Social value of basic science research

This page discusses the value of doing basic science research that is not geared to immediate application. Almost all mathematics research is of this sort, and a significant fraction of physics, chemistry, and computer science research also fits this model.

Until the nineteenth century, basic science research was generally done in spare time by people who had other day jobs (examples are mathematician Pierre Fermat, chemist John Dalton, and biologist Gregor Mendel). In the present era, this sort of "science-on-the-side" model has fallen out of favor, and basic scientific research is generally done by people in academia. Therefore, to some extent, evaluating basic science research is similar to evaluating academia (see more on academia as a career option and social value of academia).

There are some areas of research that fall within the realm of science research but are sufficiently close to application that it is inaccurate to characterize them as basic science research. Examples including machine learning and artificial intelligence research (see social value of working in artificial intelligence and machine learning) and biomedical research (see biomedical research as a career option and social value of biomedical research).

==Should there be more basic science research?

Societies that engage in basic science research

There seems to be a positive correlation between the wealth of a society and the fraction of money that is spent on basic science research. However, causality could arguably run in any of these ways:

Wealthier societies have more money to spend on luxuries such as basic science research, in the same way as they have more money to spare for entertainment or art.
Basic science research makes societies wealthier by producing ideas that feed into technology that improved productivity.
Both wealth and the fraction of money spent on basic science research have an independent common cause. This cause could be the education level or intelligence of the members, the value they place on intellectual pursuit, the value they place on making long-term investments, or something else.

The knowledge goods argument

As a general rule, income is a good proxy for social value generated. Higher income attracts more people. So, naively, we would expect the "right" number of people in every profession.

However, basic science research produces knowledge goods. Knowledge goods have the property that they have high fixed production costs but, once produced, are free to consume at the margin. The production and dissemination of knowledge goods is non-rival -- one person's knowing something doesn't reduce the amount there is for another person to know. In fact, some forms of knowledge benefit from network effects: the more others know, the greater the value there is to knowing it.

The high production costs and low replication or dissemination costs suggest two possible models for the production and dissemination of knowledge goods:

People invest in producing knowledge goods and then charge others for access to the knowledge goods. To prevent the knowledge "leaking" they may use measures for secrecy and intellectual property protection.
The production of knowledge goods is funded philanthropically, and the goods are then disseminated in the widest and lowest-cost manner possible.

It has been argued that for basic science research, model (2) promotes more long-run scientific and technological progress, because:

It enables the production of ideas that may not have an immediate market to sell to, but may be part of a long chain of ideas that eventually lead to something useful.
The wider dissemination helps make sure that more people have access to the idea and can build on it.

Note that philanthropically funded basic science research is not the only instance of knowledge goods being disseminated for free. In industry, there are many instances of freemium and ad-supported models used to distribute goods with high fixed production costs but low distribution costs. In the free and open source software (FOSS) world, software code is available for free to use and modify, and people make money either by having foundations that can be donated to, or by partnering with for-profit companies that benefit from the growth of that software ecosystem.

Bacon's chain

The standard argument for the social value of basic science research has been dubbed "Bacon's chain" by William Niskanen, a critic of the argument. Niskanen formulates the argument as follows in his article Reflections of a Political Economist, as quoted by David Henderson in the blog post Basic Research Does Not Equal Technology:

Government financing is necessary to provide the adequate level of basic research, which is necessary to provide the scientific foundation for advanced technology, which accounts for a large part of economic growth.

Schematically:

Government funding $\to$ Basic research $\to$ Advanced technology $\to$ Economic growth

However, Niskanen and some others have argued that very link in the chain is flawed. In particular, the link from basic science to advanced technology has been argued to be weak. Henderson quotes David P. Billington's The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering to offer an explanation for the link from basic research to advanced technology being weak:

There is a fundamental difference between science and technology. Engineering or technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed. Technological results are forms that exist only because people want to make them, whereas scientific results are formulations of what exists independently of human intentions. Technology deals with the artificial, science with the natural.

Henderson also quotes Billington quoting Michael Mulkay writing:

[S]cience seems to accumulate mainly on the basis of past science, and technology primarily on the basis of past technology.