The first is, as I know you’re big on, there is an inherent value to pure research that is not necessarily economic but scientific (though in the longview, that is of course economic, but that can often be the very long view).

I guess that what I’d say is that people shouldn’t fool themselves that this research will happen without Federal Government funding at close to the rate at which it happens now. I personally think that there is a benefit to the amount of that research that is currently being done, but I am not sure that there’s a right or wrong answer; society can decide how much it values pure scientific research. However, it really does have to decide, even if only by not deciding, which is a vote for much less of that research; if it decides it wants to fund less of it, as we both know and have explained, that’ll also hurt Universities a lot (as well as other institutions such as Fermilab, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, etc, etc), because many of them rely on the overhead from the research dollars to operate at the levels at which they currently do.

The truth is that, in terms of seeding a product, pure research funding is not very economically sensible, in that there is no X investment = Y revenue equation you can plug money into. If you look at it with a very budget cutting mentality, there’s not much of a case that there’s any kind of great return on the investment, although it is the case that it’s a bit like playing the lottery, in that you’re not particularly likely to hit a decent return, but if you do, it could be huge. But not everything is going to net you a Tang. Most of the money is going to net you a research paper in a journal read only by other people getting NSF funding, which only glacially moves science (and civilization) forward.

But that misses the point twofold. The first is, as I know you’re big on, there is an inherent value to pure research that is not necessarily economic but scientific (though in the longview, that is of course economic, but that can often be the very long view). Human progress really DOES tend to move pretty glacially (although, again, when it does really hit, it can create a chain reaction that pushes us forward by leaps and bounds. Think math and physics in the 20s or computer science in the 50s). You can place a value on things that supercedes to some extent the economic value (although needless to say, that scientific value will eventually return economically).

But MORE than that, your last paragraph nails the real economic benefit of funding pure research. What NSF funding specifically (and research funding like it) does is provide huge support to higher education in America (or wherever), and just as importantly, it’s probably America’s most successful and certainly most pervasive job training program for highly skilled jobs (engineering, physics, chemistry, high end math and computer science, etc.).

On the former, as you say, for a university like Carnegie Mellon (which doesn’t have a very big endowment relative to other universities), the revenue stream of research funding is one of the three legs of the stool on which its viability rests. And that benefits, of course, not just those people studying quantum physics or whale fucking (or whatever John McCain’s favored “example of ridiculous pork spending of the week” is), but every student, decreasing tuition costs, allowing a university to expand, supporting the staffs (and of course faculties) needed (which are often very big employers in any given area), etc. etc.

But on the second, which I’m a big advocate of, I think people often bitch about how America is getting surpassed in math and science and the like, and losing its competitive edge in that regard to countries like China and India and Pakistan, but they don’t quite realize the nearly 1 to 1 ration of that and research funding. Where do they imagine our next generation of highly skilled specialists are coming from? They come, of course, from universities. And it’s not just people that wind up spending their lives as Post Docs studying Hadron data, but guys that end up in Boeing, or Monsanto, or GM, or as city planners, etc. NSF funding is, in a very real sense, a farm system for scientists and technologists. I think it sounds good for a congressman to cut research funding, because it can be hard to sell to constituents and a ripe target, but I don’t think many people have it very well thought through. Sure you’re planting a million seeds, but even if that only returns 10,000 to 1 to harvest, the more seeds, the better the crop.

I’m a pretty libertarian guy in terms of funding stuff, but if there is to be ANY funding of higher education, or any place for the American government to make an investment in keeping our competitive and scientific edge, pure research funding is actually a pretty damn good investment.