What role do government and politics play in supporting scientific innovation (coming from academia)?
There are good/interesting arguments on both sides of “governments have nothing to do with progress in science vs look at all the useful things we’ve got from the NASA space program”, etc. Where do you fall?
The biggest single thing is the government simply pays for a very large chunk of science! In 2019, the federal government paid for 41% of US scientific research.[1] That was more than the private sector (33%), university system (13%), or the philanthropic sector (10%). It’s true that if the US government stepped back these other sectors would probably step forward to shoulder some of the burden, but I doubt they would cover the majority of the short-fall.
More broadly, I think science and innovation is pretty hard to predict. That means we ideally want an innovation ecosystem that explores and tries lots of different approaches, even if some of those approaches don’t seem to hold the highest promise at there outset. One way you can get that is to have a private sector that is open to new entrants and startups who want to try different stuff than the incumbents. But those new firms are still going to be ultimately chasing the same signal as everyone else, namely profit, which might limit the extent to which this ecosystem explores the potential space of technological possibility.
So I think it’s useful to have some innovating organizations who are pursuing goals entirely untethered from market success. The government is one viable solution to this problem of getting a bit more exploration into the innovation ecosystem. I haven’t seen a study that tries to rigorously quantify the value of, e.g., NASA or DARPA, in terms of their spillovers to the rest of the economy, but I would be surprised if they don’t come out looking like good investments.
What role do government and politics play in supporting scientific innovation (coming from academia)?
There are good/interesting arguments on both sides of “governments have nothing to do with progress in science vs look at all the useful things we’ve got from the NASA space program”, etc. Where do you fall?
The biggest single thing is the government simply pays for a very large chunk of science! In 2019, the federal government paid for 41% of US scientific research.[1] That was more than the private sector (33%), university system (13%), or the philanthropic sector (10%). It’s true that if the US government stepped back these other sectors would probably step forward to shoulder some of the burden, but I doubt they would cover the majority of the short-fall.
More broadly, I think science and innovation is pretty hard to predict. That means we ideally want an innovation ecosystem that explores and tries lots of different approaches, even if some of those approaches don’t seem to hold the highest promise at there outset. One way you can get that is to have a private sector that is open to new entrants and startups who want to try different stuff than the incumbents. But those new firms are still going to be ultimately chasing the same signal as everyone else, namely profit, which might limit the extent to which this ecosystem explores the potential space of technological possibility.
So I think it’s useful to have some innovating organizations who are pursuing goals entirely untethered from market success. The government is one viable solution to this problem of getting a bit more exploration into the innovation ecosystem. I haven’t seen a study that tries to rigorously quantify the value of, e.g., NASA or DARPA, in terms of their spillovers to the rest of the economy, but I would be surprised if they don’t come out looking like good investments.
From table RD-3 of the NSF science and engineering report, taking basic research as a proxy for science.