Hello, I'm Eugene Rumor. I work at the Carnegie Endowment where I run the Russia and Eurasia program and I'm here at USIP to discuss the issue of Russia in the Middle East with colleagues here. Russia intervened big time with boots on the ground in Syria in 2015 and really played the decisive role in turning around the course of the Syrian civil war and basically save the Assad regime there. So that intervention came as a surprise to many observers including myself at the time, but really that surprise stems from our being accustomed over the past 25 years or so to Russia not being present in the Middle East and it was treated as Russia's return to the Middle East as Russia's return to great power politics, which I think is an important element and clearly with intervening in Syria, saving the Assad regime, Russia demonstrated a number of important qualities that it wants to project as part of its image in the Middle East. Major military power, a major power capable of standing up to the United States and also a partner to dictators in trouble and also a country that really doesn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about values, civil rights and so on, but it really appreciates raw power. Since the start of the war, that complicated dynamic, for example, between Russia and Turkey has become even more complicated because Turkey emerged as a serious supplier of hardware to Ukraine. Also, it's pretty clear that Russian resources are not what they used to be prior to the war in Ukraine. Russia's military performance in Ukraine has been, shall we say, lackluster, which is a blow to its reputation as a major military power. Russia, in the seven years since the intervention in Syria, really has not been able to solve any of the problems that have been long-standing problems in the region and some of the other tensions have increased. For example, the Russian-Israeli relationship where there was a condominium in terms of positioning themselves in Syria and especially in the Syrian airspace, that's become more complicated because Israel has come under more pressure to supply Ukraine with weapons and clearly that introduces new tensions in Russian-Israeli dynamic. Clearly, the dynamics in Ukraine is the central issue that will determine Russian positioning elsewhere. Probably the dynamic between Russia and Saudi Arabia will continue to be of extreme importance. Because of the Saudi-Israelan global oil markets and the ability to moderate or modulate the flow of oil. Clearly, the Russian-Israeli relationship is something to watch because the new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long had a very close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. Now, how that relationship is going to evolve going forward is a big question because probably the Israelis will be under more pressure to supply weapons to Ukraine, which is something that Russians clearly oppose. So I would say also that it's the question of the resources, ultimately, that will be available to Russia. Either resources available to it militarily on the ground in Syria or the flow of oil and the ability of OPEC Plus to cooperate with Russia and willingness of OPEC Plus to cooperate with Russia in dealing with the oil price cap that just went into effect or is going to effect has been agreed to by the European Union. So there are multiple factors to watch here.


Well, again, now for the main event, again, the resolution reads government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research. Here for the affirmative, Tony Mills, Tony, please come to the stage. Speaking against the resolution, Terence Kealy, Terence, please come to the stage. Tony, you have 17 and a half minutes to establish your case. You can use the podium. Take it away, Tony. OK. Thank you, Gene. And thank you to the Soho Forum and to Terence Kealy. I'll just dive right in. In 1785, the French chemist Claude Louis Bertollet determined the chemical composition of ammonia, a colorless, pungent gas that is an important natural source of nitrogen. Nitrogen, itself discovered only a few years before that, is a chemical element essential for life, being a key nutrient in the production of amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids. Nitrogen is particularly important for agriculture in the form of fertilizers. Yet, while nitrogen is abundant in nature, it's usable forms are rare so that historically humans have been dependent on scarce and finite sources, for instance, from seabird, guano, manure, leguminous plants, and later byproducts of coaking coal. Several years after determining the chemical composition of ammonia, Bertollet advanced the theory of chemical equilibria by discovering that certain chemical reactions, such as the formation of sodium carbonate, are reversible, contrary to scientific opinion. Together, Bertollet's discoveries suggested to future scientists that ammonia, a simple compound composed of one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms, could be synthesized from its elements. This would provide a steady and renewable source of nitrogen. And over the course of the 19th century, as nations industrialized, abundant sources of nitrogen became even more important to feed the world's growing population. And chemists and engineers sought without success to synthesize ammonia. Almost a century after Bertollet's discoveries, another French chemist, Henri-Louis Le Chatelier, refined the principle of chemical equilibria and helped specify the conditions under which ammonia could be synthesized. Like his predecessors, however, Le Chatelier tried and failed and it was left to yet another chemist, the German, for its Haber, to provide a successful laboratory demonstration of ammonia synthesis, which he did in 1909. Haber soon partnered with Karl Bosch, an engineer at the German firm BAISF, and together they scaled the synthesis of ammonia to industrial levels. The practical consequences are difficult to overstate. For starters, the industrial production of ammonia enabled Germany after the outbreak of World War I to circumvent the Allied blockade, including imports of Chilean nitrates, and continue producing fertilizers and munitions at scale. Longer term and far more significantly, the synthesis of ammonia went on to transform global agriculture, turbocharging the world's food production, in what is now referred to as the Green Revolution. According to Czech Canadian scientist Falklaus Smil, the synthesis of ammonia is quote the single most important change affecting the world's population, without which the expansion of the global population from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 8 billion today would not have been possible. Bertollet's discoveries were of course not by themselves sufficient for the synthesis of ammonia. It took numerous scientists and engineers of different nationalities and different fields and institutional settings over a long period of time to achieve that. But Bertollet's work nevertheless did provide a necessary foundation for the work of Haber and Bosch over a century later, even though Bertollet himself could not have imagined the extent of the practical consequences of his discoveries. This is only one of many such stories, a different one with the same moral could be told about the English mathematician George Bull's discovery of binary algebra in the 1840s, which the American engineer Claude Shannon, nearly a century later, applied to electrical relays and switching circuits, laying the foundation of the modern digital computer, which was developed during World War II. Or consider the advent of electromagnetism in the 19th century, or of quantum and relativistic physics in the 20th century, without which we would not have electricity, radar, or radio, nuclear energy, lasers, or GPS. Or consider the discovery of messenger RNA in the early 1960s by American, French, and British biologists, which enabled scientists such as Kathleen Carrico over half a century later to help develop the mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. What these stories all illustrate is something that may seem so simple as to pass us by, which is that scientific discoveries, especially in what is often called basic science, can enable transformative, indeed world changing, technological innovations that greatly benefit the public. And this is a major reason why the federal government does and should continue to support basic science. Is only the state capable of doing so? Of course not. The private sector has and continues to fund basic science as well. But private industry is quite understandably primarily concerned with commercial results and thus tends to not only have its own research priorities, but also to operate on a timeline that is from a historical point of view, extremely short. But as the examples described earlier indicate, the quote unquote payoff from basic scientific discoveries, whether economic, medical, military, or other, often comes from unexpected places and can also take decades. Unsurprisingly, industry has never devoted more than a small share of its research budget to basic science. The public sector, meanwhile, though it funds much less research than the private sector overall today, remains the single biggest patron of basic science. Science and technology flourish in a complex ecosystem of discovery and invention that depends on a wide variety of institutions, goals, incentives, and kinds of research. Private industry plays an enormously important role here, especially in using science to develop commercially viable products that benefit society, such as vaccines. But basic science, traditionally housed within academic institutions, is also vitally important. And the state is best positioned to ensure that it has adequate support over the long term. The idea that science is vital for technological innovation is an important rationale for federal science funding and indeed an important aspect of the self-identity and public image of modern science. But it was not always true, and I want to offer some historical background to contextualize the argument I'm making tonight in our debate more generally. For most of history, technological development was not, in fact, dependent on advances in science. Many of history's impressive technological achievements, the water wheel, the mechanical clock, the mariners compass, eyeglasses, gunpowder, long predated the scientific revolution inaugurated by Copernicus in the 16th century. Even the industrial revolution of the 18th century, though it came after the scientific revolution, cannot be understood as the straightforward result of the scientific revolution. Indeed, with few notable exceptions, the inventions of the first industrial revolution did not derive from, nor could be described as applications of Copernican astronomy, Newtonian mechanics or optics, or even the chemistry of Boyle or Lovoisier. This is not to denigrate these achievements or their inventors, nor to deny any link between science and innovation during this time, but it is to point to the fact that science, then known as natural philosophy, remained quite distinct from what was known then as the mechanical arts, the latter being associated with the craft guilds, which aimed not at knowledge for its own sake, but rather satisfying basic human needs. This would change in the 19th century with the rise of what historians call the second scientific revolution. This was a period of astonishing scientific growth as well. In the mathematical sciences, to name just a few developments, we saw the rise of modern probability theory and statistics, formal logic, binary algebra, and non-Euclidean geometries. In the physical sciences, electromagnetism, spectroscopy, thermodynamics, organic and inorganic chemistry and statistical mechanics. In the life sciences, evolutionary biology, physiology, pharmacology and bacteriology, these advances all paved the way for even greater advances in the 20th century with the rise of quantum and relativistic physics, as well as modern genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology. The sciences of this second scientific revolution greatly enhanced our mastery over natural forces, thus enabling practical innovations of all kinds from telegraphy to laboratory-based vaccines. Science also became integrated into practical domains, such as medicine and engineering, giving rise to the modern scientific professions familiar to us today. And science became increasingly important to industry with the rise of industrial research and ultimately entire science-based industries from electricity to pharmaceuticals to telecommunications. It was also during this period and for similarly practical reasons that the US federal government began to take an active interest in science. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century and accelerating after the reconstruction era, Congress created or expanded a number of science bureaus from the US Geological and Coast Surveys to the Weather Service to the Army Signal Corps to the Department of Agriculture to grapple with a variety of practical challenges faced by the growing and industrializing nation. This drew the federal government into supporting a wide array of scientific activities, including increasingly basic science. For instance, spurred by the 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic, Congress established the National Board of Health, a short-lived institution whose purpose was to study the causes of and methods of controlling Yellow Fever, which had plagued the American South since the country's founding. The board launched the nation's first system of federal grants and aid for medical and public health research. The hygienic laboratory was also founded during this period and by the early 20th century had expanded beyond its original purview on infectious and communicable diseases into basic research on the biological and chemical processes and mechanisms underlying chronic diseases and other public health challenges. Or during World War II, later, the Public Health Service and the newly formed National Research Council pioneered methods of supporting and coordinating academic research to tackle such wartime problems as venereal disease among soldiers, submarine detection, and chemical warfare. Following the war, reformers, inspired by such coordinated research, sought to establish a new chemo-medical institute to promote scientific research for medical purposes. Failing to find adequate financial support from private companies and philanthropies, these reformers turned reluctantly to the federal government, resulting in the Randstell Act of 1930, which expanded and renamed the hygienic laboratory to the National Institute of Health. The Second World War would see a dramatic expansion of federal science with a large-scale mobilization of research, epitomized most famously by the development of radar, mass production of penicillin, and the creation of the atom bomb. Federal science would continue to expand after the war with the creation of the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation, all of which fund basic science. And federal science would expand further still during the Cold War, especially after Soviet Russia's launch of Sputnik I in 1957, the first successful artificial earth satellite. This was another period of bureau building with the growth or creation of such familiar research agencies as NASA and the Advanced Research Project Agency, now known as DARPA. The state's growing interest in science over this century-long period was spurred by crises, in particular disease and war, and it must be admitted the sometimes self-serving efforts of reformers who sought to take advantage of these crises to implement reforms they had sought all along. Yet the growth of the scientific establishment could not fairly be described as a ploy by which scientists duped the state into plundering public coffers for public, for private gain, as is sometimes suggested by critics. The emerging partnership between science and the state was entered into reluctantly with mutual suspicion on both sides. It was through grappling with the practical problems that clearly fell within the purview of the state from mapping the country's coasts, waterways, and expanding frontier lands to protecting public health and providing for the national defense that science and the state came to recognize their mutual dependence. The resulting system, though it can tout many successes, is far from perfect. Our purpose here is not to defend every aspect of it. But rather than seeking to sever science from the state, a politically impossible goal, even if it were desirable, we should instead seek to reform the federal scientific establishment, ensuring that there is ample support for basic science should be a key aspect of any program for reform. So to conclude my opening remarks, I'd like to make an important caveat to my argument. Neither the claim that basic science enables technological innovation, nor that the state should therefore fund basic science should be confused with what is sometimes called in policy circles the linear model of innovation. This is the idea that technological innovation follows a strict one directional process that moves from basic research to application to commercialization, thus stimulating economic growth. Despite remaining prevalent in economic and policy circles, this assembly line picture of innovation is rightly rejected by nearly all scholars today as simplistic and misleading. The relationship between science and innovation is not linear. First, hardly all technological innovation depends on basic scientific discoveries, as we saw earlier, nor are all scientific discoveries nascent technological innovations. The term basic is potentially misleading here as it implies that all scientific discoveries form the basis of something else. But this is an excessively narrow and instrumentalist conception of science. Copernicus's achievement in developing a heliocentric model of the cosmos did not provide the basis of any technological innovations, even though it ushered in the scientific revolution. Even in those instances where basic science does enable technological innovation, however, the relationship between the two is hardly straightforward, but rather complex and dynamic. Science and technology, knowledge and use, discovery and invention, these often feedback on each other in mutually beneficial and unpredictable ways. Thus, while Bertelet's scientific discoveries enabled the synthesis of ammonia, it was the recognition of the practical consequences that pushed chemists to solve this problem, spurred not only by scientific interest but also by the potential practical benefits. Moreover, the problem was solved through collaboration between scientists, engineers, academics, people in industry, entrepreneurs working across time and space in different countries, fields and institutional settings and over decades. Something similar could be said about the invention of the computer, radio, radar, atomic energy and modern vaccines. Yet though we should reject the linear model, we should not reject the idea that science, including basic science, can enable technological innovations that benefit the public. That would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The importance of science to technological innovation and thus to economic growth is arguably one of the most important socioeconomic changes of the last 200 years. Basic science is neither always necessary nor by itself sufficient for technological innovation but it nevertheless can enable and has enabled technological innovations that benefit the public in almost incalculable ways, as with the synthesis of ammonia or modern vaccines. The state should not fund basic science because turning on the spigot of federal funding will inevitably produce wondrous innovations that will pay off economically. The state should fund basic science rather to ensure that there is a flourishing ecosystem of discovery invention and that should include ample support for the kind of research that, though not undertaken primarily for practical benefits, nevertheless can produce such benefits, albeit sometimes many years later. Thank you. If you've got some turns, Keely, turn, take it away. So thank you, Gene, for having invited me. Thank you, Tony. Of course, I agree with almost everything Tony said. I don't need to be persuaded that basic science is important but what Tony has omitted is the concept of crowding out. The assumption behind his arguments and the assumption behind most people's assumptions are that when the government funds basic science or indeed applied science, it's adding to what the private sector would otherwise have done. But the evidence, unfortunately, is that when governments fund science, basic or applied, what it actually does is it crowds out the private funding. I'm going to back it up a little bit closer. Oh, sorry. Let me repeat that. So the assumption that many people make is that when government funds basic science or applied science, you end up with additional science in addition to what the private sector would have funded. The tragedy is the converse that when governments fund science, applied or pure, it crowds out the private funding. And I'll explain how that works. First though, a quick note of the history and many of the facts I shall give are the same as Tony's but they will have a different interpretation. So... The story starts with Francis Bacon in 1605, 400 years ago, an English scholar who suggested that governments should fund science because the Spanish and the Portuguese had discovered the New World because their governments funded science and therefore the English should do the same. The problem with the argument is that it wasn't true and that the Spanish and Portuguese didn't fund pure science. And the person who demolished that argument was Adam Smith. The most important event of 1776, as everybody knows, was the publication of a book. There was another event which was unfortunate but we're not going to go into that. What Smith showed from particularly his friendship with James Watt, who was his neighbor in Glasgow who basically made the steam engine work was what James Watt had done, an unlettered technician, is he'd invented the separate condenser for the steam engine which turned the steam engine into the iconic instrument of the Industrial Revolution and it was contained within the patent, the first law of thermodynamics. So what Watt had done is he had discovered the first law of thermodynamics out of his work in transforming the world's economy, actually. And so Adam Smith came up with the theory and which he showed comprehensively in the wealth of nations that governments should not fund science because it was unnecessary because actually universities depended on industry. And we have now one of the great natural experiments of all humanity because for the last 300 or 400 years, the Europeans under autocratic regimes funded science very, very generously. The French and German governments funded science. The British and the American governments inspired by Adam Smith did not. And that changes, and here I agree, it's only after the Second World War. But now we have a 300-year span. We have laissez-faire science with the British and the Americans and we have GBG's government funded very generous science in France and Germany. Well, who creates the Industrial Revolution? The British, who creates the Second Industrial Revolution? The Americans. Who doesn't even converge on Britain and France, or on Britain and America, let alone overtake? France and Germany. As late as 1940, the Germans, for example, their GDP per capita was only two-thirds of that of the United States just as it had been 200 years earlier. Everything changes in 1940, 1957. The American government did fund science before the Second World War, but they funded, and it's very important to have a distinction between the two types of funding model. You have the mission science model and you have the linear science model. Now, the mission science model we could all support. And this is when the American government decides to fund the Co-survey or the Library of Congress. If these institutions, these missions need research, sure, they'll fund it. What happened after Sputnik particularly was the American government did convert to the linear model. That was Vannevar Bush's book, Science the Endless Frontier, and contrary, here I do slightly disagree with Tony, there were some scientists who were skeptical, but absolutely, this was Bush leading a group of scientists saying to the American government, we are terrified that you'll do to us what you've always done. So until the Second World War, the American government funded mission research, things like its missions, and it funded research during wartime. So the National Academy of Sciences was created in the Civil War, for example, but at the end of these wars, it stopped funding. And indeed, Vannevar Bush's huge organization, the OSRD, the Organization for Scientific Research and Development, was disbanded in 1947. So you have this enormous amount of science being funded that's disbanded because until the end of the Second World War, the American government funded only mission research. Bush tried to persuade the government that they needed pure science in the linear model that Tony is now very skeptical about, but for many years, everyone believed that that was the way forward. And so the American government started to fund pure science. So let's have my one and only slide. The slide? Yeah. So here you have, from 1820 to the present day, actually for various reasons, 1985, but that'll do. And these are log curves. So on the left, you have rates of GDP per capita growth in the United States of America since 1820. And as you can see, GDP per capita has grown about 2% a year for the last 200 years. Fine, Britain looks pretty similar. Germany and France, by the way, don't look nearly as healthy because they don't converge. On the right, oh, can I have my slide back, please? Guys? On the right, I'll talk you through, is the American government after the, thank you, after launch of Sputnik, a log curve, remember, this is log curve federal expenditure on basic science. And it goes from in 19, fixed dollars, it doesn't matter what year, 20 million in 1940. Today, it's 20 billion, in fixed dollars. The expansion by the American government into pure science has been explosive. Three orders of magnitude, such as pure science in America until recently was dominated by the federal government. And the consequences to economic growth? Well, you can see for yourself. The dip, by the way, is the Great Depression. I'm not claiming that science, well, I am actually, that science caused the Great Depression. I'm just pointing out that that's what that dip is. So we've done the experiment. And the American government pouring money into pure science has done precisely nothing to rates of economic growth. You can take it away now if you don't like the slide. There are no fewer than eight important American government studies showing that the government funding of pure science has done absolutely nothing for American technological or economic growth. So I will just mention their names. In 1969, the director of defense, research and engineering, engages in a project known as Project Hindsight, showing that the American government invention in pure science has done absolutely nothing for military capacity in the States. In 74 in 1980, two years, the National Planning Association, which is a think tank but very closely associated with the government rather like Rand, does a series of studies on productivity growth and concludes strong correlation of private funding of R&D with economic and productivity growth, no benefits from the public funding. In 1986, the Office of Technology Assessment, one thing that Tony and I agree on, it's a shame that office has gone. But in 1986, the Office of Technological Assessment says that the private return on R&D is 20%, there is no public return on R&D. I, public funded R&D, no economic benefit. In both 1991 and 1998, the Congressional Budget Office finds exactly the same thing. I quote, returns to private R&D are high, those to federal R&D low to non-existent. Actually, if you look at the data, non-existent. In 2003, the OECD, not only does the OECD find that there's no government funding that stimulates economic growth, it finds that government funding inhibits economic growth. This is across the entire OECD countries over a 25 year period. Government funding of R&D actually slows economic growth as an empirical observation. And in 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only private R&D generates income. So, why? Why is it that all these empirical studies performed by government agencies show that the government funding of R&D and indeed basic science has no economic benefit? It's because of crowding out. And in 2018, a paper by two Italian economists, Archibucci and Filippetti, they also looked at the OECD over a 25 year period and they chronicled this crowding out. Now, this paper's interesting because it's written by two men who really dislike me and the paper is full of really unpleasant remarks about me which I could have done without. But what they show, they blame me, what they show is that in 1964, the American government funded two thirds of all R&D in America, two thirds. If you're a Midwest company wanting to do research, you wrote a grant to the Commerce Department, absolutely insane. And since 1964, this has now gone down and today the American government, like OECD governments everywhere, the American government funds only 20% of American R&D and half of that is defense, only 10% of American civil R&D is funded by the state. In that time, there therefore has been across the OECD a fall in the public funding of R&D. I could give you the data, but let me just say that. But the consequence has been a growth in the private funding threefold. For every dollar, the public sector has withdrawn from the funding of research, the private sector has put in three extra dollars. More than compensate. Now Archie Bujji and Filippetti say admit that this is crowding out. They don't pretend it's not crowding out. They claim it's a bad thing. We could go into that that they are, of course, wrong. But the reason is why? No, it is a good thing because it's where the industries, where technology comes on. What is the mechanism of crowding out? The mechanism is scientific quality. If the government creates universities that all the best scientists go to and the best scientists go to universities, I mean, we're all used to now Silicon Valley and that sort of thing. We all understand that good scientists can create companies and do. Nonetheless, the majority of scientists are like Jane Austen. They're looking for fame. They go to universities. If you take the best scientists out of the market and put them into universities, you leave industry with a lot so good scientists. And therefore industry doesn't get a return on its investment. And therefore it looks for other ways of making money, marketing or something. And so the government funding of research, which others, not me, I mean, I have also shown it, but the point is others have shown, creates crowding out three to one. It's a very serious crowding out. Takes the best scientists out of industry and therefore damages rates of economic growth. Now we are told that governments have to fund science because the market disincentivizes companies from doing science. So the myth that we are told by the economists is if I do science, I'll be disincentivized because my discovery, which costs me a lot of money to make, Tony will take for nothing in his company. And therefore for him, the discovery is free. For me, it costs a lot of money. Therefore he will outperform me. I will go bust and he'll make all the profit. That is the story the economists tell. And it is a story based on an utter myth. That assumes that knowledge is what's called explicit, but actually knowledge is tacit. There's no way that I say making iPhones and going to be competed with, except by other companies, making mobile phones. And they are capable of copying my research. Only by the research they themselves have done over the previous 20, 30 years, which has given the expertise to copy my research and vice versa. So the costs of copying you can show are actually 100% on average. The marginal costs are less than 100% but the average or the total cost is 100%. It costs as much to copy on average as it does to innovate. So it's just a myth that the market doesn't reward science. Actually, the company that says that it's not gonna do fun science because it's worried about its discoveries being copied by other people should be told, fine, don't do science and see how long it takes you before you go bankrupt, not very long. So, to summarize, the American government didn't fund science. Here, Tony and I agreed on the facts until the Second World War and particularly Sputnik when the Americans suddenly thought, oh my heavens, we're going to be overtaken by the Russians. That really was the belief. And what is interesting is what the American government funded in 1957 because it's exactly as Tony says, NASA and ARPA, now known as DARPA. The American government recognized that the linear model, the National Science Foundation model had failed, the Russians were in space. And so they went back to the traditional model of mission science. When you have a particular mission, governments can actually deliver on that mission. Governments can actually deliver on atom bombs. They can deliver on operation warp speed. Give a government a mission and it can succeed. The myth, the dangerous myth, is that the government funding of pure science through the linear model is itself a stimulus to economic growth. Someone whom Tony and I both know wrote in the magazine that Tony once edited New Atlantis that the linear model is a lie. And it is, it's a lie. It's been promoted heavily by governments. It's promoted by, because they want the glory. When the human genome was sequenced in the year 2000, who announced it to the world? Bill Clinton, the great patron of science. So governments want to fund science. Industry wants to fund science because it thinks, wrongly, it's getting money back for its taxes. It thinks it's getting a subsidy. Scientists want government to fund science because they don't want to work for industry. They want to work in a peer reviewed system so they basically fund themselves according to the science they want to do. And the general public believes somehow that governments should fund science because we all want to see programs on Netflix about penguins and things. What has actually happened is that that model has failed. The government knows it's failed. There's been this fantastic collapse in the government funding of research and development. And the consequence has only been an accelerated rate of economic growth. Thank you very much. Tony, seven and a half minutes for your battle. You can take the podium or do it for me or whatever you want. Thank you. So there's actually quite a bit of agreement, I think, between Dr. Kealy and myself. And I just want to point to a few points of important disagreement. Yeah, can you hear me? Okay. So just to start, and maybe come back to this if I have time. If you'll notice that in the course of Terrence's remarks, he moved from science enabling technological innovation to science stimulating economic growth as measured in aggregate statistics and so forth. And here he and I are in a lot of agreement. I think the arguments on behalf of that model and the linear model associated with it are not persuasive. I tend to read the economics literature a little bit more ambivalently, but I'm a philosopher by training not an economist. So I leave that to the economists. But the argument that I've been making in which our proposition, I believe, is about is the relationship between science and technological innovation, which is connected with economic growth, but a distinguishable point. I want to make a few, I won't come back to that if I have time, but I want to make a few historical observations. So we do agree on a lot of the same facts, but there are some important differences, not only in interpretation, but also in some factual details that I think are important. So Dr. Keely and I are in a complete agreement that the first wave of industrialization can't be explained by federal science funding. I would go further and say it can't be explained by science really at all. Where we disagree is about how to interpret this fact. So I don't think we can draw useful inferences from England in 1790 about federal science policy today any more than private enterprises today could draw lessons about industrial research policy from private enterprises in 1790. There was no research in industrial research in 1790, just as there was no federal scientific establishment or even any research universities in the modern sense. So to pose the question adequately, we have to look at the changes that happened in the intervening time, which is what I pointed to in my opening remarks. A few other historical observations. While it is certainly true that federal science funding exploded with World War II and increased after. It is not accurate to say that the federal government in the United States didn't fund science before that, nor would I suggest is it entirely accurate to say that the government didn't fund any basic science. Certainly the majority of that research was mission research as Dr. Keely described it. But as I described in my opening remarks, it was through these missions through the practical concerns of the state that the federal government became increasingly involved in basic research already by the early 20th century. I would argue even before that. By which I mean funding academic research, including through a system of grants and aid pioneered by the National Board of Health, developed later by the Public Health Service, beginning with the Cancer Institute on Harvard's campus that was later integrated into the National Institutes of Health. And the forerunner of the National Institute of Health, which I mentioned, and it's worth noting I think that health research didn't figure prominently in Dr. Keely's opening remarks either. Health research by the time of the outbreak of World War II was not supported on nearly the scale that it came to be after the Second World War, but did receive for the time quite generous federal support and was already moving toward basic research. Part of the difficulty here is that parsing the distinction between basic and other kinds of research is actually quite difficult. And so it often turns out whether the government or industry is funding practically oriented research, it can wind up needing to fund basic research. Okay, the other thing I would note, something that was omitted in the discussion of the post-war period, is that while the federal government did absolutely increase federal funding for basic research, it never has, including during that period, devoted anywhere close to the majority of its federal funding to basic science. If you look at the post-war period, basic science makes up a small fraction of overall federal R&D. And so if we're gonna distinguish between mission research before World War II, we have to distinguish between mission research after World War II. Most research in the post-war period, as it still does today, comes in the federal context, is military. In the post-war decades, it was associated with NASA, which was mainly a large-scale engineering project to build rockets and put people on the moon. So this is a, again, this is not to deny an absolute number is that the funding for basic did increase. Okay, I wanna, with my remaining few minutes here, pivot back to the question of economics and technological innovation. So we're in complete agreement that the linear model is inadequate. I also would affirm Dr. Keely's argument about science and scientific knowledge not being mere information, but requiring tacit knowledge. There are some, I think, subtle differences between us on this, maybe we can get into in Q&A. But the main thing I wanna emphasize here is that my argument is not premised on an economic one based on an assumption about public goods or the linear model or crowding out or crowding in. The examples that I gave were historical. Might dismiss them as mere anecdotes, but they're very significant anecdotes. To dismiss them as anecdotes would be like dismissing putting a man on the moon as a mere anecdote. And what these examples show and illustrate is that the timeline and the predictability of the way in which basic science can enable technological innovation. First, the timeline is enormously long by the standards of industry, and frequently even by government, and that the domains from which those innovations may develop are very hard to predict in advance. So if we just look again, George Boole's discovery of binary algebra in the 1840s, enabling Claude Shannon to apply that to computing in the 1930s, it's almost a century. And that wasn't even the beginning of the modern computer yet. A similar timeline between Baratale's discovery of the composition of ammonia, 1785, to the synthesis of ammonia over a century later. It would be unrealistic to expect private industry to consider those sorts of timelines in making its research priorities. And this is one of the primary reasons why it is difficult for the private sector to sustain basic science beyond its commercial interests, not for any reasons relating to a crowding out. The other piece I might add here in conclusion is that the priorities of industrial research do not always align with some public interests for why we might want science. Health being an obvious example. The private sector does lots of health-related research, but the public sector can play a role in prioritizing certain areas of research that might be less immediately profitable for industry. So I'll leave it there. Maybe through question and answer, we can get into some more detail. Thanks. Seven and a half minutes. We're about off from you. Take it away, Terrence. So of course we're agreed that basic science is important. That's not the issue. Industry does much more basic science than I was going to call him Tony, perhaps I was calling him Dr. Mills. He kept on calling me Dr. Keely. Industry funds on average, 7% of its budgets are spent on basic science. When you see how vast industry's budgets are, 7% of industries are indeed on basic science. These are huge budgets. Moreover, it's been known for 20, 30, 40 years even. There's a direct correlation between the amount of money a company spends on pure and basic science and its subsequent profits. Pure science is very profitable to industry, and Nathan Rosenberg in particular wrote a paper explaining that. Companies spend all their time copying each other. That's what they do, and so they should. And the best people for copying other people's science are turns out to basic scientists. We can go into why that is. Let's just accept that as an empirical fact. And you won't keep basic scientists unless you allow them to do basic science. And so companies end up funding an astonishing amount of basic science simply because it's so commercially valuable. Now, Tony talked about the unexpected nature of science, but that happens in industries. Well, Bell Labs, for example, Bell Labs discovered the science of radio astronomy because their telephone engineers kept on the longer the line, the more the interference. In the end, they realized it came from the stars, Nobel Prize. Bell Labs discovered the background cosmic radiation from the Big Bang. They went looking for it. It's just a consequence of the applied science they were doing, and we could carry on with that. We get anecdotes from Tony, and they're fine, but they're anecdotes the other way around. The aeroplane was discovered by private workers who beat the state-funded workers, and we could continue with such anecdotes as well. Anecdotes are dangerous, which is why I like to try personally to go for the systematic economic data, which shows very clearly, I would suggest, that the government funding of basic science does nothing for economic growth, but does crowd out the private funding. So rather than take up any more time, having made these points, I shall just finish with one little point. Tony started with Fritz Haber who discovered nitrogen, and of course it's very important, but Fritz Haber's wife killed herself because she was married to a monster because thanks to the German government, he also invented the gases that murdered thousands of soldiers on the Western Front, and actually, and there's a paradox here, and a cruel paradox here, because he was Jewish, he actually launched the industry that led to horrors in the Second World War. That was government-funded. When Fritz Haber was working in the private sector, he did fabulous work. The moment he was corrupted by state funding. Thank you. Well, we now go to the Q&A portion of the evening, and people are welcome to line up and ask questions. Let me take moderator's prerogative to lob a question at each of you, and then have the other comment on it.  Just want to make it clear that he started with something involving agriculture and discovering nitrogen and all the rest. You do acknowledge, I take it that, according to you at least, if you can cherry pick some anecdotes that do justify even the linear model, that that is possible.  Government did it and then it led to something good. That has happened. You acknowledge that. Do I talk into this? Yes. Is this work? Yes, of course. When government has funded as much research and development as it has funded, something good is going to come out of it. The question is, would more good have come out of it if the government hadn't funded and therefore researchers had been allowed to work within industry, which is much more applied to economic growth. And I would argue that the answer to that is yes.  Never forget that one of the few missions the American government funded for many years was agricultural research. Why? Because of the problems of overproduction. American farmers were poor for more than a century because the private sector inventing things like barbed wire, whatever, or the cotton gin made agriculture too productive. And when it becomes too productive, there's no profit for individuals. There is no evidence that agriculture has ever needed government funding other than pacifying bloody-minded voters who will vote against you because of the fact that they aren't happy about their overproductivity and therefore lack of profits. I see. Any comment from you, Tony, about that question? Sure, yeah, I would maybe disagree but in a way that might seem to support you in a certain way. I actually don't think there are many historical examples that support the linear model. So the examples that I gave are examples where scientific discovery in unpredictable ways and over a long period of time enable technological innovations, that's true. But that's, if that's the linear model, then I suppose I would endorse it. But the linear model, as it's understood, is a very narrow conception of how the piece is involved in innovation interrelate. It's a one-directional process, basic science happens over here. It has nothing to do with practical application and it is sufficient to generate technological innovation almost effortlessly that leads to commercial application and economic growth. And I think that model doesn't hold up and one of the reasons why it doesn't hold up is that the historical record is much, much more complicated. That's why I would differentiate between the linear model, which we should all reject. And your good friend, Dave Edgerton, has even written on this. It's so implausible as an account of innovation that there's an entire field of science studies devoted to figuring out how anyone even came to believe it. And in fact, there's not a lot of evidence that anyone, in fact, ever really believed it, at least maybe outside of some economists. So we should all reject the linear model, but that should not lead us to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as I was arguing. And also go further and say scientific discovery, including scientific discovery that might be pursued for purely non-practical or different practical reasons can nevertheless generate technological innovations. And that is a reason why the federal government should support it. And then just one question for Tony and then we'll go to questions from the audience. As you know, really the key phrase from Terence is crowding out that you're implying in his view that government funding can only add rather than subtract. Let me introduce a related question about something, and you're maintaining that for profit companies in their very nature are not going to invest a lot in basic research. Beyond that, however, my question to you is we have, I looked up the numbers just the other day, a half a trillion dollars in official philanthropy in 2020, last year, a half a trillion dollars and much of it went to medical research. The philanthropic dollar seems to like research. Surgeonly, a lot of rich people would love a cure for cancer. I think we could have raised a lot of money for COVID vaccine and then the government wouldn't have protected those companies against lawsuits. So the question is, do you acknowledge the possibility that for profit companies actually do more than you're implying and therefore there is a little bit of crowding out and then introducing the separate question which is that philanthropy really likes research and despite the fact that we think the government is doing it all, philanthropy is immense. So that's my two basic challenges to you, could you comment? Sure, yeah, so maybe starting with the second one. Private philanthropy does now and has for a long time supported lots of research, including basic research. That's absolutely true. I think to answer the question again, I would look to historical examples. So if we look at the reasons why and the events that led to the creation of the National Institutes of Health, it's quite interesting because what happened was, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, a group of reformers inspired by wartime research is actually speaking of the dirty underbelly of science funding, they were particularly inspired by two things, which was research on venereal disease and the building of chemical weapons. But the model of coordinated research which was the federal government providing an infrastructure and ultimately funding for academic research to solve a practical problem inspired reformers after World War I to use it to build a chemo-medical research institute as they called it and they wanted it to be private. The scientific community wanted it to be private, the industry initially was very interested, it wanted it to be private and even many of the statesmen that they spoke to wanted it to remain a private institution. They were unsuccessful in getting sufficient private support to launch the institute, including from private philanthropists and from industry and really only quite reluctantly turned to the federal government because of Ransdell, that particular senator who was very bullish about public involvement here and that led to the creation of NIH. There are other examples like that from history which I think illustrate not that the private sector or private philanthropy won't fund research but sometimes there is a misalignment between what the goals might be and the federal government in those instances can play a very valuable role. Comment from you, Terence, on that question and answer. Well, I'm going to quote Martha Peck who's the director of the Boroughs Welcome Fund who back in 1993, I think she's still running it by the way, she said, we've seen foundations move away from medical research because the government has moved in. So even foundations recognize that when the state is moved in, they'll find other things to fund. This is a classic example of crowding out. Actually, Tony and I have really drilled down today. We agree on practically everything apart from the point that you've identified. It does come out to crowding out. Crowding out is real, it happens and that is why it's such a damaging thing and that is where Tony and I disagree because Tony, I don't know what your position on crowding out is but I've never seen you talk about it or write about it ever and I would argue in the nicest possible way though I didn't like it the way you looked at me when you, significantly, when you were talking about venereal disease research. I don't know what my wife has told you. I think that that is the hole I would pick and I'm being very courteous, I hope, but that's the hole I'd pick in your argument. I think you need to address crowding out. That's what I would say, I hope you're not offended. Okay, do you want to say something? Yeah, because that was the second part that I didn't get to you. So I think crowding out is certainly real. I don't deny that that can happen. I think part of the difficulty, I guess there are two challenges. Well, maybe at three. I do read the economics literature differently than you. You can find economists that make more persuasive versions of arguments for federal support than the Nelson and Error arguments that are very easy, I think, to criticize. That said, I don't think it's fundamentally an economic argument, I think it's an argument of how we understand the state's role in the nature of scientific enterprise. So I don't draw from economics literature ultimately to make my arguments. I think part of the challenge is how we define research, so there are different areas of research, and the relationship between basic and applied is quite slippery, and I think that's one of the challenges here, is that when the federal government is involved in an area of research, it can wind up funding lots of basic research. NSF is the only agency in the federal government whose sole purpose, more or less, is to fund basic research. We probably disagree about how good that model is for different reasons, but it's important to keep in mind that it's one agency, and its budget is tiny compared to the overall federal research establishment. And many other agencies do today and have historically moved into basic research, not entirely, but because of the recognition of its practical importance. And so I think it's more a question of what the area of research is, and the innovations in question, and how the incentives align in different contexts. I think it's very difficult to generate a kind of formula to what we can apply to every instance. And I think the other challenge is that aggregate statistics can be very misleading in lots of ways. The examples I gave generated all kinds of benefits that are difficult to capture in all sorts of economic terms. And I completely agree with you that there are a number of studies, including one by the Office of Technology Assessment from the early 1990s, which shows that traditional economic measures are not adequate to capture the effects of federal spending. That report does not conclude, therefore, that the federal government shouldn't play a role. It also points out in that same report that's worth adding that private industry doesn't use those very measures itself because they are inadequate. And if we look at aggregate statistics, we also find sort of aggregate facts which could be interpreted in lots of different ways. One I'm curious to hear what you think about is that in the post-war period, when the federal government was at its peak of federal funding, including not quite at its peak of federal funding, basic, but basic science, if you look over time, as a share of federal R&D is more or less constant. It's gone up in recent decades overall, but it's never been very large. Actually, applied science has never been that large either. The lion's share goes to development research, especially by the military, but this is true even outside that. But if you look at then private industry, private industry now spends relatively large amounts on basic science compared to the historical record, although it's about 7%, it's self-reported data, there may be issues about how to classify it. But if you look at the post-war decades, it spent about the same percentage on basic science at a moment when the federal government was by far the largest funder of research. Now, one might infer from that that there's no crowding out going on there. My instinct is to say that we need to drill down deeper than those aggregate data and to get a better sense of what's really going on. You could take one minute to respond, but just for a minute, or do you want to pass, Dennis? Well, very quick. One minute. Very, very quickly. Since Tony's agreed with me, I want to agree with Tony on one thing, which is there is a role for the government funding of science. I do accept that, but it's defensive, it's protecting us from industry and other potential bad actors. I mean, we want a democratic government to be fully equipped to understand the dangers of AI, for example. It's an appalling example, and I very much regret having to say it, but it is absolutely true that the person who led the research that showed us that cigarettes cause lung cancer of all loathsome people was Adolf Hitler. So governments do have a role in challenging industry. So I want to agree with you to that limit, but let's not pretend it's going to give economic growth because it just doesn't. First question, I'd ask you like a question, don't have to identify yourself. Take a break. Go ahead. So I have one question, but in two parts. Oh, what's that I'm saying? One question in two parts. Is this okay? One question in two parts. Okay. First part goes to Mr. Mills. So you gave us lots of exams of successful science, successful research, and it kind of gave us false impression that government funded science always so successful. If you listen, for example, to Senator Rand Paul, he sometimes gives speech about unsuccessful government funded research, which is ridiculous. Not only it's unsuccessful, but it's wasteful. So what makes you think that if we would leave all this money which government takes from the private sector and makes all this research, and the private sector will do instead this research, it will not be more successful, better research, better science, earlier discoveries, and so on. This is one. And two. That's your question. Fine. Your question is. Second part to. Forgive me, you asked the question and that was very good question. Your question was doesn't government often engage in unsuccessful research? Did I summarize that correctly? Yes. Yes, okay. And I guess the challenge is for Tony to answer. Sure, yeah. Well, I'll make it even harder for myself maybe by quibbling with the first part of your question. So the historical examples I gave are not examples of the federal government funding science and then generating technological innovation. We'd have to look case by case whether Bertolet was receiving, he did receive funding from the French state. There are a lot of different actors in different countries. The French government that funded Bertolet doesn't exist anymore, because a lot of things happened in France in the 19th century. So that's not the purpose of the historical examples I gave. The purpose of those examples was to illustrate the complex ways in which basic scientific discoveries can enable technological innovation often over very long periods of time. And this gets to the second part of your question. Certainly true that the federal government could fund wasteful things in science as in other domains. I think the challenge is what do we define as wasteful? So if we had, let's say the federal government had decided to give a grant to George Boole in the 1840s to do research on mathematical logic. Well, we couldn't have done that actually because mathematical logic didn't really exist yet as a discipline, but to do whatever it was that he was doing. And then five years later, 10 years later, 20 years later, 50 years later had said, well, was there a good return on investment? The answer would probably have been no. There was certainly awareness of the utility of what his work and related work could imply. Efforts to build calculating machines were already underway by Stanley Jevins in the 1870s or 80s of memory serves, partly inspired by Boole's work. Leibniz had tinkered with building a calculating machine because he had intuited some of the discoveries that Boole had made much, much later. So the idea of something practical was around, but no one had done anything really to show for it until the 1930s. And even then, if we had given a grant to Claude Shannon and said, see if you can make use of George Boole's research and come back in five years, there would have been no computer yet, really. At least nothing like the computers that were developed by the federal government in the US and by the British government during World War II. So it's very difficult to apply a simple ROI metric on scientific research, particularly basic science. And that's one of the reasons why I think the state does have a role to play in the long term. Comment, Sharon? Very briefly, one of the things is that government agencies resist audit. Michael Puree, who is a professor of economics at MIT, has tried repeatedly to audit how effective DARPA or ARPA is. They just won't give him the data. And ARPAs had lots of failures to its name, like, for example, Project Agile in Vietnam. And yes, I agree with Tony about some of the examples he's given, but the British government was unbelievably generous to Babbage in the middle of the 19th century with his difference engines, a fortune they gave him, an absolute fortune and produced absolutely nothing. Next question. This is a question for both speakers. In my experience as an academic research scientist. The latter is in my cut, yes. Basic government funding of basic science research is much more likely to make that basic science research prone to politicization and also to scientific fraud, fraudulent data, fraudulent methodologies, as compared to basic science research funded by the private sector. I think a clear example of this is climate science research over the past 40, 50 years. I'm curious if either of you have any data to speak to that in more general terms. Well, let's have Terence go first for the moment, yes. Well, you're quite right, of course. And I would refer you to an essay that you know very well in New Atlantis by that Arizona State University academic Daniel Sarevitz, a very accessible essay. It's on the web, and he's called How to Save Science as something he absolutely recognizes. Saving science, I believe, Scott. Thank you. He absolutely recognizes the point that you've made that science has been horribly politicized and actually hugely damaged. The example I would give is food research. And I once wrote a book called Breakfast as a Dangerous Meal, in which it's not really nutrition advice. It is the longest lasting example I know of of non-reproducible science. For over 100 years, nutrition scientists, many of them on government grants, have written rubbish about breakfast for all sorts of reasons, but fat and all the rest of it. So you're absolutely right. And actually my guess is that Tony will agree with me.  Yeah, we agree on this. So we haven't really, one thing that we didn't get into, maybe we can get into more, we're getting into it now, is the problems with the current system. So my argument is not that the way that the federal government currently funds science is perfect and should continue as such. I would even go farther and say, it's frequently the case in public policy debates and here Terence and I agree, that in the science policy realm at least, the reflex is, well, these Asians just need more money. And it's an important fact about the creation of the federal scientific establishment that it transforms scientists into claimants, among others, for public resources. That's just a sociological description. And so we should take the arguments that they make with a grain of salt. But that doesn't mean that all of what I said in my opening remarks is therefore not true. The question about how to make the federal scientific establishment function better, which is a very important public policy question, is one that we can and should have. What I would argue, particularly to your question about incentives and encouraging of perverse research incentives that can generate fraud, or maybe fraud is certainly a problem, but more frequent than that are research practices that are frankly just shoddy, that generate unreliable research. I guess I would say two more quick things about this. First, the areas of science that are most plagued by replication problems are not basic sciences really. They are, well, we could debate about how to describe what kind of research psychology is. But psychology is where the replication issue originated at least in the early 2000s. There are sciences in which there's a very important and very peculiar role for statistical methods and debates about how to apply and misapply those, go back all the way to the 1950s. Biomedical research is certainly impacted, but quantum physics isn't having a replication crisis. So I think that's an important datum that we would want to use if we're gonna try to generate a fuller explanation about what's going on here. The second thing I would say is that there is a good argument to be made, and I would make it if this were a different debate, that the way the federal government is funding so-called basic science in many instances doesn't really amount to basic science and for precise of the reasons that you've intuited. There's a passage in Michael Polany, a figure that I'll probably come back to later, who shared my viewpoint. He says somewhere that if Western governments adopted the Soviet model of asking for a certificate of social utility before funding scientists, it would be a disaster for the scientific enterprise. That's exactly what science agencies do now, including basic scientific agencies like the NSF, almost literally have a certificate of social utility. And so there's a whole debate about this going on in science and policy circles and people have different viewpoints of politics. I've come, I think, to an emerging agreement that this is not the best way to go about things, but this isn't a problem with basic science per se. This is a problem with the institutions that we currently have. Okay, next question. Yeah, Terrence, I think the crowd enough argument is very compelling, but isn't that much more of an argument about the way basic science is funded rather than whether it is funded isn't a policy such as say the research and development tax credit basically science funded, but through the private sector and not crowding out but the total opposite? Well, the trouble with tax credits is twofold. First, there's an awful lot of fiddly. The moment you have tax credits, company accountants suddenly discover that everything is R&D and therefore can be tax credited and that is a real problem. But the other problem is you assume that there's a problem with R&D that somehow we need more R&D. Actually, it's not at all clear that is the case. There are diminishing returns in capital, there are diminishing returns in labor and actually there are diminishing returns in R&D and you can actually have too much R&D. I've never seen a convincing argument that we actually need tax credits for R&D.  They're not short of money. If they wanted to spend more money on R&D, they easily could. If you look at the budgets of companies like Amazon, what's 45 billion? These companies don't need tax credits. I've never seen an increasing argument that we actually need tax credits for R&D. Come in. The only thing I would add is that we probably in agreement on this that even in the public sector, there's no a priori argument for why budgets should always increase, right? There could be diminishing returns in that domain as well. So the argument for whether the federal government should fund basic science at all should be distinguished from how much money the federal government should spend on basic science or any other kind of research. Next question. Hi. Wait, you spoke about the discoveries of... Close in the mic. I'm sorry. You spoke about discoveries of nitrogen. You come to the other situation of a person like Lavazier who discovered oxygen where the government itself based on ideology executed him. And then you have in the Soviet Union, people like Tovhim Lysenko, the issue is not necessarily the loss of money or the crowding out, but governments driven by ideology. How the impact of, what are the impacts of governments driven by ideology pushing science backwards based on whatever the prevailing ideology is of the day? I guess... Yes, it's a great question, it's a problem. So the example you gave the Soviet Union is a good one. The Bukharin who was in charge of Soviet science policy for a certain period before he was, it shouldn't laugh, before he was killed by the Soviet government, he was in charge of a program of central planning, essentially, a five year program that would direct science to socially useful ends. The Soviets didn't believe in the idea of basic science because they thought that science had to be in conformity with party ideology. It was actually in opposition to that very model that people like Michael Polanyi developed the account that I'm giving of federal support for basic science without control in the way that the Soviets did, for example. So there is a real problem there. The question is what kind of state are we talking about? If we're in a liberal state, we're gonna have a very different model for the relationship between science and state than when we would have in a totalitarian state or the Ancien regime. Yes. You got it, yes. But the trouble is the moment the state gets involved, even in America. So in 1917, when America joined the Western Front, American army aeroplanes were all borrowed from the British, the Belgians, and the French. You did not have an American aviation industry. And the reason for that was the Wright brothers had flown as a private enterprise in 1903. And thereafter, the federal government in association, of course, with the Smithsonian Institution, who had received the original grant, until 1917, consistently denied and lied. There's no other word for it, just lied, that the Wright brothers had not developed the aeroplane because they wanted the glory of the aeroplane for themselves so they could get more government research grants. Basically, the moment the government gets involved in anything, it's gonna corrupt even a democratic government like yours. Next question. Hello, guys. Gentlemen, what do you think about the idea that because the government doesn't operate on the profit and loss system, that whatever it spends resources on is necessarily resource destructive? And how do you think that idea applies to this debate? Terrence, take that. Well, hi, I could certainly agree with you. Look, I'm going to agree with you, but I'll let Tony expand on why we both agree with you. Tony, I think you disagree, yeah. Yeah, I think it depends on what our goals are, right? So I think we can point to examples where the federal, I mean, we look at the history of federal science. There are lots of examples of successes. The difficulty is that it can't run a controlled experiment to know what would have happened otherwise. So I think it is hard to, as I said earlier, I think it's very difficult to generally a universal formula that we can apply that's gonna give us the correct policy output in any given context. I think what we can do is look at the instances where the federal government has done things well and where it's done it badly, the private sector has done it well, where it's done it badly. And that is a very complicated picture. There are examples where, which again, we haven't talked a lot about and I'd be curious to hear, Terrence, what you think about federal funding of health research. There are lots of examples of benefits that have come from federal funding of medical and biomedical research that might be very difficult to capture in economic terms, that ultimately have lots of benefits. An example is the work on cancer research in the 1970s, which played an important role in the AIDS epidemic response in the 1980s. No one could have anticipated that work done in the 70s on that would have been helpful for something, a practical problem that was quite different. And then there are lots of other examples that we could look to and there are examples where the relationship between the state and industry and science is quite different. Operation Warp Speed during COVID-19 was one model and World War II provides a plethora of examples of different models. So I don't have a unified field theory that can sort of generate policy outputs. I tend to shy away from that way of thinking about policy. This will have to be the final question. Sorry. I'll come to the party and talk to the guys afterwards.  I would like to look into physics. We have the big colliders and the big... Not microscopes, but the word. What's the word? Telescopes? Telescopes? Looking for the word. Particle accelerators? The big machines to look into the sky and... Telescopes? Thank you. No industry would fund that. And we had a similar example in quantum physics, where only after many, many decades, suddenly the industry is getting interested. So how can we bridge that gap? I think that's a challenge for Terrence. What about the telescopes, Terrence? Just for starters. Name a telescope until recently that wasn't funded by the private sector. The 19th century is full of these great telescopes created by the private sector. And the 20th century is full of radio telescopes invented by Pell Labs and the private sector. The most romantic branch of science is astronomy. And astronomy has never been short of the private funding of science. Who invented space travel? Who invented the space rockets? Mooney Goddard. He invented the rocket. He invented the stages. He invented the liquid fuels. He invented the guiding mechanisms all on Guggenheim money. Astronomy is the one science that doesn't need a penny of public funding because the world is full of multi-millionaires. Look at SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The moment Congress said there are no little green men out there, Silicon Valley just took over and SETI now has more money than it knows what to do with. Don't worry about astronomy. It's always been fine. I'm gonna have to, we've run out of time for the Q&A. Tony, you're gonna do your five minutes rebuttal and you may wanna trash what Terrence just said in your rebuttal. So do you wanna do it from there? I'll do it from here, okay. So I've tried to convince you that the public has a vested interest in sustaining the conditions for a vibrant ecosystem of discovery and invention and that a key part of that is the flourishing culture of basic science. My argument is that the state can, has and should continue to play a vital role in ensuring that basic science receives adequate support. But rather than trying to persuade you of that one more time in my summary remarks here, I wanna pivot a little bit, step back and think about the political context of my argument. And I wanna consider something that I think is particularly topical given our venue, which is whether the argument that I'm making is a statist anti-free market argument, which Terrence is too polite to accuse me of but I think is implied in many of his comments. So my position is that the state should fund basic science. I'm not saying anything here tonight about whether the state should control science. Is that a statist argument? It's worth noting that one of the most important arguments on behalf of the point of view I'm advocating tonight was in fact articulated by a conservative Republican, one who was mentioned earlier, Vannevar Bush, who was in fact arguing against central planning by the state. Bush was the chief of research during World War II. And the success of the research programs he oversaw persuaded many that the state should continue to steer science toward national goals after the war. The American science writer, Waldemar Kempfer captured this idea well in a 1943 article titled, The Case for Planned Research. Laissez-Faire, he wrote, has been abandoned as an economic principle. It should also be abandoned at least as a matter of government policy in science." It was an opposition to this idea backed by New Deal liberals, such as Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia and political allies of President Roosevelt and later Truman, that Bush made his famous case for federal funding of basic science during peacetime. In an influential report titled, Science the Endless Frontier, Bush pointed out that the fundamental scientific discoveries that had made wartime technologies possible, that made mission research successful, predated the war and were generally not the result of any preplanned effort, governmental or otherwise. They were the kinds of basic scientific discoveries that I described in my opening remarks. Though he was President Roosevelt's science advisor, Bush was in fact an anti-New Deal conservative, and he feared the perpetuating the government's wartime and military controls and bureaucratic controls, excuse me, into peacetime would erode scientific freedom and indeed democratic freedom. In trying to sell basic science in its contribution to the public interest, Bush admittedly oversold his case, overemphasized its link to innovation, in cautiously suggesting that technologies will freely flow from pursuit of science for its own sake. Here, Den Sarowitz, whom Terrence mentioned, and I agree. But here Bush could have learned from his contemporary and fellow critic of central planning, the Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi, whom I mentioned earlier. Polanyi had been embroiled in a very similar debate dating back all the way to the 1930s, when an influential group of British scientists inspired by the Soviet method of central planning argued that the state should not only fund science but steer it toward political goals. A fierce critic of Soviet communism, Polanyi rejected this idea on principle, arguing that science is a spontaneous order that cannot be planned in advance. An idea echoed by his friend Friedrich Hayek. For Polanyi, as for Bush, the problem was not state funding of science, but state planning of science, though both recognized that safeguards would be needed to keep such funding from becoming central planning. Polanyi's case for basic science, or as he preferred to call it pure science, was ultimately a political or even a moral one, not an economic one. Advocates of planning, he argued, saw science as little more than an instrument for political power. While conceding that science can and does contribute many practical benefits to society, Polanyi insisted that science be defended on non-utilitarian grounds. Though originally articulated in opposition to Soviet style planning and its Western apologists, this moral case for pure science is no less relevant today with a growing of liberalism on both left and right, which treats scientific ideals as little more than instruments of power. Resisting such instrumentalism, Polanyi advocated a liberal culture in which science could flourish for its own sake, thereby contributing not only to scientific and technological progress, but also to the preconditions of a free society. The state has an important, if limited, role to play here, not in planning science, but as Polanyi himself put it, in providing the opportunities for its pursuit. To do less, he wrote, is to neglect the progress of science. Thank you. Look, I'm a great fan of Michael Polanyi, and actually, Vanivar Bush was a great man as well, but what they wanted was absurd. They wanted, oh, I'm a great fan of Michael Polanyi and of course, Vanivar Bush, but what they wanted was absurd. They wanted government money without accountability to the government. Very famously in 1947, President Truman vetoed the first National Science Foundation bill, because that was exactly what it provided. Government money to scientists without accountability to government. You can't have it. That's for fantasy. It's never gonna happen, and you don't need it. The private sector generates tons of pure science itself. So almost all, not all, but almost all, the pure science that Tony quite rightly says was the basis of the mission science of the Second World War period was actually generated by the market or by philanthropy, or by like unusual individuals in the previous hundred years, not exclusively. Of course, the French and German governments produced something useful, but essentially, the basic science that was being used by British and American scientists after the Second World War had come from the era of laissez-faire in science. So I think the, and I'm just repeating myself now, I think the key is crowding out, and I think there is, I'm not gonna say conspiracy of silence because we're sophisticated people here, and we know that conspiracy theories are wrong, but there's such a total alignment of every vested interest, industry, scientists, universities, politicians, that no one has really addressed properly the question of crowding out, which I think damages, in fact, crowding out is why we can't have the government funding of science. And I will only concede that governments should fund science to challenge industry. It was important, for example, to challenge the tobacco companies. There are times when a democratic polity must have technological capacity of its own, so it can challenge, say, AI. And actually, Tony wrote a really good article a few years ago about the Office of Technology Assessment, which empowered the democratic legislature here in the States against, not just the executive, but also against industry, and there we are agreed. But when it comes to economics and economic growth, and perhaps the old orphan industry, but forgetting disease, but when it comes to economic growth, we must stop thinking that the government funding of pure science, or indeed even applied science, will do anything other than that best, nothing bad, but probably will hold it back because of crowding out. Thank you. I have in my hand the so-called Tutsi role, so please take out your machines and vote yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. Government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological progress by funding basic research. Yes, no, or undecided on that resolution while you're voting. Of course, again, both debaters have kindly consented to come to our after-party. Those of you in particular who didn't get your questions answered, you can see they're both extremely approachable, friendly guys, and so you can ask them your questions. Then that's two blocks uptown. Most of many of you know where it is. Just follow the crowd. 55 Great Jones Street. An announcement about what's to come on our next debate will be February 26th, that's a Monday, and the debate resolution will read, the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist. That will be between two journalists, Eli Lake and Jeremy Hammond. It will be held at a different venue at the Soho Playhouse, way to the west and Soho on Van Damme Street. It's a 168-seat theater that mostly does plays. It does have it downstairs for reception afterwards. I will tell you that perhaps naively, I was surprised to learn this morning that sales for that event are really taking off already. And so I do urge you when you get home tonight, buy your ticket because we may well be sold out. There are those who suggested to me that I try a larger venue than the Soho Playhouse, but I sort of like the idea that it's tucked away in Soho a little bit away from the crowds so that possibly disruptive demonstrators will not know that we're holding the debate. So that's one of the advantages of having in that pocket. It's a very nice stadium seating theater of 168 seats, but the sales are really soaring. So if you want to go, I suggest you buy your ticket as soon as possible. We'll probably have to declare sold out status for that event fairly quickly. Grant, I'm seeing you nod and you, and okay, I have the tissue on my hand. It's gonna be tossed to the winner. Yes, okay. Yes, okay. All right, government must play a role in fostering scientific and technological research by funding basic research. The yes vote went from 28.9 to 27.8, it lost one point. The no vote went from 33 to 68, so it gained 35 points. So the, thank you to both debaters for a very civil debate from which I learned a great deal. Thank you both, Tony and Terrence.


My fellow graduates, 2020 has been a remarkable year, not only for this graduating class, but for our university, for our nation, and for our world. As the class of 2020, we've studied hard and we've learned the rules of our disciplines and our professions. But in 2020, the rules have changed. As we take our first steps beyond the classroom, we have a unique opportunity to rewrite the rules, to shape the future and to create a safe, just and sustainable world. On behalf of all those graduating, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported us on this journey, academic staff, administrative staff and student support services, as well as our families, our friends and our colleagues who all help us to make our dreams possible. This is my fifth university degree, but it's the first one where the graduation speeches will be delivered online. It seems fitting, as like many of you, I completed my entire degree online. This option allowed me to continue my lifelong learning alongside my other work, travel and family commitments. In the final stages of our study this year, we all became online students. Griffith University is a leader in quality digital learning, and this is a great strength as we move into a future where safe and inclusive access to education is more important than ever. In 2020, we've shown that university is not a place. It's a community of learning and discovery. Wherever our next steps take us, we're grateful for our opportunities as Griffith graduates to bring our learning to life in the world and to create a future we can all be proud of. I wish you well on your journey.


So it seems like we have come across a new normal today. In the past few months everything has been upended. Workers who were once told that they're unskilled are now being told that they're essential. Globally hundreds of millions of workers are having a very, very tough time. They're still not getting premium pay to compensate for the extra rest that they're taking. Well the actions we take on our work floors could literally mean life or death for ourselves or our co-workers. What's not new is that bosses always want to cut corners with profits over safety. So the work of Labor Notes is more critical now than it's ever been. You know I've been a chemist worker for over eight years. I've been a union nurse for 10 years. I've been a union member and educator for 14 years. For over 20 years. For 25 years. 35 years. And Labor Notes has been there for me and my union from the beginning. I had no idea of what it was going to be. And when I found it I felt like I'd stumbled on to kind of the thing I'd always been looking for. I've learned almost everything I know about organizing from Labor Notes. Through Labor Notes we have organized a national nurses network. Last year Oakland teachers led a powerful strike. Our zoom that only could handle a hundred people was not good enough. Labor Notes was like we got you. Use ours. That's why I'm going to continue to be a regular supporter of Labor Notes. You know what I'm giving this year and I'll give it next year and the year after. I'm going to be turning my donation into a monthly pledge this year. When I donate to Labor Notes it feels like I'm paying them back for the unconditional supports that they've shown to me. Because we need to stand together now more than ever. Because we need Labor Notes to build power as one labor movement. Because we don't ever win anything alone. We win by standing together. Because I know that this is my home. We're asking you to please join us. Join us. Please join us in making a monthly pledge to help Labor Notes do what it does best. As much as you're able. Every dollar counts. Every dollar does count. And while we know not all are able to give at this time. That's exactly why the rest of us need to. So if you're willing to join me. If Labor Notes means as much to you as it does to me. Go to www.labornotes.org slash donate. Or click on the link below this video. And you can donate. That's that simple. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. And remember that we're all in this together. And long live all workers.