No, I was disagreeing with “This would plague private funding just as much . . . .” At all, yes. As much, no.
That was never in dispute. I’m not suggesting that substituting private grants for government grants would produce science nirvana.
No, I’m not. Private givers may not always expect a marketable product to result from the research they fund, but they at least expect new knowledge. Preferably important or profound knowledge.
Here it is.
What was it Milton Friedman said about the four ways to spend money?
As Effective Altruists have pointed out, charitable giving is not as results-driven as it could be. Still, it has to be less wasteful than government grants, because the givers have skin in the game.
The government grants to scientists with other peoples’ money. Private grantors (or those who donate to the grantors) spend their own money.
I’m getting confused. Is renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels, or more expensive? If the answer is cheaper, has that been true for centuries, or just recently? Is there anyone other than “big industry” who benefits from energy being cheap?
No one else, though? No trade-offs?
Would reducing greenhouse gas emissions by enough to affect climate change cause any harms or big troubles?
Climate warming is real. It will cause real harm and big troubles for mankind. It’s also possible to exaggerate the harms and troubles, or to be excessively concerned with them.
We need a new economics of water as a common good: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00800-z
Before governments get together to manage the globe’s “precipitationsheds” and “evaporationsheds,” perhaps they should get better at setting water policies within their own borders. While they allow some private, tradeable water rights; they also control prices and allocate water politically. As a result, we get water surpluses in some places, and shortages and rationing in others.
We need a new economics of water as a common good: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00800-z
Typical of Nature’s editors to be more concerned with leveraging scientific research to gain political influence than with increasing the sum of human knowledge.
Also, Singapore is a parliamentary democracy, albeit one that is dominated by one party.
Cato’s Letters, by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were popular in the revolutionary era though less known now.
If he’s wise enough to realize taxes are creating deadweight losses, why is he eliminating them only for technology-producing businesses and workers? Or, if he must have a government, why not lower taxes for everyone? As it is, his plan amounts to industrial policy, where the government picks winners and losers. I guess turning El Salvador into a “tech hub” will increase his status when meeting with other government leaders, but it’s going to make the world poorer than it would have been had he let the market determine where investments go.
#[0] My Trezor now seems passé, but is there an air-gapped Monero cold wallet?
"[Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal] again echoed a long-term frustration with the SEC's apparent desire to reveal what it believes the law requires not through rigorous understandable written notice—something more like actual law or rule making—but by just bashing certain crypto market players against the wall, seemingly at random."
#coinbase #sec #crypto #regulation
Larry White or George Selgin.