History teaches us that we don’t learn from history.
11 thoughts on “Lessons About Iran”
Neo con pundits comparing foreign tyrants to Hitler?
Time to buy: BA, LMT, NOC and EPA, FR:EAD
What’s EPA?
aaa 111
Umm.. I daily have to explain to people that government directed research and industrial development always fails and always has. Who won the cold war again?
Trent, I don’t think that’s correct. The Manhattan Project is a good counterexample. The project to develop atomic weapons, a wholly government funded affair, worked and worked well enough to both end a world war and prevent a third such war with the USSR.
Rather I think government directed research and industrial development has huge opportunity costs. That’s both a much harder problem to demonstrate and correct. One doesn’t see what one never had.
Here, the most obvious example is the difference between NASA-funded rocketry development and private rocketry development. NASA traditionally spends a factor of ten more for similar results.
What makes these sorts of problems particularly ugly is that they make it much harder for private companies to conduct their own research. A private research effort means a researcher has to constantly justify their activities and incurred costs. Government funding means that unless the researcher is remarkably incompetent, becomes a public embarrassment, or fails to generate the usual signs of activity such as research papers, they stand a good chance of pulling funds year after year with little accountability.
And nuclear research has been stagnating ever since.
Ugh, I guess to finish my prior post off, the end result is that no one has much incentive to do private research unless that research will pay more than government-funded research pays. I think that helps explain the decline in the famous private research labs of the past century, such as, Edison labs, Skunk Works, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc, all have disappeared. I think it was in large part due to the relative cost of running such private research compared to businesses that did their research with public funding (say by using partly subsidized university labs).
It’s lead to a generation of business leaders that are disinterested in R&D and a generation of ineffective researchers who even when they do make interesting discoveries are isolated from the businesses that would apply those discoveries to the real world.
Karl,
There are several prominent research labs in America right now. GE runs a huge R&D facility in upstate NY (GE Research), 3M does a lot of research at their facilities in Minnesota. Dupont also continues to do excellent research in the NJ/Delaware areas. I would even venture to call much of what Google does R&D. Many companies do pawn off much of their internal R&D funding on universities (feeding rapidly enlarging academic frenzy in America). As you say, and this is disappointing. It would behoove them to keep some sort of R&D in house even if just to make sure they know/understand what R&D they are buying (being a smart buyer).
I read a book called “Sidewinder: Creative missile development at China Lake” Amazon link which talked a lot about development teams and approaches to innovation.
Something one of the developers of the sidewinder noted was that unauthorized projects were far more efficient than approved projects. No time is officially spent on unauthorized projects, so they can’t be used to pad everyone’s hours or budgets. An unauthorized project stops as soon as the developers realize it won’t work, whereas an unworkable official project can drag on for years just from inertia. (The Sidewinder started as a crazy idea and the researchers pursued it as a side project, almost like a hobby. As it became more promising they slid it into what they were authorized to be working on, calling it “A proximity fuse with reduced dispersion”)
The list of ways unofficial projects are better goes on, and it was a very interesting read.
The point that trade wars lead to shooting wars can’t be made too often. Protectionism, and of course a reluctance to engage in relatively small, easily winnable conflicts, will result in WW III.
Trade (foreign or otherwise) is key to peace because trading partners play roles in each others’ livelihoods. Exhibit A comes from Radley Balko’s article on the Cory Maye saga:
Mississippi has tried to make amends for its past, but some areas of the state still lag behind the rest of the country when it comes to race…“In the northwest, you have the Memphis suburbs,” he continues. “The Gulf Coast development down around the casinos is comparatively enlightened too.” He pauses. “But just about everywhere else, this is still Mississippi.”
The legacy of Jim Crow’s various forms of protectionism is not much of a mystery.
History teaches us…
Which is why we are not supposed to be putting children in charge as we have been.
Revision: we should put children in charge of little things as training to become adults. We’ve bypassed that step making a first term congress critter president.
Neo con pundits comparing foreign tyrants to Hitler?
Time to buy: BA, LMT, NOC and EPA, FR:EAD
What’s EPA?
aaa 111
Umm.. I daily have to explain to people that government directed research and industrial development always fails and always has. Who won the cold war again?
Trent, I don’t think that’s correct. The Manhattan Project is a good counterexample. The project to develop atomic weapons, a wholly government funded affair, worked and worked well enough to both end a world war and prevent a third such war with the USSR.
Rather I think government directed research and industrial development has huge opportunity costs. That’s both a much harder problem to demonstrate and correct. One doesn’t see what one never had.
Here, the most obvious example is the difference between NASA-funded rocketry development and private rocketry development. NASA traditionally spends a factor of ten more for similar results.
What makes these sorts of problems particularly ugly is that they make it much harder for private companies to conduct their own research. A private research effort means a researcher has to constantly justify their activities and incurred costs. Government funding means that unless the researcher is remarkably incompetent, becomes a public embarrassment, or fails to generate the usual signs of activity such as research papers, they stand a good chance of pulling funds year after year with little accountability.
And nuclear research has been stagnating ever since.
Ugh, I guess to finish my prior post off, the end result is that no one has much incentive to do private research unless that research will pay more than government-funded research pays. I think that helps explain the decline in the famous private research labs of the past century, such as, Edison labs, Skunk Works, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc, all have disappeared. I think it was in large part due to the relative cost of running such private research compared to businesses that did their research with public funding (say by using partly subsidized university labs).
It’s lead to a generation of business leaders that are disinterested in R&D and a generation of ineffective researchers who even when they do make interesting discoveries are isolated from the businesses that would apply those discoveries to the real world.
Karl,
There are several prominent research labs in America right now. GE runs a huge R&D facility in upstate NY (GE Research), 3M does a lot of research at their facilities in Minnesota. Dupont also continues to do excellent research in the NJ/Delaware areas. I would even venture to call much of what Google does R&D. Many companies do pawn off much of their internal R&D funding on universities (feeding rapidly enlarging academic frenzy in America). As you say, and this is disappointing. It would behoove them to keep some sort of R&D in house even if just to make sure they know/understand what R&D they are buying (being a smart buyer).
I read a book called “Sidewinder: Creative missile development at China Lake” Amazon link which talked a lot about development teams and approaches to innovation.
Something one of the developers of the sidewinder noted was that unauthorized projects were far more efficient than approved projects. No time is officially spent on unauthorized projects, so they can’t be used to pad everyone’s hours or budgets. An unauthorized project stops as soon as the developers realize it won’t work, whereas an unworkable official project can drag on for years just from inertia. (The Sidewinder started as a crazy idea and the researchers pursued it as a side project, almost like a hobby. As it became more promising they slid it into what they were authorized to be working on, calling it “A proximity fuse with reduced dispersion”)
The list of ways unofficial projects are better goes on, and it was a very interesting read.
The point that trade wars lead to shooting wars can’t be made too often. Protectionism, and of course a reluctance to engage in relatively small, easily winnable conflicts, will result in WW III.
Trade (foreign or otherwise) is key to peace because trading partners play roles in each others’ livelihoods. Exhibit A comes from Radley Balko’s article on the Cory Maye saga:
http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/the-case-of-cory-maye/singlepage
The legacy of Jim Crow’s various forms of protectionism is not much of a mystery.
History teaches us…
Which is why we are not supposed to be putting children in charge as we have been.
Revision: we should put children in charge of little things as training to become adults. We’ve bypassed that step making a first term congress critter president.