Comments on: A Review of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Part 2 http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=3746 Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:36:51 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Markk http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=3746&cpage=1#comment-3237 Markk Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:56:12 +0000 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheusreborn/?p=3746#comment-3237 I see, this report has more to do with 'basic research' than what I was talking about regarding the first installment. That was more the the D side of R&D. This is even more complicated. What "products" are the fruit of basic ecological or climate research? I think that those points are well made in the review. Even more, if ecological research gave us knowledge to slightly change farming practices, and led to reduced loss of productivity, or more productivity with different crops, how is that factored in? Plus there is the Mongolian Horde card. It doesn't work most of the time, but it does sometimes work to have a bunch of people to throw at a problem, and you need that baseline number of people that are up to speed in a given area. All these make a model of basic R&D's relationship to economic productivity pretty difficult. I suspect that this is an area where every model is a "dark theory" as it were, where every time you tested you would get a different result. Isn't that the wrong question anyway? Its seems pretty wrongheaded to make some decision like - "we'll allocate X dollars to basic research" at all. What "Basic" research? High Energy Physics or infectious disease modeling? They seem pretty far apart to be lumped together. There are only so many hours in a day for people to make decisions on this I guess. At the US national level you got what NIH, NSF, NOAA, NASA, DoD, maybe a half dozen line items, so things really are thrown together. I see, this report has more to do with ‘basic research’ than what I was talking about regarding the first installment. That was more the the D side of R&D. This is even more complicated. What “products” are the fruit of basic ecological or climate research? I think that those points are well made in the review. Even more, if ecological research gave us knowledge to slightly change farming practices, and led to reduced loss of productivity, or more productivity with different crops, how is that factored in? Plus there is the Mongolian Horde card. It doesn’t work most of the time, but it does sometimes work to have a bunch of people to throw at a problem, and you need that baseline number of people that are up to speed in a given area. All these make a model of basic R&D’s relationship to economic productivity pretty difficult. I suspect that this is an area where every model is a “dark theory” as it were, where every time you tested you would get a different result.

Isn’t that the wrong question anyway? Its seems pretty wrongheaded to make some decision like – “we’ll allocate X dollars to basic research” at all. What “Basic” research? High Energy Physics or infectious disease modeling? They seem pretty far apart to be lumped together. There are only so many hours in a day for people to make decisions on this I guess. At the US national level you got what NIH, NSF, NOAA, NASA, DoD, maybe a half dozen line items, so things really are thrown together.

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