-Caveat Lector- >From Intellectual Capital http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/99/0128/icbusiness3.asp Al Gore's Not-So-Excellent Adventure by Jerry Pournelle January 28, 1999 ANAHEIM, Ca. -- Vice President Gore predictably came bearing gifts to the 1999 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He usually does. Gore likes speaking at the AAAS, because while many scientists privately think he is dumber than a box of rocks, most scientists and all scientific administrators flatter him into thinking he is one of them. Gore always has had a particular devotion to the Internet. I recall a few years ago Gore lecturing about how he played in integral way in starting the Internet and how it works. The people he was speaking to were the ones who actually made the Internet happen, and their comments after Gore's speech were a great deal gentler than I expected. This year his devotion manifests itself in money: Gore proposes a $366 million increase in government "investment" in information technology. This is a really poor idea. Doing more with less <Picture: Government investment in information technology?> Is government "investment" in information technology a good idea? I do not say this from dogmatic opposition to government funding of basic science; indeed, there is really no alternative, because there is no one else to look out for the future. Private industry is not going to help with long-term plans. The discounted value of a dollar in 20 years is effectively zero, and corporate management is judged on close-range, bottom-line returns. Investors may buy stocks valued at 100 times earning, but they do not really expect to wait 100 years to get their money back. And corporate managers who allocate real money to research with no payoff in 20 years or more are going to be instant targets for hostile takeover bids. The fact is that no one but government is going to look out for our grandchildren, and basic research is more likely to benefit our grandchildren than this generation. Nothing is inherently wrong with government research in the future, and it is likely we need more of it. Indeed, I am willing to argue that our investments through the National Science Foundation (NSF) have been spectacularly successful, one of the best investments of tax dollars ever made by us or anyone else. NSF, in contrast to the National Institutes of Health and many of the other research funding agencies, developed techniques for allocating money to the best research while cutting off money to projects that should not have it. You could, and NSF officials do, argue some good projects are left unfunded, so that NSF could use more money. But the interesting part is that no NSF officer I ever talked to wants a lotmore, and most wish that some parts of NSF had less. Money corrupts The reason is simple enough, and it is not just the waste of money on useless work. The problem is that adequately funded projects attract really good people. Overfunded projects attract not only the top people interested in that project, but others who are not that good: people who might be splendid at a less knotty problem, but who are simply over their heads working on this one. These people are not necessarily second rate; they are only second rate in some areas. They would be first rate elsewhere; and because we do not have an oversupply of such people we cannot afford to waste them. That is the first misallocation of resources. You can see it in the health sciences, where we spend something like 50 times as much money per death from AIDS than on cancer. Lately breast cancer has attracted enormous amounts of money, although lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer. The result is funding a bunch of low-priority breast-cancer studies while high-priority lung-cancer studies go begging. The very top people with something to contribute probably continue to work in lung cancer, but a lot of graduate students choose breast cancer as a specialty as career insurance. You win some, and you lose some That is the problem with Gore's jump on the Internet/Information bandwagon. It is already overfunded through the marketplace. There may be some sense to Amazon.com (which has never shown a profit) having a stock-market value three times that of The New York Times enterprises and 15 times that of Barnes and Noble (which actually has book stores and reports profits). But there is certainly no sense to all of this Internet ferment. Some of those investments are bad, and those who made them are going to lose, and that's what market economics is about. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of research funds. Several AAAS panels (Gore didn't attend any of them, of course) were in information theory and models of Internet information flow. The fundamental mathematics are not being ignored, and if there are any interesting Internet research projects out there going begging for funds, I do not know about them. Pouring money into the research project of the moment is precisely what government ought not to be doing. The market will take care of that. What government should be doing is finding areas where there is not any basic research but ought to be. Alas, bureaucrats are not good at doing that, because almost by definition, basic research seldom has any payoff. Oh, sure, once in a while there's something spectacular, like Shockley's work on solid state physics at Bell Labs resulting in the transistors that created our modern world -- but that doesn't happen often. Mostly, basic research funds look like money poured down a rat hole, candidates for Sen. Proxmire's "Golden Fleece Awards," while many such projects turn out to be dry wells. Good research will always pay for itself (if only by showing where it is not a good idea to invest), but it is not always easy to see that intelligent funding of basic research takes hard work by smart people. Government science funding has a spotted track record. Some projects had spectacular success: The X Projects transformed aviation, and NSF funding has changed the nature of our understanding of the physical world. Others, such as health sciences, have had mixed success, although generally doing a lot more good than harm. But some, including "research" into "regulatory science," have done a great deal of harm. Gore's $335 million for the Internet is not enough to cause a serious distortion, but it could be the opening wedge of a campaign to take control of the most dynamic part of our economy; and that is extremely dangerous. Scientifically, Gore may be dumber than a box of rocks, but he understands policy very well. The real danger here is that he is not just jumping on a bandwagon to gain favor with the science community. The real danger is that he knows exactly what he is doing. Jerry Pournelle has written about computers and civilization for 20 years. He is a contributing editor for IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] <Picture>Related Links The American Association for the Advancement of Science provides data on congressional R&D appropriations, and the National Science Foundation has a database of grants awarded. Federal funding of science is a high priority for the private and public sectors, as this article from the Minnesota Research Review illustrates. Amazon and eBay are still losing money, but their rising stock is lifting net stocks generally, reports Wired News. 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