Sorry or chiming in so late on the discussion, I just saw it now. Being a topic I am deeply passionate about, I couldn't resist to not answer. My fingers were itching to hit the keyboard and I desperately needed to ease that tingle. I am in basic research myself and think it is at the heart and foundation of the progression of humanity, because if we stop developing, our race's and civilisation's peak is very soon to come and a steep decline will follow.
The issue is not that companies capitalizes on gov. funded research but that the basic research is almost never funded by private investors, as it is risky (the odds of ending out with a new "iPhone" are slim and hard/impossible to predict), expensive and long term oriented. This is a real problem as many big companies avoid partially or completely to pay their taxes. Tax money that should pay for the research done by the government and fund any future research. Even though the government can draw money from other tax payers to fund their research, the incentive to keep dropping money into what seems to be a black hole will by that logic surely get alienated.
Some think that the government should completely stay away from the private market and only focus on maintaining the infrastructure, basic education, basic healthcare, bank rescue packages etc... All of this is mentioned and expanded on in great detail in
Mariana Mazzucato's 'The Entrepreneurial State'.
Those people that think that basic research should be left to the private sector so that finally only research that pays out is getting done and those mad scientists stop wasting my hard earned buck are of course entitled to have that opinion. They just have no fucking clue what they are talking about.
You don't need to take an iPhone as an example to show the complexity and vast amount of developments that need to go into a single product. You can take a simple pencil. It's a graphite core ensheathed by wood. Products don't get much simpler than that. You need someone to find graphite, you need companies mining it who in turn need all the equipment to run a mine which in turn needed to be invented and developed (nowadays graphite can be even produced artificially), you need someone to find out that mixing graphite powder and clay and then baking it in a kiln makes for better pencils, you need lumberjacks, sawmills and finally the whole machinery that allows you produce pencils. And then you need the tools for accounting, building the factory itself, maintaining it etc.
This is a highly interesting talk explaining this like I never could that I can wholeheartedly recommend to listen to:
TED Talk Matt Ridley - When Ideas have SexSo, many technologies are needed to produce something as simple as a pencil, And yet many of them don't pay out themselves, meaning they don't benefit from the pencil business. The pencil business isn't paying back.
Yet, it is painstakingly obvious that science is needed. The problem is, no one can know beforehand which science is needed. Which science will lead to the iPhone and which not? Ground-breaking science is often made out of mere curiosity. Yet there is very little science done that doesn't contribute to our better understanding of the world.
That's why science is vital. This article describes fantastically why basic science is benefitial:
Thomas Levenson - Let's waste more money on scienceBut science needs funding and as we've seen products need science. How can science be funded, then?
A) directly. Science needs to pay for itself. Which would require an intellectual property law that never lets intellectual property expire. The Pencil needs to still nowadays pay for the discovery of graphite. Besides being completely impractical, this model would also provide an extreme hindrance to innovation. Patents as they exist now are already dampening innovation and development.
B) in a communal effort. There are many ways the society including the pencil producer can pay science and thus pay for the ideas and developments they are using, but the probably easiest is by paying taxes and the state funding basic research.
And funding research pays out. There is no doubt about it that. Switzerland's economical strength and long-term stability is based way more on science than it is on banking, for example.
So when people say "science should pay for itself" what they actually mean is "I don't want to pay for science". Which in my eyes would only be okay if they are living totally independent and use nothing they cannot make themselves.
So what it actually means is "I love my iPhone, but it was expensive enough. I'll be damned if I have to pay to make the next iPhone possible".
They want to benefit from progress and technology but not pay for it. Out of personal benefit, I'd even say greed. Which is defined as parasitism.
And this is something that drives me crazy. Because it is directly affecting me personally.
I am working in life science. Investigating the biological basis of Multiple Sclerosis, to be precise. I am doing this since my master thesis and my PhD and am now in my late 30ies, approaching 20 years in the profession soon. I have all that time had comparatively low income -just above minimal wage during my 6-years PhD, for example. I earn roughly 30% of what I could earn in a pharmaceutical company.
All that while having work contracts that have never exceeded one year, often only 3 months. With a high degree of uncertainty whether there will be any continuation. I have lived in 4 European countries to be able to do this.
Putting easily and constantly in 50-60h/week.
I don't have kids and a family. I'd like to but the financial uncertainty and general instability this job brings along has kept me from having one.
Additionally, I have to find my own money. I have to apply for research funding, develop the projects and convince people they are worth doing. A full panel of experts will decide about that. And even if they think it is worth it, there still might not be enough money to do it.
But that all is ok, because I chose to do it. I love what I am doing and I think it is worth to be done.
At some point my research might hopefully contribute to a successful therapy for Multiple Sclerosis. It will likely be a single brick in a wall as big as Trump's moronic project, but I hope I will have contributed something to better understand the brain and its diseases.
Some company will develop a therapy for Multiple Sclerosis. It will be a so-called "block buster", a medication/treatment that's responsible for a big chunk of the company's earning. We're talking billions here. A CEO of said company will get bonuses in the million range. While the scientists like me that paved the road to this point will likely be on state pension.
That's ok, that's how the world runs in our neoliberal economy model.
But if a CEO or any other that is on the benefiting site of this will then come forth and say "we should cut science funding, science should be be able to pay for itself. We are, why aren't they?" -then I have the strong urge to punch that person.