zugzwang Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Democracy 'bad for business' claims WPP's Martin Sorrell, Thatcherite grifter. Sir Martin Sorrell: There is no good general election outcome for business The upcoming General Election is creating 'increasing uncertainty' for businesses, the advertising mogul saysBusinesses are likely to be hit whichever way the General Election goes, Sir Martin Sorrell has warned, as both Labour's anti-business rhetoric and the Conservatives' pledge for a referendum on staying in the EU are creating uncertainty for business. Mr Sorrell said the increasingly uncertain result of the upcoming General Election may "crimp" the UK's strong economic recovery, and that both parties are unlikely to ease business fears in the next couple of years. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11458293/Sir-Martin-Sorrell-There-is-no-good-general-election-outcome-for-business.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehowler Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Maybe MarkG wants to come back with a riposte, it was his argument after all? But I don't think I did too badly with an off the cuff non-public money list. I think it's stretching things a bit to say Einstein was public-money backed when he was working at the patent office! I suppose you could argue that they were paying for his shoe leather and beer through salary but hardly fair to say the outline of relativity came from government inititiative (bedrock of his work was done in 1905, before academia beckoned, I think). As for usefulness, there'd be no GPS without relativity principles applied to time keeping... And yes, Fleming was a prof, but there was no public money behind his work to develop penicillin, it was accidental - depending on the version you follow. As for google, are we also to discount any work/invention done on other prior work that might have benefited from public cash? That seems a bit mean spirited. It's also contrary to the pathways and evolution of scientific thought, as I see it anyway. Anyway, I've got another one. Supermarine and the Spitfire, private company, private aviation designer. Or are the naysayers going to argue that was public money from the air ministry? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehowler Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Show me a great scientific or technological breakthrough of the 20th century that didn’t require public spending to establish the basic principles of that science or technology. Just one. OK, finally got one now that's incontestable - the Wright brothers. But like Kipling said, it's the exception that proves the rule. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bear Goggles Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 OK, finally got one now that's incontestable - the Wright brothers. But like Kipling said, it's the exception that proves the rule. Okay, I'll take that one But interestingly, Aviation is something that subsequently had lots of state subsidy, so if you like, the exception is that it started with private enterprise and was then adopted by the state (you could also argue the the railways were similar). But I think it's fair to say that science and technology advances fastest when there is a mixture of private and public funding driving it on. Usually it's state funding that provides the basic principles and private enterprise that uses that knowledge to develop profitable business models - nothing wrong with that, is there? If you have only state funding you end up with poor products and little to no iterative improvement (see soviet cars), but if you have only private funding then it is very difficult to invent things that are not profitable in the short term. I can't see how Satellites, nuclear power, the internet, modern therapeutic medicine or modern computing could have been invented and developed without state funding. Yet this observation is something that upsets people, for the last 30-40 years we've had the message drummed into us that only private enterprise is good, and the state is always bad, this is eating away at our ability to think freely, which takes us back to my original point. When you only have one way of thinking you only have one reality to think within. We have an ideology that has 'won', it has driven out all other ideas of how an economy can work, and in doing so has become regressive, malign, and detrimental to human progress, yet our leaders can't think outside of the set of constraints set by this 'reality'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wonderpup Posted March 9, 2015 Author Share Posted March 9, 2015 Just imagine if all those taxes spent on 'government R&D' had instead been left in the hands of real innovators who were free to develop whatever new technology they wanted without the government getting in the way... Imagine what could have been achieved if the private sector banks had channeled their investors cash into the hands of those 'real innovators' instead of blowing a global housing bubble and taking down the system? The truth is that those private investors chose real estate over innovation because innovation is risky- and- it was assumed- real estate was not. So the private sector failed not because it lacked the funds- god knows there was enough money sloshing around the system- it failed because it is too risk averse to take on the kinds of speculative research that only Governments are prepared to invest in. To grunt 'government bad, private sector good' in response to nearly every question is too simplistic- the private sector is great at developing the products of blue sky research- but it will not fund that research because the risks are simply too high in most cases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zugzwang Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 Maybe MarkG wants to come back with a riposte, it was his argument after all? But I don't think I did too badly with an off the cuff non-public money list. I think it's stretching things a bit to say Einstein was public-money backed when he was working at the patent office! I suppose you could argue that they were paying for his shoe leather and beer through salary but hardly fair to say the outline of relativity came from government inititiative (bedrock of his work was done in 1905, before academia beckoned, I think). As for usefulness, there'd be no GPS without relativity principles applied to time keeping... And yes, Fleming was a prof, but there was no public money behind his work to develop penicillin, it was accidental - depending on the version you follow. As for google, are we also to discount any work/invention done on other prior work that might have benefited from public cash? That seems a bit mean spirited. It's also contrary to the pathways and evolution of scientific thought, as I see it anyway. Anyway, I've got another one. Supermarine and the Spitfire, private company, private aviation designer. Or are the naysayers going to argue that was public money from the air ministry? D'oh! Completely forgot about GPS. What an eejit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehowler Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 So perhaps our best bet for space is a combination of state money and maverick individual thinking - e.g. a kid at MIT who has access/money to do what they want AND the brain brio to go their own way? Hard to see how the state will put serious money behind something daring, I agree, but it might come out as some skewed corollary from a defence/military project. And AI is promising because a lot of the research is going on outside the normal public money structures, though its exponents still might be able to turn to state science bodies if the work becomes significant. It's easier for people in the arts (back to Stansilaw Lem/Solaris) to keep up the unconventional/maverick thinking because they generally exist without any funding or commercial strictures and it doesn't take a lot of carrots to keep them in paper and ink. Pound for pound, the ideas and proposals we've had from impoverished scribblers must be incredible bang for buck when compared to state funding of things like NASA and the Channel Tunnel; then again, engineers on the latter projects make real things happen, whereas books only influence how things happen. But witness how the mention of Solaris has sparked all these posts... On the subject of scribblers and their ideas, the prescience of Orwell with 1984 and Winston Smith crushed into acceptance and delusion by the state has been shadow-spooking me over the course of this thread. Big Brother's posters have an eerie ring of contemporary British culture/media about them: WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
billybong Posted March 9, 2015 Share Posted March 9, 2015 For space exploration you need funds but lots of spare land as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest eight Posted March 10, 2015 Share Posted March 10, 2015 For space exploration you need funds but lots of spare land as well. You mean you need a lot of backlot to run the Mars rover around so that it appears it's actually on Mars? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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