Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture value as a country that is impossible to capture as a company.
The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.
This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.
I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.
For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.
It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.
Do you think Juicero wanted to end up with a bunch of people who learned how to make an outstanding power supply and nothing else to show for it? Did the actual work on the power supply end up being available to anyone else? Maybe we should have an organization that actively wants to invest in things like this, rather than depending on the waste of VCs?
> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.
Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.
The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.
Those STEM grads took years to train through NSF-funded programs. Why would private industry waste their quarterly revenues on STEM grads who will become useful only after 4-6 years of training?
Also, I bet VCs are far _more_ aware than the average Joe of the wide body of worthwhile but uninvestable ideas. After all, they are responsible for saying "no" to them and gently redirecting them to government/patronage/charity while asking to keep in touch in case the field becomes investable (because that's the story of how their boss got rich).
"Value capture problems don't exist because capitalism is perfect" is the kind of misconception that can only survive far away from the actual process of finding investments and making returns.
The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.