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I think that work sounds really cool. I hope a private company wants to continue it and you get hired.
But I mean come on "you have to give me and my friends money or your country will fail" is obviously not a compelling argument. If it don't make dollars it don't make sense.
There are totally things which don’t make dollars but make sense. Nobody benefits personally from running fair courts, or from building roads.
Do you mean that people do benefit personally from having fair courts and roads? The key question to if something should be state funded is not "is it beneficial," to be funded by tax dollars something should be a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Generaly the courts are supposed to be designed this way. Roads on the other-had depend on the type of road. Roads can be excludable, see toll roads. Probably most interstate and express roads should be paid by user fees that full capture the externalities of those roads. So some set of roads are both beneficial and monetizable. They can "make doallars."
Knowledge as derived from fundamental research can be non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but some not-insubstantial fraction of useful knowledge is excludable.
This can be done in two ways. First, you can patent some knowledge. Much of the development of GLP-1 agonists from Gila monster venom was funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, etc. If the drug companies are going to be granted a monopoly on the beneficial results of this type of research they ought to pay for all of this class of research. It makes no sense for the tax payer to pay for the research and then grant a pharmaceutical company the exclusive rights to capture all the benefits of the research.
Second, you can keep knowledge as a trade secret. If @Jesweez research actually has "...direct relevance for fire risk forecasting..." then the actuarial teams at the insurance companies should be willing to pay him for it. If it's not something that can actually be incorporated into a risk model then it does not actually have "direct relevance," it has some sort of hypothetical indirect potential relevance. Alternatively, if it can actually give you an edge understanding where drought is affecting most, you should be able to sell it to a hedge fund trading agricultural futures. Or an industry consortium or publication in the vein of the some sort of new Old Farmer's Almanac.
There is probably some small set of research that is useful, novel, can't be patented, and can't be sold as a proprietary model. It is a vanishingly small fraction of total federal research funding though.
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...The whole point of government is that there are some public goods that only indirectly make money, or otherwise increase quality of life in a cost-efficient way due to pooled resources?
Forest fire forecasting and management is almost definitionally something the government should be funding itself - the government owns a lot of fire-risk land, massive forest fires affect broad swaths of society, and the net effect can be monetary (even massively so) but is so indirect that private commercial interests might not have good reason or incentive to fully fund it.
"If it don't make dollars it don't make sense" is an absolutely terrible heuristic for government spending.
This is pretty much the same argument made against things like trying to reform USPS. Yes, it loses money, but guess what? Life itself is inherently a money-losing enterprise. I think of Bostrom's phrase "a Disneyland with no children," and I feel like the spending-reform types are unconsciously drawn to trying to instantiate it.
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I mean, it’s the truth. Basic science is a fundamental engine of progress. Just look at the past century of innovation.
Funding basic science is not something companies typically do. It’s too indirect. They’re not going to foot the bill to study what chemicals are in a desert dwelling lizard’s mouth.
I’d argue the same whether I was a scientist or not.
You're just dealing with a catastrophic loss of trust, driven by I think mostly Covid and woke ideological excess. That puts this stuff in the same category as public restrooms and park benches: it sure was nice when we lived in a society where we could have these things without them being abused and ruined for everyone.
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What is the number one invention of that century of progress? The transistor certainly is a candidate. The FET was invented at Magnavox (and later realized at Bell Labs) and the bipolar junction transistor (and several others) at Bell Labs.
Bell Labs existed in a weird corporate/government liminal space because it was funded by the profits of AT&T's government-granted monopoly on telecommunication through the Reagan administration. I'm not sure it's the right example of corporate research.
Yeah, and said monopoly was eventually broken (sort-of?) by the government itself. Maybe Nybbler could have used the example of the RCA labs (who did do a bunch of interesting fundamental science), but then again, the Labs division were often at loggerheads with management in the back half of the 20th Century, and this infighting led to RCA's demise.
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