War vs. Research

[JayB]

If the claim that there was an explicit tradeoff between millitary expenditures and research and innovation was valid, you'd expect Europe to be the clear global leader in this regard

 

No, I'd expect Japan to be the clear leader - constitutionally obligated to pacifism - minimal overseas military presence. And guess what? They are.

 

 

 

If there was a clear inverse correlation between these two variables, then the US would rank next to last, which isn't the case.

 

The case of Europe and Japan is interesting. Japan was essentially a scientific backwater before WWII, while Europe was the clear epicenter. Both were devastated in WWII, but Japan's relative significance as a driver of innovation and scientific research has increased significantly relative to the rest of the world since WWII, and Europe has undergone a significant relative decline, despite the two having roughly comparable levels of defense spending which are much lower than the USA's. If there's a clear negative link between defense spending and innovation, there's none evident in any of your arguments thus far.

 

Consider the case of Germany. Between about 1860 and 1910, Germany became the world's leading scientific power, at the same time that it was ramping up its spending on armaments. Clear link? Not really if you consider what happened to German scientific output during the next interval of heavy investment in arms during the 20th century. Clearly there's a bit more to the story than defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

[bstach]

Many of the fine consumer product that we enjoy today are a direct result of government funded research via space and military programs.

 

We should also consider, if that money wasn't spent on military, what would it be spent on? In Canada, if we had that kind of money, we would spend it on beer and popcorn. One thing is certain, its not being spent on healthcare.

[Dechristo]

beer and popcorn is fine health care

[cj001f]

Not really if you consider what happened to German scientific output during the next interval of heavy investment in arms during the 20th century.

 

Huh? German scientific & engineering output was massive during their next buildup as well. Until the last few years when their output became crippled by heavy bombing the sophistication of their weaponry far outclassed ours (perhaps excluding Nuclear weapons - when their ideological blinders crippled scientific progress) - as the postwar success of the American & Russian firms who stole their technology shows.

 

Ever wonder why there's really good German food in Huntsville, AL? Because we needed the Germans to build ICBMs. Or why you can buy some really good Zeiss copy lenses from Ukraine? Because they stole the works wholesale from Jena.

 

Yes, much military technology has migrated to the civilian sector. To be more "efficient" the military is more narrowly tailoring their current efforts leading to a decrease in such events.

[JayB]

Yeah - they were spending a lot and building a lot, but a considerable number of their top scientists were also fleeing the country for some reason or another. They were spending the scientific capital that they'd accumulated over the previous 70 years or so, and I'd be willing to wager that had their country prevailed in WWII, their relative decline as a scientific power would have accelerated for a number of reasons. I think that you'd also have to credit at least part of the German edge in arms to the fact that they had dedicated themselves to these efforts quite a bit more intensely than their opponents prior to the onset of the war.

 

Still not sure how any of this supports the thesis that you are offering oblique, piecemeal support of.

[cj001f]

Still not sure how any of this supports the thesis that you are offering oblique, piecemeal support of.

 

I'm not sure what that thesis is, except perhaps your straw man argument that we couldn't be doing anything else useful with the money we are spending in Iraq!

 

As for spending scientific capital - look around Cambridge boy! The biotech world may be different, but in the old industries Germany is still a substantial force.

[JayB]

One argument is that money being spent on Iraq wouldn't necessarily be spent by the government at all, and if it was, the overwhelming majority of it would probably go towards non-discretionary spending. The second argument is that if there's any correlation to be found between millitary expenditures and innovation, it's probably not especially tight, and it's certainly not always negative. Both of which are arguments against the notion that if the US hadn't spent a dime prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it would somehow herald an era of unprecedented investment in research and promote an outburst of innovation. The absence of spending on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, and on millitary spending in general in the rest of the world has yet to produce such a result, in the present or at any particular time in the past.

 

Germany is a case in point. Nowhere in my statements is there anything that suggests that Germany is an insignificant player, but the fact is that its significance as a driver of innovation has waxed and waned quite a bit over the course of the last century and a half, and there hasn't been a tidy linkage between millitary expenditures and the relative significance of its scientific and technological contributions.

 

The Cambridge biotech scene is another story that it would be tough to explain with a single variable.

[olyclimber]

think of how dangerous a place the world would be if we didn't have the nuclear bomb

[Dechristo]

correlary smorrelary

[chucK]

If we weren't having this stupid war, you know damn well that the democrats would be back in power, and all the money would be going to welfare moms (and they wouldn't be doing research with it).

[fear_and_greed]

Guys, you're missing the point of my original post.

The money is being spent like it's going out of style in Iraq. Obviously the money was there to spend. Would a more progressive and free thinking administration choose to spend it on a more worthy project and set the bar high with a mission statement similiar to the space program?

" We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Heady stuff. And with good reason. The effort had to be committed and without limits.

The US is held hostage by it's dependence on foreign oil. Would not a better use for war monies be used to try and discover and bring to market a new energy, non polluting source?

The spin offs and position of leadership in the technology would be immense.

Or it this too much to ask of a president that believes dinosaurs were around just a few thousand years ago?

[cj001f]

That is a reasonable question - would the money to secure America and the West's energy infrastructure have been better spent invading and occupying Iraq or developing alternative fuels?

[JayB]

If one's objective is to contrive utopias then I don't see why one should limit the expenditures to the amount spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, nor limit the objectives to alternative fuels.

 

There's also an assumption at work here that the productivity of research is infinitely scalable, which is also a dubious assumption. Some problems are amenable to brute force approaches and the results are directly proportional to the funds invested in the efforts, but this is more common in cases where the science is essentially complete and the problem is one of engineering rather than discovery. I'm not sure that a shortage of investment in engineering is all that stands between the world and economical, renewable replacements for fossil fuels at the moment.

[cj001f]

There's also an assumption at work here that the productivity of research is infinitely scalable, which is also a dubious assumption. Some problems are amenable to brute force approaches and the results are directly proportional to the funds invested in the efforts, but this is more common in cases where the science is essentially complete and the problem is one of engineering rather than discovery. I'm not sure that a shortage of investment in engineering is all that stands between the world and economical, renewable replacements for fossil fuels at the moment.

 

Not linearly scalable - but most certainly scalable. Plot industrial innovation vs. number of companies and fiscal reward. Greater fiscal reward, more companies, more innovation. It applies to any industry. Rarely does much successful research occur in the modern era without fiscal rewards and substantial fiscal backing.

 

I realize a conservative would consider honesty Utopian but that is the core of the Iraq war isn't it? Energy security? If they'd said that in the beginning it could have been a compelling case; we needn't have had the bullshit terror you demagogues lap up.

[JayB]

I think I argued against the energy-security claim elsewhere so you'll have to use the search bar for a response to that one.

 

I think that your engineering background is getting the best of you with respect to the relationship between financial inputs and tangible outputs at the leading edge of science. The relationship between scientific discoveries and financial incentives is tenuous at best, and I can't think of very significant discoveries that were inspired by the desire for financial gain at all, actually. The usual model is someone makes a discovery, and sometime later someone actually finds a use for it and there's a financial reward involved. There are problems out there that you could literally throw all of the money in the world at and get nowhere because the critical discoveries just haven't been made. I'm not sure where things stand with regards to most renewables, but something tells me its not just a lack of funds holding them back at this point.

[cj001f]

I think the fundamental problems with alternative energy sources are engineering JayB - namely none of them can currently compete with the tremendous advantages of packaging and availability that fossil fuels hold. Hell, even fossil fuel distribution is restricted by legal woes, not technological ones - a group I know was working on large diameter (think 3m by 15m or whatever cargo containers are) composite cylinders for transport of LNG. The major sticking point was liability for failure. Instead of massive terminals we could utilize our existing infrastructure - but that seemingly small item held it up.

 

It's a few academics in the lab vs. the billion dollar resources of Exxon Mobil. In the past science was the activity of a few; activities of a few are modeled individually. Now science is a group activity; it's best modeled as a group - statistics would dictate the output of meaningful research given meaningful inputs.