Physics PhD student working and doing research at a government-funded lab here. I agree with pretty much all of this. But there are a few things I'd like to add.
> [The Higgs Boson] has no practical applications for now, and although it might in the future
Correction from a physicist here: the Higgs Boson will definitely never have any practical applications. I can say that with the same complete confidence I can say about e.g. knowledge of planets 100s of light years away never having any practical applications.
I still totally agree with you that there is a different kind of value that these results provide. Even they will never have practical, economic value, exploring these questions about our place in the universe is a deep and important part of the human endeavor, and we should that for its own sake.
Also, while the knowledge of e.g. the Higgs Boson or exoplanets will never directly provide practical economic value, there is value provided by all the research into advanced technologies needed to make these measurements happen. Things like superconducting materials for the magnets in the LHC, advanced optics for exoplanet telescopes, high-speed computing to process the data from the LHC, etc.
These advances prompted by these basic science quests do provide practical economic value, although I think they are susceptible to the crowding-out effect you mention (sure, trying to build the LHC leads to advances in superconductors, but you would make more advances per dollar by just paying people to research superconductors). That being said, there's another more subtle reason these projects lead to advances in practical technology that isn't susceptible to a crowding out effect: they are great at drawing in young, smart people into science, many of which will later transition into more applied roles. Many smart, idealistic 20-somethings don't get so excited by practical technology development, but do get excited by grand quests such as searching for fundamental particles or for far-off exoplanets. Many of these scientists will later go on to more applied fields, as there are very few jobs at a senior level in these non-applied scientists. This is a good way to entice them to get trained as scientists, and not to go into less productive fields (essentially I'm making your "prestige" argument but slightly different).
That effect is kind of what happened with me. Earlier in my 20s, I was idealistic and wanted to do theoretical physics/math work that wasn't super applied. As I grew up and matured, I gained an appreciation for the practical, and transitioned to more applied/experimental physics work. That's what I do now: I research quantum computing at a government-funded lab (Sandia National Lab).
"Correction from a physicist here: the Higgs Boson will definitely never have any practical applications."
As Kelvin taught us, when someone uses their authority as a physicist to claim something will never happen, we should immediately suspect it has already happened and we just haven't heard yet.
Seems like a bad bet for you since you can only win once you're dead. :) But I would certainly take you up on that if I had any way to know you'd follow through on it!
I'll just chime in as some one else with physics training (also started as a PhD student in a different part of physics then ended up in quantum information, actually).
The 100-1 claim certainly sounds dramatically overconfident based on outside view type heuristics, even with some plausible-sounding but hard-to-fully-evaluate technical explanation, so Isaac's response is very reasonable. However, as it happens, we really do have surprisingly strong reasons for confidence here, namely that manipulating higgs interactions won't be technologically relevant any time soon. The principles that this argument is based upon - time and energy scales - are fundamental enough that they seem unlikely to be obviated even by whatever is the next revolution. There's a reason you need a giant ring of superconducting magnets to even catch an exceedingly rare glimpse of these things!
Alex is right and 100-1 is pretty reasonable, especially for the next 30 years.
Do you think you would have predicted atomic-scale electronics 50 years ago? I feel like a general heuristic of "this technology would cost trillions so we won't do it" is reasonable *except* when it turns out there's some strong economic inventive for it.
Good question. I'm not sure if I would have, but other people in fact did! Most famously Feynman in his Plenty of Room at the Bottom talk (1959), but more concretely, and with more focus on electronics, many others in the 60s and 70s. (I was aware of Aviram and Ratner, Claude listed about half a dozen others which I haven't looked into.)
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we could find some technologies that no one predicted 50, let alone 100, years in advance. This wouldn't do much to convince me. What would help more would be examples of fundamental physical interactions that there was strong, near-universal consensus could not be practically useful, but then later were. Particularly if this confidence was due to arguments that did not depend on the details of theory, but rather something fundamental like inherent energy or timescale limitations, and especially if those arguments had at least several orders of magnitude to spare. I don't think there are any examples like that or close to that. (The lack of such examples isn't my argument, but examples like that are, annoyingly because they're not fair to expect, what would work best as evidence against my reasoning.)
Also, I don't think it's "this technology would cost trillions". I think it's "this technology would cost orders of magnitude more than earth's GDP to still not do anything". That said, I haven't thought too carefully or tried to be creative about this.
I'm not confident it will *never* be useful. Let me put it this way - if I got to ask God whether there had been some useful technological application of interactions with the Higgs field by the end of history (to be clear this is not on my top-10 list), I would not be shocked with either answer. But a 'yes' would strongly update me towards dramatically greater heights of technological achievement than can currently be envisioned even in our wildest-but-still-somewhat-coherently-specified sci-fi dreams. And a 'yes, within the next 30 yrs actually' I would take as 'buckle up, the ASI singularity is upon us and it's going to be even crazier than almost anyone thought, the laws of physics don't apply and nothing you can imagine can be ruled out'.
The physics of the Higgs Boson tells us it is extremely unlikely to have any effect on any physical processes that could be useful to humans. Let's examine the energy scales and time scales of the Higgs.
The Higgs has a mass of 125 GeV. That means it is created in, and is physically relevant in, processes that happen at a temperature of around 10^15 Kelvin or hotter. This is totally infeasible to reach at any significant scale on Earth. The temperatures involved in controlled nuclear fusion, which is a speculative but potentially feasible technology, are around 100 million Kelvin. 10^8 Kelvin. Even more speculative and far-out nuclear reactions that we might want to one day control and harness are proton-boron fusion which happens at around 10^9 Kelvin. 10^15 Kelvin is way hotter temperatures required for even speculative, far-out physical processes that humans might want to one day control.
The Higgs also has a lifetime of 10^(-22) seconds. Orders of magnitude shorter than physical processes that are at all relevant to useful technology. Even the fastest chemical and nuclear reactions take longer than this, although some nuclear reactions come close.
There really isn't any physical process that the Higgs boson affects that could be useful to humans.
"trying to build the LHC leads to advances in superconductors, but you would make more advances per dollar by just paying people to research superconductors"
This is key. End goals matter. Science with a capital "S" can still be done in the pursuit of economically useful (i.e. profitable) technology, but the stated intention has to be that.
It's crystal clear in the Introduction section of any scientific paper, where you're supposed to answer the question "why are we doing this?" Nanotechnology papers will all say something like "this could produce better solar cells," or "this could produce a new type of medicine," or etc etc.
HEP papers are "we didn't find that particle that theory predicted with the previous collider, so now we're building a bigger one." That's basically it. There's not even the pretense of "maybe those magnets will be useful for an MRI or something." That's not what it's about, on any fundamental level for the people & institutions doing the work.
The means are the ends. When you steal to fund something you want, you poison the effort. You also misalign the incentives of all people involved. If you value scientific research, don't use stolen money to fund it and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
If humans value this research (and many of us do), they will band together voluntarily to create institutions to fund it. There will be dynamic competition in the research space. All the incentives of all interested parties will be aligned. With coercion eliminated, the best traits of humanity can be focused on discovering the secrets of this amazing universe we find ourselves in.
All "public goods" arguments are just a lazy pseudo-scientific veneer to justify one group of people stealing from another group of people. Same with "solving coordination problems". The problem is that the people you're stealing from don't share your vision.
Fortunately, the desire for "pure research" is one shared by a very many people. Quit being lazy. Put down the gun. Fund these efforts honestly, and see the results blossom.
Also, thanks for an interesting article, though I disagree with much of it.
> The means are the ends. When you steal to fund something you want, you poison the effort. You also misalign the incentives of all people involved. If you value scientific research, don't use stolen money to fund it and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
If you value fighting fires, don't use stolen money to fund it, and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
What a silly argument. Why not fund everything without public money? Let's have police, fire fighters, military, roads, etc, all made by private money. It'll work so well, that's why literally no functional country does it!
It's possible to steal money and then spend it more efficiently than it would have been spent. But there's no reason to expect that by default, and the presumption is against you.
There are real public goods/coordination arguments involved in proposals like dominant assurance contracts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts it's just that few people actually care about any of that (which is what led Robin Hanson to co-write Elephant in the Brain).
I think private enterprise would support more prestige research if given the chance. However, antitrust law prevents companies from becoming large or profitable enough to fund these types of projects. Companies like Bell Labs, Microsoft, & Google may have sponsored a wide range of research if they weren't preoccupied with being sued by the DOJ for being too successful.
Antitrust laws are essential in a healthy capitalist economy . These companies are sponsoring some good research but the government needs to fund the kind of fundamental research that these corporations will never do because it will negatively affect the bottom line.
I spent much of my career doing useful, productive work.
But then I got a job with Apple, supporting their accumulation of money, by producing forced upgrades that made their older products less and less usable, forcing customers to buy replacements. A great deal for Apple and their share holders, of which I am one, and they farthermore don't bind the mouths of the kine that tread their grain - i.e. they pay quite decently. I made pots of money. But that was the only usefulness or productivity involved.
That's typical for big tech in modern times. Really smart engineers work hard to generate ever more unwanted advertisements, and make them ever harder to avoid. I get it that to most vendors, the best use of a customer or prospective customer's time is being advertised at, and the next best use is filling out customer satisfaction surveys that provide meaningless measures that look good on internal slideware. But never tell me that this is useful or productive.
Even smarter people worked in finance. The result was bonuses for them - and for the rest of us, the 2008 crash, when their opaque financial instruments didn't perform as advertised, reducing risk. Not useful or productive, except in terms of accumulating money.
Give me an option to make an adequate living, while improving the world - even marginally, in the form of happier customers - and I'm a happy worker. Give me a "bullshit job" (see https://www.librarything.com/work/21372389), and no matter how well I'm paid, I'm overstressed and miserable, and retire as soon as I can possibly afford to. And in the meanwhile I'm much more interested in looking good than doing whatever my job is supposed to be.
"Instead of being forced to engage in useful, productive work, academics and those employed by government research labs can set their own priorities, working on topics they enjoy, without regard for any potential societal benefit."
This is exactly why a healthily-funded scientific ecosystem is good. You don't know in advance what discoveries are going to be useful, or what theories a particular innovator can draw from to revolutionize his own field. There are times when a new technology is economically inferior for decades until people learn how to use it properly, after which it becomes ubiquitous. Market nerds should take a hard look at the history of technology and see how little innovation sprang from periods of human history where everything was produced to be immediately useful.
Indeed people don't know in advance, just as Edison didn't know in advance what material to make his lightbulb filament out of. But the market incentivized him to attempt an enormous number of them until he got one that worked far better than anything else yet tried.
The discussion of Soviet science and the role of religion in human life basically hits the nail on the head of why I no longer consider myself a libertarian. If more libertarians could acknowledge these key points, it would be a much robust and rich worldview.
The libertarian argument against government science funding is sort of dumb to me on a practical level, since govt funding of hard science yields high macroeconomic returns, according to many studies. There are many other places to cut wasteful government spending if that's the objective. As a principle, I believe it's good to be on the side of advancing science and human knowledge.
Exactly! As I mentioned in my comment, the rapid growth of innovation in chips and transistors from government being the biggest buyer had a huge macroeconomic impact. And not just that, probably saved millions of lives from medicine and global wealth.
As libertarians like Caplan often point out, government is a package deal—even when government might (allegedly) outperform markets at the margin on X, government failure (which includes things like Holocausts, the Iraq War, etc., etc.), likely means it is negative sum overall. Those who defend government are very good at applying the sunk cost principle to government based on Whig historiography.
> I don’t think a pure libertarian model can explain how much innovation actually comes out of government, including certain communist successes in science and engineering. The Soviet Union, despite its lack of private enterprise and market incentives, produced an extraordinary range of scientific achievements….
This is an absurd straw man of libertarianism. Of course the Soviet Union viciously redistributing resources to scientific research produces scientific advances. The question is whether that allocation is moral and, secondarily, socially optimal. The libertarian answer to both is "no." Your answer is "yes," because you just want society to adopt your personal utility function:
> [T]here is…a category of research that may never have an economic payoff but is valuable for its own sake.
> I still want to know these things.
> I see certain forms of knowledge as good in and of themselves.
> …what I classify as knowledge that is good for its own sake.
Unfortunately, you never get to the hard part of the argument: proving these things are per se good. You just beg the question repeatedly. (Perhaps your response will be: if only I were EHC, this would be self-evident. But that verges on tautology.)
If instead of pursuing a maximally meaningful career, you "applied [your] intelligence…to a more lucrative corporate job," you would "end up wealthier," and you could use that wealth to fund the research you liked. But you'd rather others pay that opportunity cost for you, so you suggest robbing them and funding your favorite research with their money.
Nah, see someone with less of a contrarian axe to grind instead. Sure, if you follow a dozen people on particle physics, consider adding her to the mix occasionally. She's not a complete crank. But having her as your main source as an outsider is going to tend to give you a fairly distorted view. (I come from physics, though I've left, and it wasn't particle physics.)
Physics aside, she makes compelling arguments that scientific progress is being significantly diminished by Goodheart's Law and other perverse institutional incentives. The longer a game has been around, the better people become at subverting its rules toward their own purposes and away from the purposes the game was initially designed for. My personal experience in academia and scientific research largely agree with her takes.
Okay, see her on institutional incentives then maybe. ;) But perhaps especially there, from what I have seen, she touches on real issues but in a highly biased and misleading way. This is based on my experience in physics academia which did not at all resemble the picture she paints - some sort of funhouse mirror/strawman version. On the other hand, my experience was in the US, hers, somewhat limited and in Europe. So perhaps that is part of the story. I do think she is an earnest person. I also think it's important to keep in mind that her views are non-representative.
Yes, there has been significant and growing disappointment among many physicists and commentators regarding the rate of progress in theoretical and high energy physics, particularly in areas like string theory, supersymmetry (SUSY), and attempts at a "Theory of Everything."
Here’s a breakdown of the main criticisms and expressions of disappointment:
🔬 1. Lack of Experimental Evidence
String theory and SUSY have been extensively explored theoretically since the 1970s–1980s, but no experimental evidence has been found to support them.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was hoped to confirm supersymmetric particles or extra dimensions, found none, leading to widespread frustration.
As Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow once put it, “Supersymmetry is an idea that should have died a decade ago.”
📉 Concerns About Scientific Productivity
Many have pointed out that progress in fundamental physics has slowed:
No clear successor to the Standard Model has emerged.
Predictions beyond the Standard Model have failed to materialize in experiments.
Theorists have proposed increasingly speculative ideas without testable predictions.
📚 Books and Public Critiques
Several high-profile scientists and books have voiced these concerns:
Peter Woit – Not Even Wrong (2006):
Argues that string theory has become more like philosophy than science, due to its lack of testable predictions.
Lee Smolin – The Trouble with Physics (2006):
Criticizes string theory for dominating the field despite its unproven status.
Sabine Hossenfelder – Lost in Math (2018):
Argues that physics has become too focused on mathematical beauty and aesthetic criteria rather than empirical validation.
Define non-representative in a rigorous way and also in a way that doesn’t define representative based on the views of people who are mainly entrenched within the incentive systems of which she is critical.
Ruxandra is wrong about Caplan. At a minimum, there are a decent number of people who were born as a result of his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He’s also taken some big swings in some of his other books; TBD whether they will have a big payoff too.
The LHC humanities greatest scientific bargain. Government funding for research is essential . Private companies have no real interest to fund anything outside of their own narrow interests 😎
> I would argue that there is furthermore a category of research that may never have an economic payoff but is valuable for its own sake.
What makes something valuable? The perspective of economics is that value is subjective, and if people are willing to pay for something, then it is worth at least as much as they were willing to pay. But that doesn't apply to the government spending our tax dollars. Instead, if there is a "public good" that isn't excludable but people actually value, Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts can provide it if and ONLY if people actually do value it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts
There is relatively little interest in that mechanism, because few are interested in efficiently (in an economic sense) providing actual public goods. A DAC is a way of determining whether a project actually merits a certain amount of funding, whereas the subjective opinion of one person (who isn't himself paying for it) does not. It also avoids the labor scientists spend on applying for grants.
> I don’t care if the average voter would rather have food stamps or more giveaways to the elderly, or even tax cuts.
The average voter doesn't need to care what you care, since that's just one individual's subjective opinion.
> Yet I don’t think I would put in nearly as much effort towards becoming some corporate bigwig at Walmart.
Things would be different if the IRS had your genetic potential for income and levied a head-tax on you, pushing you to take the most lucrative job you could. That would be more economically efficient than income taxes that discourage earning more money.
> the prestige economy maximizes the potential to do good
I don't think you're giving enough thought to ACTUAL maximization. Maximize a function and the derivative should go to zero. Where do you see that happening?
> This is perhaps a benefit of the peer review system
A system that post-dates Einstein, who wanted nothing to do with it.
> we should think about how to make sure that the prestige economies we support are ones that are pro-social.
Indeed, we should, because we aren't even close to a maximum. Including the less BS parts of universities like "the more mathematical parts of academic economics, physics, computer science, and statistics" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/star-trek-as-fantasyhtml
> Usually not as powerful as markets
And less efficiently as far as taxation is concerned, because we currently tax income rather than potential income.
> At the same time, there is a substantial, disproportionately high IQ and agentic, portion of the population that needs a prestige economy in order to truly flourish.
Going back to Einstein, he had his miracle year while working as a patent clerk.
> I think that’s a potential danger
Not just a "potential danger", it actually happens every day. You yourself regard certain fields as worthless. You need a mechanism to separate the wheat from the chaff.
> or at least what I classify as knowledge that is good for its own sake
Why should anyone else care what YOU specifically regard as inherently good? We're talking about public policy, not what you choose to fund yourself. The utilitarian frame asks what EVERYONE regards as good.
> the idea that being free to pursue their own interests will get a lot more effort out of them makes sense to me
It might be that anti-capitalist studies gets a lot of effort out of some professors, but that doesn't make it "socially useful labor" as Marx would put it.
You missed perhaps the best argument against state-sponsored science: it consistently evolves Lysenkoism. By this I mean scientific untruth that is generally believed to be good science, protected against falsification by state action. In Lysenko's case, enforced by the Soviet Union's harsh methods. Our variant enforces its dominance via the kinder, gentler methods of educational gatekeeping and credentialism, and the denial of "funding" to scientific dissidents.
We don't have a clear name for that system, but in recent years its results are what some people (on both sides) have called "The Science".
In this house we believe: Science is Real! Do you believe in The Science?
If you do, then you probably think The Science is just science -- that is, truth to our best approximation. Maybe then you worry about whether or not state-sponsored science is crowding out hypothetical free-market science. Could SpaceX explore Mars cheaper and better than NASA does? Uh, this seems possible (cheaper but later, and also worse seems more likely) but also not really a problem in any case.
What is a problem is, i.e., Keynesian economics evolving to justify inflation / abandoning hard money, increasing state debt and overspending -- hard to put a price tag on it. But the effects in particular of inflation on the poor have been IMO catastrophic.
Or virology evolving into its modern form which insists on staying relevant via gain-of-function research. Whoopsie! 25m dead? Ish?
This article does reinforce my belief that American science is fast approaching a very dangerous interregnum. However, I have come to realize that perhaps democracy is hardly ideal, and perhaps quite unsuitable as a funding mechanism for science. For this reason, I believe that the best course of action is to create an independent research foundation devoid of federal funding, and convince the more technically minded billionaires of the merits of basic research. Ideally, one would seek the support of a family, as opposed to a single wealthy businessman. The projects that will be necessary for the next great leap in scientific discovery require the stability that only a dynastic source of support can provide.
The government funding research would have no resistance if the results of it, shared with private industries, are not going to be patented out of public reach and sold back to the public with inflated prices. M3edical research and internet are the explicit examples of this abuse
You have not addressed the core of my comment. Let's say Pfizer got financing from state, created the vaccine, turned around and sold it to the state at the full price and patented their vaccine too. Is it fair for the taxpayers? When government funded research was handed to the world-like internet or fuel cell and corporations developed this research into practical applications-iot is different.
Once again, I am not pointing on the government financing but on the way it is abused. Government financing of research must have strings attached. Otherwise, as in the case with COVID vaccine public pays twice. This is typical DOGE case. You are so enthusiastic about government financing, which is not bad in itself, but raises question about your preferences and possible bias.
Physics PhD student working and doing research at a government-funded lab here. I agree with pretty much all of this. But there are a few things I'd like to add.
> [The Higgs Boson] has no practical applications for now, and although it might in the future
Correction from a physicist here: the Higgs Boson will definitely never have any practical applications. I can say that with the same complete confidence I can say about e.g. knowledge of planets 100s of light years away never having any practical applications.
I still totally agree with you that there is a different kind of value that these results provide. Even they will never have practical, economic value, exploring these questions about our place in the universe is a deep and important part of the human endeavor, and we should that for its own sake.
Also, while the knowledge of e.g. the Higgs Boson or exoplanets will never directly provide practical economic value, there is value provided by all the research into advanced technologies needed to make these measurements happen. Things like superconducting materials for the magnets in the LHC, advanced optics for exoplanet telescopes, high-speed computing to process the data from the LHC, etc.
These advances prompted by these basic science quests do provide practical economic value, although I think they are susceptible to the crowding-out effect you mention (sure, trying to build the LHC leads to advances in superconductors, but you would make more advances per dollar by just paying people to research superconductors). That being said, there's another more subtle reason these projects lead to advances in practical technology that isn't susceptible to a crowding out effect: they are great at drawing in young, smart people into science, many of which will later transition into more applied roles. Many smart, idealistic 20-somethings don't get so excited by practical technology development, but do get excited by grand quests such as searching for fundamental particles or for far-off exoplanets. Many of these scientists will later go on to more applied fields, as there are very few jobs at a senior level in these non-applied scientists. This is a good way to entice them to get trained as scientists, and not to go into less productive fields (essentially I'm making your "prestige" argument but slightly different).
That effect is kind of what happened with me. Earlier in my 20s, I was idealistic and wanted to do theoretical physics/math work that wasn't super applied. As I grew up and matured, I gained an appreciation for the practical, and transitioned to more applied/experimental physics work. That's what I do now: I research quantum computing at a government-funded lab (Sandia National Lab).
"Correction from a physicist here: the Higgs Boson will definitely never have any practical applications."
As Kelvin taught us, when someone uses their authority as a physicist to claim something will never happen, we should immediately suspect it has already happened and we just haven't heard yet.
I sincerely hope you're correct in this case!
You should join some prediction markets, I would love to bet against you. :)
I'd bet at 99:1 odds that the Higgs boson is not created or manipulated as part of any practically useful technology in my lifetime.
Seems like a bad bet for you since you can only win once you're dead. :) But I would certainly take you up on that if I had any way to know you'd follow through on it!
We could do 30 years, so we're both likely to be alive then...
I'll just chime in as some one else with physics training (also started as a PhD student in a different part of physics then ended up in quantum information, actually).
The 100-1 claim certainly sounds dramatically overconfident based on outside view type heuristics, even with some plausible-sounding but hard-to-fully-evaluate technical explanation, so Isaac's response is very reasonable. However, as it happens, we really do have surprisingly strong reasons for confidence here, namely that manipulating higgs interactions won't be technologically relevant any time soon. The principles that this argument is based upon - time and energy scales - are fundamental enough that they seem unlikely to be obviated even by whatever is the next revolution. There's a reason you need a giant ring of superconducting magnets to even catch an exceedingly rare glimpse of these things!
Alex is right and 100-1 is pretty reasonable, especially for the next 30 years.
Do you think you would have predicted atomic-scale electronics 50 years ago? I feel like a general heuristic of "this technology would cost trillions so we won't do it" is reasonable *except* when it turns out there's some strong economic inventive for it.
Good question. I'm not sure if I would have, but other people in fact did! Most famously Feynman in his Plenty of Room at the Bottom talk (1959), but more concretely, and with more focus on electronics, many others in the 60s and 70s. (I was aware of Aviram and Ratner, Claude listed about half a dozen others which I haven't looked into.)
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we could find some technologies that no one predicted 50, let alone 100, years in advance. This wouldn't do much to convince me. What would help more would be examples of fundamental physical interactions that there was strong, near-universal consensus could not be practically useful, but then later were. Particularly if this confidence was due to arguments that did not depend on the details of theory, but rather something fundamental like inherent energy or timescale limitations, and especially if those arguments had at least several orders of magnitude to spare. I don't think there are any examples like that or close to that. (The lack of such examples isn't my argument, but examples like that are, annoyingly because they're not fair to expect, what would work best as evidence against my reasoning.)
Also, I don't think it's "this technology would cost trillions". I think it's "this technology would cost orders of magnitude more than earth's GDP to still not do anything". That said, I haven't thought too carefully or tried to be creative about this.
I'm not confident it will *never* be useful. Let me put it this way - if I got to ask God whether there had been some useful technological application of interactions with the Higgs field by the end of history (to be clear this is not on my top-10 list), I would not be shocked with either answer. But a 'yes' would strongly update me towards dramatically greater heights of technological achievement than can currently be envisioned even in our wildest-but-still-somewhat-coherently-specified sci-fi dreams. And a 'yes, within the next 30 yrs actually' I would take as 'buckle up, the ASI singularity is upon us and it's going to be even crazier than almost anyone thought, the laws of physics don't apply and nothing you can imagine can be ruled out'.
How do you know? Basic science sometimes takes centuries to find applications that were completely unimaginable when the discovery was made.
No early number theorist could have imagined the economic value of encryption in the context of a whole stack of technologies not yet invented.
The physics of the Higgs Boson tells us it is extremely unlikely to have any effect on any physical processes that could be useful to humans. Let's examine the energy scales and time scales of the Higgs.
The Higgs has a mass of 125 GeV. That means it is created in, and is physically relevant in, processes that happen at a temperature of around 10^15 Kelvin or hotter. This is totally infeasible to reach at any significant scale on Earth. The temperatures involved in controlled nuclear fusion, which is a speculative but potentially feasible technology, are around 100 million Kelvin. 10^8 Kelvin. Even more speculative and far-out nuclear reactions that we might want to one day control and harness are proton-boron fusion which happens at around 10^9 Kelvin. 10^15 Kelvin is way hotter temperatures required for even speculative, far-out physical processes that humans might want to one day control.
The Higgs also has a lifetime of 10^(-22) seconds. Orders of magnitude shorter than physical processes that are at all relevant to useful technology. Even the fastest chemical and nuclear reactions take longer than this, although some nuclear reactions come close.
There really isn't any physical process that the Higgs boson affects that could be useful to humans.
Yes, exactly. Well put.
"trying to build the LHC leads to advances in superconductors, but you would make more advances per dollar by just paying people to research superconductors"
This is key. End goals matter. Science with a capital "S" can still be done in the pursuit of economically useful (i.e. profitable) technology, but the stated intention has to be that.
It's crystal clear in the Introduction section of any scientific paper, where you're supposed to answer the question "why are we doing this?" Nanotechnology papers will all say something like "this could produce better solar cells," or "this could produce a new type of medicine," or etc etc.
HEP papers are "we didn't find that particle that theory predicted with the previous collider, so now we're building a bigger one." That's basically it. There's not even the pretense of "maybe those magnets will be useful for an MRI or something." That's not what it's about, on any fundamental level for the people & institutions doing the work.
It seems like the money spent on the LHC would have been better spent directly on those advanced technologies necessary for it.
The means are the ends. When you steal to fund something you want, you poison the effort. You also misalign the incentives of all people involved. If you value scientific research, don't use stolen money to fund it and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
If humans value this research (and many of us do), they will band together voluntarily to create institutions to fund it. There will be dynamic competition in the research space. All the incentives of all interested parties will be aligned. With coercion eliminated, the best traits of humanity can be focused on discovering the secrets of this amazing universe we find ourselves in.
All "public goods" arguments are just a lazy pseudo-scientific veneer to justify one group of people stealing from another group of people. Same with "solving coordination problems". The problem is that the people you're stealing from don't share your vision.
Fortunately, the desire for "pure research" is one shared by a very many people. Quit being lazy. Put down the gun. Fund these efforts honestly, and see the results blossom.
Also, thanks for an interesting article, though I disagree with much of it.
> The means are the ends. When you steal to fund something you want, you poison the effort. You also misalign the incentives of all people involved. If you value scientific research, don't use stolen money to fund it and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
If you value fighting fires, don't use stolen money to fund it, and don't use the political process (one of the most evil things we have invented) to direct the resources.
What a silly argument. Why not fund everything without public money? Let's have police, fire fighters, military, roads, etc, all made by private money. It'll work so well, that's why literally no functional country does it!
Yes, everything should be funded without public money.
It's possible to steal money and then spend it more efficiently than it would have been spent. But there's no reason to expect that by default, and the presumption is against you.
There are real public goods/coordination arguments involved in proposals like dominant assurance contracts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts it's just that few people actually care about any of that (which is what led Robin Hanson to co-write Elephant in the Brain).
I think private enterprise would support more prestige research if given the chance. However, antitrust law prevents companies from becoming large or profitable enough to fund these types of projects. Companies like Bell Labs, Microsoft, & Google may have sponsored a wide range of research if they weren't preoccupied with being sued by the DOJ for being too successful.
Antitrust laws are essential in a healthy capitalist economy . These companies are sponsoring some good research but the government needs to fund the kind of fundamental research that these corporations will never do because it will negatively affect the bottom line.
I spent much of my career doing useful, productive work.
But then I got a job with Apple, supporting their accumulation of money, by producing forced upgrades that made their older products less and less usable, forcing customers to buy replacements. A great deal for Apple and their share holders, of which I am one, and they farthermore don't bind the mouths of the kine that tread their grain - i.e. they pay quite decently. I made pots of money. But that was the only usefulness or productivity involved.
That's typical for big tech in modern times. Really smart engineers work hard to generate ever more unwanted advertisements, and make them ever harder to avoid. I get it that to most vendors, the best use of a customer or prospective customer's time is being advertised at, and the next best use is filling out customer satisfaction surveys that provide meaningless measures that look good on internal slideware. But never tell me that this is useful or productive.
Even smarter people worked in finance. The result was bonuses for them - and for the rest of us, the 2008 crash, when their opaque financial instruments didn't perform as advertised, reducing risk. Not useful or productive, except in terms of accumulating money.
Give me an option to make an adequate living, while improving the world - even marginally, in the form of happier customers - and I'm a happy worker. Give me a "bullshit job" (see https://www.librarything.com/work/21372389), and no matter how well I'm paid, I'm overstressed and miserable, and retire as soon as I can possibly afford to. And in the meanwhile I'm much more interested in looking good than doing whatever my job is supposed to be.
"Instead of being forced to engage in useful, productive work, academics and those employed by government research labs can set their own priorities, working on topics they enjoy, without regard for any potential societal benefit."
This is exactly why a healthily-funded scientific ecosystem is good. You don't know in advance what discoveries are going to be useful, or what theories a particular innovator can draw from to revolutionize his own field. There are times when a new technology is economically inferior for decades until people learn how to use it properly, after which it becomes ubiquitous. Market nerds should take a hard look at the history of technology and see how little innovation sprang from periods of human history where everything was produced to be immediately useful.
Indeed people don't know in advance, just as Edison didn't know in advance what material to make his lightbulb filament out of. But the market incentivized him to attempt an enormous number of them until he got one that worked far better than anything else yet tried.
The discussion of Soviet science and the role of religion in human life basically hits the nail on the head of why I no longer consider myself a libertarian. If more libertarians could acknowledge these key points, it would be a much robust and rich worldview.
The libertarian argument against government science funding is sort of dumb to me on a practical level, since govt funding of hard science yields high macroeconomic returns, according to many studies. There are many other places to cut wasteful government spending if that's the objective. As a principle, I believe it's good to be on the side of advancing science and human knowledge.
Excellent essay.
Exactly! As I mentioned in my comment, the rapid growth of innovation in chips and transistors from government being the biggest buyer had a huge macroeconomic impact. And not just that, probably saved millions of lives from medicine and global wealth.
As libertarians like Caplan often point out, government is a package deal—even when government might (allegedly) outperform markets at the margin on X, government failure (which includes things like Holocausts, the Iraq War, etc., etc.), likely means it is negative sum overall. Those who defend government are very good at applying the sunk cost principle to government based on Whig historiography.
> I don’t think a pure libertarian model can explain how much innovation actually comes out of government, including certain communist successes in science and engineering. The Soviet Union, despite its lack of private enterprise and market incentives, produced an extraordinary range of scientific achievements….
This is an absurd straw man of libertarianism. Of course the Soviet Union viciously redistributing resources to scientific research produces scientific advances. The question is whether that allocation is moral and, secondarily, socially optimal. The libertarian answer to both is "no." Your answer is "yes," because you just want society to adopt your personal utility function:
> [T]here is…a category of research that may never have an economic payoff but is valuable for its own sake.
> I still want to know these things.
> I see certain forms of knowledge as good in and of themselves.
> …what I classify as knowledge that is good for its own sake.
Unfortunately, you never get to the hard part of the argument: proving these things are per se good. You just beg the question repeatedly. (Perhaps your response will be: if only I were EHC, this would be self-evident. But that verges on tautology.)
If instead of pursuing a maximally meaningful career, you "applied [your] intelligence…to a more lucrative corporate job," you would "end up wealthier," and you could use that wealth to fund the research you liked. But you'd rather others pay that opportunity cost for you, so you suggest robbing them and funding your favorite research with their money.
See Sabine Hossenfelder on high energy physics.
Nah, see someone with less of a contrarian axe to grind instead. Sure, if you follow a dozen people on particle physics, consider adding her to the mix occasionally. She's not a complete crank. But having her as your main source as an outsider is going to tend to give you a fairly distorted view. (I come from physics, though I've left, and it wasn't particle physics.)
Physics aside, she makes compelling arguments that scientific progress is being significantly diminished by Goodheart's Law and other perverse institutional incentives. The longer a game has been around, the better people become at subverting its rules toward their own purposes and away from the purposes the game was initially designed for. My personal experience in academia and scientific research largely agree with her takes.
Okay, see her on institutional incentives then maybe. ;) But perhaps especially there, from what I have seen, she touches on real issues but in a highly biased and misleading way. This is based on my experience in physics academia which did not at all resemble the picture she paints - some sort of funhouse mirror/strawman version. On the other hand, my experience was in the US, hers, somewhat limited and in Europe. So perhaps that is part of the story. I do think she is an earnest person. I also think it's important to keep in mind that her views are non-representative.
FWIW: chatGPT says:
Yes, there has been significant and growing disappointment among many physicists and commentators regarding the rate of progress in theoretical and high energy physics, particularly in areas like string theory, supersymmetry (SUSY), and attempts at a "Theory of Everything."
Here’s a breakdown of the main criticisms and expressions of disappointment:
🔬 1. Lack of Experimental Evidence
String theory and SUSY have been extensively explored theoretically since the 1970s–1980s, but no experimental evidence has been found to support them.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was hoped to confirm supersymmetric particles or extra dimensions, found none, leading to widespread frustration.
As Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow once put it, “Supersymmetry is an idea that should have died a decade ago.”
📉 Concerns About Scientific Productivity
Many have pointed out that progress in fundamental physics has slowed:
No clear successor to the Standard Model has emerged.
Predictions beyond the Standard Model have failed to materialize in experiments.
Theorists have proposed increasingly speculative ideas without testable predictions.
📚 Books and Public Critiques
Several high-profile scientists and books have voiced these concerns:
Peter Woit – Not Even Wrong (2006):
Argues that string theory has become more like philosophy than science, due to its lack of testable predictions.
Lee Smolin – The Trouble with Physics (2006):
Criticizes string theory for dominating the field despite its unproven status.
Sabine Hossenfelder – Lost in Math (2018):
Argues that physics has become too focused on mathematical beauty and aesthetic criteria rather than empirical validation.
Define non-representative in a rigorous way and also in a way that doesn’t define representative based on the views of people who are mainly entrenched within the incentive systems of which she is critical.
Ruxandra is wrong about Caplan. At a minimum, there are a decent number of people who were born as a result of his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He’s also taken some big swings in some of his other books; TBD whether they will have a big payoff too.
The LHC humanities greatest scientific bargain. Government funding for research is essential . Private companies have no real interest to fund anything outside of their own narrow interests 😎
> I would argue that there is furthermore a category of research that may never have an economic payoff but is valuable for its own sake.
What makes something valuable? The perspective of economics is that value is subjective, and if people are willing to pay for something, then it is worth at least as much as they were willing to pay. But that doesn't apply to the government spending our tax dollars. Instead, if there is a "public good" that isn't excludable but people actually value, Alex Tabarrok's dominant assurance contracts can provide it if and ONLY if people actually do value it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract#Dominant_assurance_contracts
There is relatively little interest in that mechanism, because few are interested in efficiently (in an economic sense) providing actual public goods. A DAC is a way of determining whether a project actually merits a certain amount of funding, whereas the subjective opinion of one person (who isn't himself paying for it) does not. It also avoids the labor scientists spend on applying for grants.
> I don’t care if the average voter would rather have food stamps or more giveaways to the elderly, or even tax cuts.
The average voter doesn't need to care what you care, since that's just one individual's subjective opinion.
> Yet I don’t think I would put in nearly as much effort towards becoming some corporate bigwig at Walmart.
Things would be different if the IRS had your genetic potential for income and levied a head-tax on you, pushing you to take the most lucrative job you could. That would be more economically efficient than income taxes that discourage earning more money.
> the prestige economy maximizes the potential to do good
I don't think you're giving enough thought to ACTUAL maximization. Maximize a function and the derivative should go to zero. Where do you see that happening?
> This is perhaps a benefit of the peer review system
A system that post-dates Einstein, who wanted nothing to do with it.
> we should think about how to make sure that the prestige economies we support are ones that are pro-social.
Indeed, we should, because we aren't even close to a maximum. Including the less BS parts of universities like "the more mathematical parts of academic economics, physics, computer science, and statistics" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/star-trek-as-fantasyhtml
> Usually not as powerful as markets
And less efficiently as far as taxation is concerned, because we currently tax income rather than potential income.
> At the same time, there is a substantial, disproportionately high IQ and agentic, portion of the population that needs a prestige economy in order to truly flourish.
Going back to Einstein, he had his miracle year while working as a patent clerk.
> I think that’s a potential danger
Not just a "potential danger", it actually happens every day. You yourself regard certain fields as worthless. You need a mechanism to separate the wheat from the chaff.
> or at least what I classify as knowledge that is good for its own sake
Why should anyone else care what YOU specifically regard as inherently good? We're talking about public policy, not what you choose to fund yourself. The utilitarian frame asks what EVERYONE regards as good.
> the idea that being free to pursue their own interests will get a lot more effort out of them makes sense to me
It might be that anti-capitalist studies gets a lot of effort out of some professors, but that doesn't make it "socially useful labor" as Marx would put it.
People are on average dumb and systematically don't value valuable things. The "only if" here is actively bad.
Economists have known that value is subjective ever since the marginal revolution. Valuable things are valuable if and only if people value them.
You missed perhaps the best argument against state-sponsored science: it consistently evolves Lysenkoism. By this I mean scientific untruth that is generally believed to be good science, protected against falsification by state action. In Lysenko's case, enforced by the Soviet Union's harsh methods. Our variant enforces its dominance via the kinder, gentler methods of educational gatekeeping and credentialism, and the denial of "funding" to scientific dissidents.
We don't have a clear name for that system, but in recent years its results are what some people (on both sides) have called "The Science".
In this house we believe: Science is Real! Do you believe in The Science?
If you do, then you probably think The Science is just science -- that is, truth to our best approximation. Maybe then you worry about whether or not state-sponsored science is crowding out hypothetical free-market science. Could SpaceX explore Mars cheaper and better than NASA does? Uh, this seems possible (cheaper but later, and also worse seems more likely) but also not really a problem in any case.
What is a problem is, i.e., Keynesian economics evolving to justify inflation / abandoning hard money, increasing state debt and overspending -- hard to put a price tag on it. But the effects in particular of inflation on the poor have been IMO catastrophic.
Or virology evolving into its modern form which insists on staying relevant via gain-of-function research. Whoopsie! 25m dead? Ish?
This article does reinforce my belief that American science is fast approaching a very dangerous interregnum. However, I have come to realize that perhaps democracy is hardly ideal, and perhaps quite unsuitable as a funding mechanism for science. For this reason, I believe that the best course of action is to create an independent research foundation devoid of federal funding, and convince the more technically minded billionaires of the merits of basic research. Ideally, one would seek the support of a family, as opposed to a single wealthy businessman. The projects that will be necessary for the next great leap in scientific discovery require the stability that only a dynastic source of support can provide.
Techno feudalism at it’s finest 😆
Dominant assurance contracts are a mechanism for funding what people actually want.
> I’d still be glad that the government supports Bryan being able to make a living writing about why everyone should be a libertarian.
If the government didn't fund writing about politics, I suspect that would be better for libertarianism and anti-statism. Otherwise, great essay.
The government funding research would have no resistance if the results of it, shared with private industries, are not going to be patented out of public reach and sold back to the public with inflated prices. M3edical research and internet are the explicit examples of this abuse
Profits from selling new medicines are what incentivize new medicines to exist. Better to eliminate government funding than the profit incentive.
You have not addressed the core of my comment. Let's say Pfizer got financing from state, created the vaccine, turned around and sold it to the state at the full price and patented their vaccine too. Is it fair for the taxpayers? When government funded research was handed to the world-like internet or fuel cell and corporations developed this research into practical applications-iot is different.
In the case of the vaccine, basically any amount of money is a good deal https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/every-stock-is-a-vaccine-stock-revisited.html
Patents could hinder later drugs if overbroad.
>applications-iot
"Internet of things"?
Once again, I am not pointing on the government financing but on the way it is abused. Government financing of research must have strings attached. Otherwise, as in the case with COVID vaccine public pays twice. This is typical DOGE case. You are so enthusiastic about government financing, which is not bad in itself, but raises question about your preferences and possible bias.