On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 8:32 AM, James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
It is incredible to watch the folks here in Vortex speak about obscenity > like NASA in any other terms. It was born of a Manhattan Project-style > centralized government program an and, like the Manhattan Project, spawned > a technology-suppressing bureaucracy that would not die. It was not a > Gregg Easterbrook-like character, but Stanley Pons and his financial > independence (along with Fleischmann's retirement independence) that > allowed for an escape route for cold fusion. Yet, we see 2 decades later, > the monster spawned of Manhattan, is still fighting for the destruction of > the world. > NASA is big and bureaucratic. Many other U.S. government agencies are big and bureaucratic as well. Overgrown bureaucracy leads to funny organizational decision making and to vast inefficiencies. In the context of science, heavy-handed bureaucracy can and does impede scientific discovery. Decentralizing decision making in the context of encouraging innovation and handing much of the work over to the private sector promise to remedy some of this dysfunction. These statements are almost entirely uncontroversial. Few intelligent observers who follow this stuff who would disagree with them in principle. The question that is most interesting to me here is that of the degree and role of the government in any government-industry collaboration. When we place all emphasis on the private sector, unconditionally, a discussion that was previously interesting becomes political (U.S. politics, for those of us who cannot be bothered to follow the not-so-subtle subtext of the present thread), questions that previously had nuance become black and white and we find ourselves at another front in the ongoing culture wars. Eric
