

Capitalist Science - YAFZ
http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474

======
mcv
But this "capitalist science" has already existed for ages, hasn't it? Plenty
of companies do science, monopolize the results through patents, and exploit
them for private profit. That's capitalist science.

> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by
> the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large.

Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the
results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.

> Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with
> taxpayer interests,

No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of
corporations.

> channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally
> improve the quality of your life.

Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
>> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist,

> Yes, but increasingly less so.

IMO opinion the real problem isn't that basic science is becoming less
publicly available as much as it's becoming less basic, and really less
science also.

If "capitalist science" meaning holding scientists to the same production
quotas that Frederick Taylor gave steel workers, then above and beyond the
problems seen with steel workers, there's the additional problem that bad
science drives out good since it's easier to produce.

------
ronaldx
Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite.

Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something
has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses
around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with
that process.

Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science
that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist
system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for
the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay
taxes for.

Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing
funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of
capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their
favoured R&D done on the cheap.

( _Edited to add:_ that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good
points about how we identify the value of science)

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn 't
otherwise be happening in a capitalist system._

But that's not what ends up happening. The funding doesn't get allocated such
that the total utility would be maximized. Instead, it is directed toward
those areas having a constituency that's better organized.

The result is that AIDS research -- its victims being fairly focused in a
particular demographic -- gets about 350x more research funding per victim
than does COPD. It gets 112x more than Hepatitis C, and 33x more than
Alzheimer's disease. [1]

Government funding equals political funding. And this is what leads to
scandals like Solaris, too. The government is not able to make rational
decisions, as much as we might tell ourselves that it does. In a democracy,
the funding will go to those causes that can muster the most votes.

[1] Source:
[http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm](http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm)

------
jerf
Don't we already _have_ both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the
paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private
investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In
practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the
idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies
we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the
alternative system were entirely eliminated.

(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that
incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market
manifested in real, concrete objects is actually _very_ important. A system
that _only_ did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society
every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and
measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than
the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make
"fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires
further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered
systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)

------
zdw
If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy
and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have
roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.

~~~
darkmighty
Have you read the article? It's interesting and follows the individual reward
premise of capitalism, although absolutely impracticable not to mention it
only makes sense in a very limited number of fields.

------
mordae
> channel more money into basic science

This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several
friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times
that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap
the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.

------
nmc
I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity
forever.

~~~
MereInterest
Science does. Each discovery is the heritage of humanity, the beneficiary of
being in the world that we are in. This suggestion is nothing more than an
attempt to steal that heritage and dole it back out in limited amounts,
expecting us to be grateful for it.

------
praptak
_" The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by
the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large."_

Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a
publicly founded research paper.

------
veganarchocap
I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve
exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model
with a voluntary consumer model.

Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by
state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if
innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private
investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other
words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too
difficult for the average enterprise to compete.

This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own
achievements in order to justify its own existence.

I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private
sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been
funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this.

Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next
biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing
newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers,
but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation
that we as consumers can benefit directly from either.

Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group,
and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this
model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement.

I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes
to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly
extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials,
let alone the money to fund space programs.

Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!

~~~
noelwelsh
I don't recognise the world you are talking about. Particularly "the state
monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the
average enterprise to compete". On the contrary, the state funds the basic
research that is then "monopolised" by enterprise once it has been
sufficiently developed. The rocket tech. that Virgin Galactic is using didn't
come from nowhere. Neither did the deep learning methods that Facebook is
investing in.

~~~
veganarchocap
NASA is a government agency, in the UK we're bound to a part of the EU known
as the European Space Agency, they aren't subject to the same laws and
regulations, let alone taxes as well as all the normal rules of competitive
business that privately owned enterprises are.

They've utilised their monopoly of force in order to contract themselves to
these responsibilities. Most likely in order to use the glory to justify their
existence.

------
denom
Is this supposed to be a scientific research paper?

> "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science
> Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives)
> that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the
> database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database
> in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the
> prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made
> by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible"

What's up with the citation to the above paragraph:

> "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity
> (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the
> money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in
> Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example."

I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database?
caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand.

This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or
personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?

------
jk4930
Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: [http://www.cato-
unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...](http://www.cato-
unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-science)

------
jlcx
"Basic science is currently a socialist enterprise, funded by the taxpayer,
with the results available to society at large."

One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available
to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change
that.

"Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no
individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research."

Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts
that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science,
which is unpatentable.

~~~
wes-exp
I don't think this it is the _fault_ of patent law that companies do not fund
basic research. I think is it just the fact that it is very hard to profit
from basic research, fundamentally. If anything, patent law (for all its
faults) at least tries to create some incentives.

------
michaelochurch
Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in
industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at
technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing
is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and
communism) in it.

That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist,
because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of
inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data
_technologist_ , in truth.

~~~
CWuestefeld
How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really
interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff
that we never even see going into textiles and building products...

Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away,
and (b) that it's bad at science in general?

Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great
example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and
government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear
which side played the greater role.

~~~
dylandrop
The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done
only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general
populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer
cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore,
the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has
no incentive at that point to be honest. (Imagine if the only crop research
was done by Monsanto.) Capitalism hasn't caused basic research to go away, but
if we only rely on science from capitalism, there will undoubtedly be a ton of
problems to face there.

~~~
CWuestefeld
_Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much
money off of current cancer treatment._

Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and
the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe
that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're
viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these
corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people
whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in
their own children.

 _the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has
no incentive at that point to be honest_

Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent
years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private
sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector
you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public
sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your
previous bogus results.

Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different
way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on
where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-
victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate
compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics.
That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend
FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The
politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense,
where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it
will have the most utility across the whole nation.

~~~
dylandrop
> real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene
> popping up in their own children

Certainly everyone's mother was killed by cancer who works on cancer. And no,
not everyone who works at a Big Pharma company is terrible, but the problem is
more that Big Pharma is concentrated on improving their current prescription
systems, rather than finding a cheap one-off cure. If Big Pharma wants to stop
acting like a giant faceless evil monster, I will stop treating it as such.
But how can you really justify current medical costs without saying that
someone, somewhere in that industry is doing something disingenuous?

> The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris
> nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather
> than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.

The problem is that there isn't enough demand to justify the cost, if we're
doing it in a "if a person is diagnosed, they pay for it" manner that
capitalism demands. Cancer research costs many, many billions of dollars due
to many factors [1]. Say we're talking about leukemia research. 40,000 cases
were diagnosed this year [2], but should each of those cases have to pay for
the extremely high costs of research? Or, could we distribute it in a way such
that each citizen pitches in a much smaller amount to help cancer research? In
my opinion, the latter makes more sense, rather than punishing those who get
sick.

Lastly as for credibility in the research world, there are definitely lots of
examples I could look up. And also plenty of examples to look up for your
cases that you mentioned as well. I think it would be too hard to count, no?
But when you see things like the Tobacco Institute
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_cu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_culture))
it's hard to say that we should research everything privately, because the
conflict of interest is just too high. In my opinion, publicly funded research
could / should be reformed, but there's not as obvious of a bias one way or
the other there.

[1]
[http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm](http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm)
[2]
[http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html](http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html)

------
LogicalBorg
Maybe we should crowd-fund science projects like we do Kickstarter projects.
In the Internet Age, that's about as capitalistic as you can get.

~~~
jlcx
It's already happening:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305)

------
grimtrigger
Article starts off with brushes that are too wide, but gets interesting around
Appendix B where he talks about a sort of "Market for Hypotheses". Interesting
concept, but doesn't talk much about the incentive structure needed for
companies to play the game fairly. Also the market would have to be government
created and run, a responsibility the ACA should make anyone skeptic of.

------
zzzeek
Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???

~~~
dylandrop
If they didn't in fact fund it themselves

------
im_a_bug
This is daft.

~~~
twic
From reading the abstract, i assumed it was satire. Is it serious?

See also:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal)

~~~
Jtsummers
Based on his previous two papers which detail a way of determining the value
of various research projects, I'm inclined to say yes, he's serious. Either
that or I'm unable to hear the _whoosh_.

