% is actual infrastructure building.
You can dig all you want, but there is no pony hiding under the Democrat’s stimulus manure pile. There is no pony hiding in the stimulus “pile of manure”
Dear Redneck:
If you are going to make an argument, argue on points, not party bias. Flaming comments are not informative and want me to flag the comments as spam. This is the only warning.
The citizenry has been duped into providing a free lunch for scientists based on their rhetoric of noble intentions. Really scientists tend to be unproductive elitists looking to score a free lunch. And using coercive force to procure citizen property (taxes) is fundamentally wrong.
Dear George:
Let me give you a few counterpoints. I don’t take lightly when someone issues a populist statement without properly researching the subject.
Scientists invented the World Wide Web and gave it away for free. The Internet moves quite a bit of money nowadays.
Consider lasers: they were invented by scientists, now they are in any DVD player, CD player, laser diodes. All of this also moves a huge amount of the economy.
How about the transistor? Need I say how much of the world’s economy run on transistors? Or do you know where the materials that are in cellphones are researched at?
Do you like nuclear medicine? Maybe someone you know has suffered from cancer and received radiation therapy.
Many scientific discoveries take years to make it to the market, and once they are there the people forget that they get them because scientists worked on that subject quite a bit of time ahead.
The main reason taxes pay for science, is that it is not guaranteed to succeed when you finance just one guy. So you have to fund many in the hopes that one will discover something great. This has happened more or less continuously. If you leave it to corporations, they don’t see past one year profits.
Maybe you would like to live in a world without science: there would be no antibiotics, no television or electromagnetic waves, there would be no vaccines against polio and no cure for tuberculosis. There would be no cellphones, no microwaves.
Taxes are necessary, just like police officers and judges. You do know that taxes actually buy individuals something, don’t you?
I like to say/joke that society owes a debt to scientists for using technology and science created by the scientists of the past and taught by and stored in the living memory of the scientists of today. Regardless of whether current research in science will have any future applications in creating faster microwave ovens, more politically-correct weapons of mass destruction, or more effective interrogation techniques, active scientists and the scientific community have a right to demand funding. This right should be viewed as as fundamental, and perhaps more deserved, than the right of any citizen to vote.
I am not simply saying that science enriches life like the arts, which is an argument people often make. One could very well claim that science is fundamentally more important as a human endeavor than most or all forms of art, sex, torture or civics.
In the future, historians could say that contemporary western culture’s only claim to not being a hedonistic, terrible society is based on its scientific discoveries. Another, perhaps equivalent claim the future historians could make to clarify the first claim: the only experiences that human consciousness has had in western culture that were of any value whatsoever were the joys of scientific discovery experienced by the (few) scientists it produced.
(I am not a future historian so these aren’t necessarily my claims.)
finally, thanks for this reference…
Thank’s very much.