Reply to Hiring freeze in academia

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "Hiring freeze in academia"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I really don't see why subsidizing research needs to be done by the public.

All of the endpoints are for private industry.

A) Why do you get an education?  So that you can get a job in private industry.

B) Why do we develop technology?  So that private industry can make money developing it.

For point A, I can see the argument that we can make people that wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to get the education and get the jobs, but in practice is doesn't play out like that.  Private industry is so nepotistic.  Very few of the people that get government aid end up in good jobs in industry.  In cases there are jobs that the Good Ol' Boys for industry don't want to give their kids, they clearly prefer foreigners as indentured servants.  So basically, we pay to train foreigners so that private industry can take advantage of indentured servants.  The rest of us end up with giant academic bills.[/quote]

This is *extremely* limited thinking and not well grounded in economics at all.

Ideas are inherently non rival (my use of an idea doesn't limit your use of an idea). But, just having a new idea isn't enough for a business to profit--they need to be able to somehow exclude other businesses from using (or fully taking advantage of) the new idea, or any potential profits will be competed away. And, if there's little chance to make a profit from an idea in the future, then the business won't do the research to develop the idea in the first place. It doesn't matter that the idea might be fantastic for society, since businesses only care about the gains that they themselves can capture.

We handle this problem, by, among other things, patent and copyright law. You get a temporary legal monopoly for a new idea to incentivize investment, and in exchange the idea is made public so the rest of the world can build upon it. But there is a big inherent tradeoff in this--monopolies are economically inefficient, and society would actually be better off if we could get the ideas without giving businesses these monopoly powers.

And, even those systems aren't enough to incentivize many kinds of research, because the research is not directed enough at a specific problem for businesses to assess how likely they are to profit, or because successfully generating the idea would undercut profits in other areas (like using existing compounds or naturally occurring substances in place of patented drugs). Or, sometimes, the immediate costs of allowing a monopoly for a couple decades are so big that we'd be better off just paying the research costs outright (e.g., HIV/AIDS medications).

Government and academic research exists to fill in these gaps. No one is suggesting that we shouldn't also have plenty of private research. But the idea that "all the endpoints are for private industry" or that private research alone could handle everything is absurd and frankly, dangerous.[/quote]

Let's paraphrase.  Businesses don't like what you are doing, people from modest backgrounds don't like what you are doing, the only people that get any benefit it seems are the dumb rich kids that paid to sit in class next to me and the foreigners that want green cards who sharpened my pencils so they could cheat off me.  Academia has degenerated to a Visa mill.

BTW how many bad disingenuous arguments does academia get to make, like the one above about marginally qualified students doing well.[/quote]

Absolutely. Taxpayers foot the bill for most of the basic R&D costs to develop a medication and then the pharmaceutical companies take them and spend a small fraction of the amount of tax money that were spent and those companies develop drugs and charge American taxpayers who paid for most of the development costs 4 to 7 tines what these companies charge people in other countries who never paid a cent. Disgusting that taxpayers who paid taxes for decades have to starve to psy for these exorbitantly priced drugs. [/quote]

That's an argument for weakening patent protections, not an argument for getting rid of public research. And pharmaceutical companies don't charge consumers in other countries less out of the goodness of their heart. They charge us more because we let them.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics