This is really good:
http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Of%20Pandemics%20and%20Pork.txt
"The new diseases, and new strains of old diseases to which we have no immunity, will surely come, and not just one, either. We have created the ideal environment to maximise new mutations among the diseases that kill large numbers of people, and we will pay a high price. Unless we get out of factory farming, which does not seem very likely.
"But then, pork prices in the United States dropped by one-fifth between 1970 and 2004, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That means that factory farming is saving the average American consumer $29 a year, or about $2.40 a month. What's the risk of a lethal global pandemic compared to savings like that?"
Right on, Dr. Dyer!
~Charles
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
But What Can I Do? (Part II.)
A long, long time ago, Jacob wrote an article that tackled the question, “Is it ethical to pour money into basic science, while there are still suffering people in the world?” He divided the question into two parts: do these projects have any real merit at all, and whether or not such projects deserve the funding they receive. Jacob answered the first with an eloquent and succinct defence of basic scientific research. He saved the second for a later date. Well, after a long and fruitful conversation with Jacob, I’m going to try tackling this problem (the ideas, of course, belong to Jacob as much as they do to me).
But what is the proposition, and how should we think of it? Straightforwardly, the proposition is that the societal benefits of funding programs that alleviate suffering (foreign aid, welfare, etc.) significantly outweigh the societal benefits of basic scientific research. Therefore it is economically unadvisable to continue funding basic scientific research so long as so much suffering remains in the world. For the purposes of clarification, basic research is trying to understand the fundamental aspects governing some kind of natural system, such as determining the workings of DNA or finding a way of mathematically uniting the four fundamental forces of the universe. What makes basic research “basic”, and what makes it appear superficially useless, is the fact that there is never a practical goal attached to the research. Jacob showed in Part 1 that this is uselessness is only superficial: basic research is the foundation on which all technology arises. For anyone who believes that a technical civilization (that is, any civilization that uses tools beyond sticks and rocks) is a good thing, basic research is not a luxury. It should be obvious that the proposition cannot at all be easily proven.
This is not to say that it cannot be proven, and that the proposition isn’t compelling. When we see images of the poor and the starving, people left to fend for themselves against disease, starvation and the wrath of warlords, it certainly is tempting to reroute money away from enormous experiments meant to probe things most people don’t even care to understand. It doesn’t help that so many grants lead to dead ends, and so many space probes crash. I can understand the sentiment behind the proposition, but this is an overly simplistic way of thinking about the situation. Economics isn’t like shopping at the mall: you don’t walk in with a wallet full of cash, and buy what you want.
In a mall, you can pay $4.99 to buy yourself lunch. You can pay another $4.99 to buy a lunch for your friend, and for a few dollars extra, you can buy ice cream too. You know what you’re paying for; it’s advertised on the poster, and the price tag is right below. But investing $1 million in scientific research doesn’t guarantee you a million-dollar discovery, and neither does giving $1 million to foreign aid or health care guarantee that you feed a million starving people or cut hospital waiting lines by ten percent. The economy is a complex system, and changing any variable can have a great number of far-reaching consequences. Imagine instead, going to a shopping mall and ordering a sandwich, and being charged $4.99. Then you ask for a sandwich for your friend, and the price for hers drops to $4.50. Then you ask for ice cream, and you’re charged $15, then $30, then $150, and finally all they tell you is “we’re out of ice cream; come back next week.” That’s perhaps a more appropriate analogy.
To look at our proposition in the simplistically abstract way of “every dollar not spent on research could be one spent on helping people” is not doing the problem justice. It is more appropriate to ask whether or not we are spending too much on research, and not enough on alleviating suffering, right now. We can show that there are benefits from basic research, and there are clearly benefits from foreign aid too. But while it might not be obvious, there are also diminishing returns the more one invests in each pursuit.
To begin, let us consider several pertinent facts. It suffices to say that if you’re doing pure research, especially in fields like cosmology, the direct benefits to your work won’t come for a while. I will also wholeheartedly agree that in a pure economic sense basic research has a diminishing returns problem, and we rightly have more doctors and teachers than we do theoretical physicists. Neither fact supports any suggestion that we should reduce basic research spending, since we do have more doctors and teachers than physicists, and it isn’t at all obvious that short-term benefits are better than long-term ones.
There are also indirect benefits, the values of which cannot easily be quantified and all of which may increase or decrease with increased funding. Large projects can help industrialize countries. A while back I was speaking to my supervisor at MOST (Canada’s space telescope!) who mentioned that South Africa was looking to become the site for the next massive radio telescope network. He mentioned that one of the factors the (international) project overseers were considering is how this will boost South Africa’s advanced technical expertise and industry. Now obviously not all large projects are (or even could be) built in developing countries, and the country already needs to be substantially industrialized. For these countries, however, large projects are proving grounds and a source of income for local engineers and scientists, and can bolster the technical economy of a country reaching full industrialization. At the very least, such projects serve to create jobs for the technically and scientifically minded in industrialized countries.
Basic science labs can create procedures and methods, and not just information and theories, to inspire applied scientists. Someone trying to create perfectly produced lenses for the Hubble Space Telescope may come up with a method that one day creates precision lasers for communications and surgery. Building the LHC’s electromagnets could teach us lessons that one day make nuclear fusion commercially viable. It is, of course, absolutely true that applied labs will also make such innovations. The problem is that, just like Jacob said before, applied scientists do not get paid to explore, and solve hard problems just so that they can be solved. What looks like spending money on things so that people can “play” is an irreplaceable fountain of knowledge. This, by the way, applies to theory as well as experimentation, since mathematics is used so often (although not by so many people) outside of research.
And let us not forget that scientists aren’t huddled in dark caves, only communicating to the outside world through Nature or Physics Review Letters. They’re also educators, and (ought to be) bastions against the irrationality, superstition and bad empiricism that permeates so many societies today.
If anyone’s worried about the efficiency of science, it isn’t like the International Space Station was created so that we could learn if astronauts could tie their shoes in space. Big projects like the Large Hadron Collider get billions in funding because of the promise of big discoveries that could spark revolutions in the pure sciences. Of course, things (like the ISS for example) do not always turn out the way they should, and grants can certainly be politicized, but human error permeates every facet of society, and it isn’t a problem endemic only to the scientific community. (IR students can probably cite a few “large development projects” in African countries that only benefitted the rulers of said countries, and don’t get me started about the Iraqi Reconstruction Project.)
Lastly, it isn’t obvious that putting more money into health care, or development, will help as much as we’d like. Will giving an extra billion to Africa improve living conditions as much as the previous billion? Or will it even make things worse, by fostering dependency and reducing the accountability of local governments to their citizens? Will giving more money to health care make the system more efficient? More money is usually not worse, but sometimes it can indeed be.
In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that foreign aid can indeed cause significant harm, despite good intentions. She notes in particular that “the most fundamental problem is that it allows African governments to abdicate their role. In most of the world, health care, education and infrastructure are provided by government. But in Africa it's provided by aid agencies. African governments today depend on foreign aid for 70 per cent of their budgets. So there's no accountability to the people. Even if governments don't do their job, they can stay in power because they are underwritten by the donor community.”
Many economists would disagree, arguing that Africa is in a unique situation, being faced not only with extreme poverty but also facing epidemic HIV/AIDS and direct consequences of climate change. No doubt the challenges faced by industrialized countries seem trivial compared to the magnitude of those faced by African countries. And there is therefore no doubt that substantial assistance might be necessary and highly beneficial. But Moyo’s arguments have merit, and it seems likely that there can be such a thing as “too much aid”. I am not sure if we have reached the point where an extra dollar does more harm than good, but its existence is likely and should be accounted for.
Both aid and research are in principle justifiable places to devote resources. Now we have to see which one is better, but this is very, very, very hard! What we’re basically faced with now is the gargantuan challenge of comparing two incredibly complicated uber-multivariable cost-benefit curves. There is a point in both research and aids endeavours at which an extra dollar would be desperately needed, and points where one more dollar yields no more benefits.
To make a quantitative measurement of the worth of a research project, we not only have to determine the probability that it will obtain useful results, and determine the worth of such results, we also have to quantify all the additional benefits I have listed above, and figure out a way to give them a value. And then we have to do the same assessment on development and aid agencies, in a way that lets us compare the two. Given the facts on the ground, it is difficult for me to see how anyone could mount a simple, reason-based argument for taking money from pure science and putting it in health care or African development. To argue for change, we must have a convincing argument for a better arrangement than what we have now, and I fail to see one. Accurately determining which is better is a question that is extremely difficult to solve, even with data and expertise, but we cannot give in to intuitions and glib conceptions of the problem to ease the burden of this task, lest we begin to oversimplify.
But wait – there’s another way out! The original question also artificially narrows the scope of the debate in unfortunate ways. The world in no way keeps humanitarian and pure science funding in the same pool, dividing it up as it sees fair. Money can come from a million other places. How about, for example, Beanie Babies? It’s a 6 billion dollar industry (not per year, of course, but 6 billion over less than ten years is still a lot for a single brand of toys). To compare, NASA’s annual budget is 17 billion, and USAID gets more than 27 billion per year. Let us do this systematically. If we compared Beanie Babies to African development, I think anyone who says NASA should be disbanded to help Africa would say Africa is preferable to Beanie Babies. Now compare Beanie Babies to NASA. Shouldn’t we, if we had the choice, pull money out of Beanie Babies first?
Beanie Babies inspire and bring joy to millions every year? So does astronomy (in fact, probably to the chagrin of most scientists in other fields, astronomers and astronauts capture people’s imagination more than any other science). Beanie Babies offer an avenue of creativity and learning? So does astronomy. It seems likely that more children will borrow an astronomy book from the library than will own a Beanie Baby. In addition, NASA makes real scientific discoveries that affect both the pure sciences and more practical pursuits like climatology and meteorology.
We have spent some time discussing how basic research can benefit humanity, but humanitarian missions can certainly also benefit basic research. How could we know if one of the children we saved through humanitarian relief won’t one day become the next Einstein? The answer is simple: we don’t. This falls back to the either-or problem from the last paragraph. Why can’t we do both at the same time? If we are in agreement that both pure science and humanitarian relief is more important than Beanie Babies, why can’t we give Beanie Babies the axe?
There is, of course, the question of whether or not you should help the world more by becoming a basic science researcher. Obviously, if you’re not that great at research, your talents should go elsewhere. Obviously, if you hate research, your talents should go elsewhere. If you’re good at basic scientific research, and you love what you do, then your contributions could make little or much difference in the world, and it is extraordinarily difficult to tell which it will be. Maybe you will become the next Thomson, or Watson, or Crick. Maybe you won’t, and your work will help the next Thomson, Watson or Crick realize a scientific revolution. Maybe you’ll hit a dead end, and prevent future geniuses from ever going down the route you did and waste their precious time. Maybe your work will be forgotten. I suppose if you want to help humanity in the short run, you probably should not go into certain fields (such as astronomy) whose discoveries are likely (of course, not certain) to have long and not short-term benefits. Otherwise, choosing your passion, and choosing what you excel at, are probably the only things you can do, and the only things you should be doing.
So yeah, I didn’t answer the question, I just made it way harder to answer. But I think that’s progress. If someone is willing to volunteer their time toward the monumental goal of auditing government spending and performing a massive utilitarian calculation, I’d be happy (and impressed!) to read the results. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that the problem is simple, obvious, and can even be resolved in a debate or conversation. There are too many benefits to basic research, and so many complications in funding, for us to judge without more information.
~Charles
With much thanks to Jacob for both the conversation and editing this piece.
P.S. (Because I don’t think this is a good argument so much as just something I want to ask.)
It is quite obvious that the people who challenge basic research because it prevents the alleviation of suffering value the alleviation of suffering more than the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. The above argument tackles the accusations using practical reasoning, but I now want to pose a question to satisfy the sadistic relativist side of my brain. Why should we believe this? The immediate answer may be that a life (not in the sense of biological life, but experience, essentially) is inherently good (i.e. good because it is). Why should we believe this? That is not an obvious question, and may be unanswerable on moral or rational grounds alone. So, then, why might you believe that? And if I were to say that I believe the “advancement of civilization” (whatever that means) is an intrinsic good more important than (the intrinsic good of) a single life, or two, or ten, what would you say to convince me otherwise?
But what is the proposition, and how should we think of it? Straightforwardly, the proposition is that the societal benefits of funding programs that alleviate suffering (foreign aid, welfare, etc.) significantly outweigh the societal benefits of basic scientific research. Therefore it is economically unadvisable to continue funding basic scientific research so long as so much suffering remains in the world. For the purposes of clarification, basic research is trying to understand the fundamental aspects governing some kind of natural system, such as determining the workings of DNA or finding a way of mathematically uniting the four fundamental forces of the universe. What makes basic research “basic”, and what makes it appear superficially useless, is the fact that there is never a practical goal attached to the research. Jacob showed in Part 1 that this is uselessness is only superficial: basic research is the foundation on which all technology arises. For anyone who believes that a technical civilization (that is, any civilization that uses tools beyond sticks and rocks) is a good thing, basic research is not a luxury. It should be obvious that the proposition cannot at all be easily proven.
This is not to say that it cannot be proven, and that the proposition isn’t compelling. When we see images of the poor and the starving, people left to fend for themselves against disease, starvation and the wrath of warlords, it certainly is tempting to reroute money away from enormous experiments meant to probe things most people don’t even care to understand. It doesn’t help that so many grants lead to dead ends, and so many space probes crash. I can understand the sentiment behind the proposition, but this is an overly simplistic way of thinking about the situation. Economics isn’t like shopping at the mall: you don’t walk in with a wallet full of cash, and buy what you want.
In a mall, you can pay $4.99 to buy yourself lunch. You can pay another $4.99 to buy a lunch for your friend, and for a few dollars extra, you can buy ice cream too. You know what you’re paying for; it’s advertised on the poster, and the price tag is right below. But investing $1 million in scientific research doesn’t guarantee you a million-dollar discovery, and neither does giving $1 million to foreign aid or health care guarantee that you feed a million starving people or cut hospital waiting lines by ten percent. The economy is a complex system, and changing any variable can have a great number of far-reaching consequences. Imagine instead, going to a shopping mall and ordering a sandwich, and being charged $4.99. Then you ask for a sandwich for your friend, and the price for hers drops to $4.50. Then you ask for ice cream, and you’re charged $15, then $30, then $150, and finally all they tell you is “we’re out of ice cream; come back next week.” That’s perhaps a more appropriate analogy.
To look at our proposition in the simplistically abstract way of “every dollar not spent on research could be one spent on helping people” is not doing the problem justice. It is more appropriate to ask whether or not we are spending too much on research, and not enough on alleviating suffering, right now. We can show that there are benefits from basic research, and there are clearly benefits from foreign aid too. But while it might not be obvious, there are also diminishing returns the more one invests in each pursuit.
To begin, let us consider several pertinent facts. It suffices to say that if you’re doing pure research, especially in fields like cosmology, the direct benefits to your work won’t come for a while. I will also wholeheartedly agree that in a pure economic sense basic research has a diminishing returns problem, and we rightly have more doctors and teachers than we do theoretical physicists. Neither fact supports any suggestion that we should reduce basic research spending, since we do have more doctors and teachers than physicists, and it isn’t at all obvious that short-term benefits are better than long-term ones.
There are also indirect benefits, the values of which cannot easily be quantified and all of which may increase or decrease with increased funding. Large projects can help industrialize countries. A while back I was speaking to my supervisor at MOST (Canada’s space telescope!) who mentioned that South Africa was looking to become the site for the next massive radio telescope network. He mentioned that one of the factors the (international) project overseers were considering is how this will boost South Africa’s advanced technical expertise and industry. Now obviously not all large projects are (or even could be) built in developing countries, and the country already needs to be substantially industrialized. For these countries, however, large projects are proving grounds and a source of income for local engineers and scientists, and can bolster the technical economy of a country reaching full industrialization. At the very least, such projects serve to create jobs for the technically and scientifically minded in industrialized countries.
Basic science labs can create procedures and methods, and not just information and theories, to inspire applied scientists. Someone trying to create perfectly produced lenses for the Hubble Space Telescope may come up with a method that one day creates precision lasers for communications and surgery. Building the LHC’s electromagnets could teach us lessons that one day make nuclear fusion commercially viable. It is, of course, absolutely true that applied labs will also make such innovations. The problem is that, just like Jacob said before, applied scientists do not get paid to explore, and solve hard problems just so that they can be solved. What looks like spending money on things so that people can “play” is an irreplaceable fountain of knowledge. This, by the way, applies to theory as well as experimentation, since mathematics is used so often (although not by so many people) outside of research.
And let us not forget that scientists aren’t huddled in dark caves, only communicating to the outside world through Nature or Physics Review Letters. They’re also educators, and (ought to be) bastions against the irrationality, superstition and bad empiricism that permeates so many societies today.
If anyone’s worried about the efficiency of science, it isn’t like the International Space Station was created so that we could learn if astronauts could tie their shoes in space. Big projects like the Large Hadron Collider get billions in funding because of the promise of big discoveries that could spark revolutions in the pure sciences. Of course, things (like the ISS for example) do not always turn out the way they should, and grants can certainly be politicized, but human error permeates every facet of society, and it isn’t a problem endemic only to the scientific community. (IR students can probably cite a few “large development projects” in African countries that only benefitted the rulers of said countries, and don’t get me started about the Iraqi Reconstruction Project.)
Lastly, it isn’t obvious that putting more money into health care, or development, will help as much as we’d like. Will giving an extra billion to Africa improve living conditions as much as the previous billion? Or will it even make things worse, by fostering dependency and reducing the accountability of local governments to their citizens? Will giving more money to health care make the system more efficient? More money is usually not worse, but sometimes it can indeed be.
In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that foreign aid can indeed cause significant harm, despite good intentions. She notes in particular that “the most fundamental problem is that it allows African governments to abdicate their role. In most of the world, health care, education and infrastructure are provided by government. But in Africa it's provided by aid agencies. African governments today depend on foreign aid for 70 per cent of their budgets. So there's no accountability to the people. Even if governments don't do their job, they can stay in power because they are underwritten by the donor community.”
Many economists would disagree, arguing that Africa is in a unique situation, being faced not only with extreme poverty but also facing epidemic HIV/AIDS and direct consequences of climate change. No doubt the challenges faced by industrialized countries seem trivial compared to the magnitude of those faced by African countries. And there is therefore no doubt that substantial assistance might be necessary and highly beneficial. But Moyo’s arguments have merit, and it seems likely that there can be such a thing as “too much aid”. I am not sure if we have reached the point where an extra dollar does more harm than good, but its existence is likely and should be accounted for.
Both aid and research are in principle justifiable places to devote resources. Now we have to see which one is better, but this is very, very, very hard! What we’re basically faced with now is the gargantuan challenge of comparing two incredibly complicated uber-multivariable cost-benefit curves. There is a point in both research and aids endeavours at which an extra dollar would be desperately needed, and points where one more dollar yields no more benefits.
To make a quantitative measurement of the worth of a research project, we not only have to determine the probability that it will obtain useful results, and determine the worth of such results, we also have to quantify all the additional benefits I have listed above, and figure out a way to give them a value. And then we have to do the same assessment on development and aid agencies, in a way that lets us compare the two. Given the facts on the ground, it is difficult for me to see how anyone could mount a simple, reason-based argument for taking money from pure science and putting it in health care or African development. To argue for change, we must have a convincing argument for a better arrangement than what we have now, and I fail to see one. Accurately determining which is better is a question that is extremely difficult to solve, even with data and expertise, but we cannot give in to intuitions and glib conceptions of the problem to ease the burden of this task, lest we begin to oversimplify.
But wait – there’s another way out! The original question also artificially narrows the scope of the debate in unfortunate ways. The world in no way keeps humanitarian and pure science funding in the same pool, dividing it up as it sees fair. Money can come from a million other places. How about, for example, Beanie Babies? It’s a 6 billion dollar industry (not per year, of course, but 6 billion over less than ten years is still a lot for a single brand of toys). To compare, NASA’s annual budget is 17 billion, and USAID gets more than 27 billion per year. Let us do this systematically. If we compared Beanie Babies to African development, I think anyone who says NASA should be disbanded to help Africa would say Africa is preferable to Beanie Babies. Now compare Beanie Babies to NASA. Shouldn’t we, if we had the choice, pull money out of Beanie Babies first?
Beanie Babies inspire and bring joy to millions every year? So does astronomy (in fact, probably to the chagrin of most scientists in other fields, astronomers and astronauts capture people’s imagination more than any other science). Beanie Babies offer an avenue of creativity and learning? So does astronomy. It seems likely that more children will borrow an astronomy book from the library than will own a Beanie Baby. In addition, NASA makes real scientific discoveries that affect both the pure sciences and more practical pursuits like climatology and meteorology.
We have spent some time discussing how basic research can benefit humanity, but humanitarian missions can certainly also benefit basic research. How could we know if one of the children we saved through humanitarian relief won’t one day become the next Einstein? The answer is simple: we don’t. This falls back to the either-or problem from the last paragraph. Why can’t we do both at the same time? If we are in agreement that both pure science and humanitarian relief is more important than Beanie Babies, why can’t we give Beanie Babies the axe?
There is, of course, the question of whether or not you should help the world more by becoming a basic science researcher. Obviously, if you’re not that great at research, your talents should go elsewhere. Obviously, if you hate research, your talents should go elsewhere. If you’re good at basic scientific research, and you love what you do, then your contributions could make little or much difference in the world, and it is extraordinarily difficult to tell which it will be. Maybe you will become the next Thomson, or Watson, or Crick. Maybe you won’t, and your work will help the next Thomson, Watson or Crick realize a scientific revolution. Maybe you’ll hit a dead end, and prevent future geniuses from ever going down the route you did and waste their precious time. Maybe your work will be forgotten. I suppose if you want to help humanity in the short run, you probably should not go into certain fields (such as astronomy) whose discoveries are likely (of course, not certain) to have long and not short-term benefits. Otherwise, choosing your passion, and choosing what you excel at, are probably the only things you can do, and the only things you should be doing.
So yeah, I didn’t answer the question, I just made it way harder to answer. But I think that’s progress. If someone is willing to volunteer their time toward the monumental goal of auditing government spending and performing a massive utilitarian calculation, I’d be happy (and impressed!) to read the results. In the meantime, we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that the problem is simple, obvious, and can even be resolved in a debate or conversation. There are too many benefits to basic research, and so many complications in funding, for us to judge without more information.
~Charles
With much thanks to Jacob for both the conversation and editing this piece.
P.S. (Because I don’t think this is a good argument so much as just something I want to ask.)
It is quite obvious that the people who challenge basic research because it prevents the alleviation of suffering value the alleviation of suffering more than the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. The above argument tackles the accusations using practical reasoning, but I now want to pose a question to satisfy the sadistic relativist side of my brain. Why should we believe this? The immediate answer may be that a life (not in the sense of biological life, but experience, essentially) is inherently good (i.e. good because it is). Why should we believe this? That is not an obvious question, and may be unanswerable on moral or rational grounds alone. So, then, why might you believe that? And if I were to say that I believe the “advancement of civilization” (whatever that means) is an intrinsic good more important than (the intrinsic good of) a single life, or two, or ten, what would you say to convince me otherwise?
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