> Why would eliminating corporate funding in academic research be bad?
The honest answer is because there isn't enough funding through government and philanthropy.
You'll find a really odd opinion, that many people think engineering endeavors are significantly more important than research ones. When instead the truth is that both are two sides of the same coin. After all, research funds the next generation of engineering.
I think there's an unfortunate effect of this because there is quite a bit of science that is beholden to corporate... let's say "motivations"(?) rather than more free intellectual pursuit. Then the money that is more free is much more competitive and frankly people are metric hacking to get there (publish or perish paradigm is weird when you have to frequently publish novel works). The system was fine but the environment changes and eventually all metrics are hacked.
For personal values, I think it is quite important to fund research. From the very basic low level to even higher engineering research.[0] I'd actually be in favor of 5-10xing the federal science budget. I'd argue this should be primarily funded through federal grants, because people will take that research and go make things which will then be sold (world wide) and we'll tax through that. It's like venture capital if it was less risky but had a longer time frame for ROI.
The category of "General Science, Space, and Technology" accounts for 20.5 bn dollars[1]. The problem is, people understand this to be a big number and hear about these huge costs (often of projects that last decades!), but this is actually 0.4% of the 2024 budget! 64% of that (13.2bn) is going into space flight, research, and supporting activities. The other 7.3bn is going to the rest of science! To put this into perspective, we spend 8.4bn dollars on salaries and expenses for Social Security. The Navy gets 16bn for research, Army 11.5, Air Force 8.2, and another 14 on "Defense Wide" (so a total of ~50bn).
edit: To be clear, I'm not against corporate funding of science or even corporations working with academics for research. I think it can often work out great. But I think there needs to be some balance or academia gets captured by industry. I think we can think of some where this may have happened (or is in danger of), including domains closely related to the topics HN cares about the most.
[side note] A fun thing I do is talk about the ultra wealthy's wealth in terms of "CERNs" instead of dollars. Because numbers in the billions are just unimaginable (I have a physics degree and work with numbers this large -- or the inverse -- and if you tell me you understand this more than an abstract concept, I'll call you a liar). But we can imagine a CERN (which is funded by several countries btw and not a significant part of any of those budgets. Despite being the largest if not most expensive physics experiment ever). Which is a (roughly) 10 billion dollar super project that took (roughly) 10 years to build and costs (roughly) 1 billion dollars a year to operate. This actually makes for a good comparison for people like billionaires because their money is so massive that it is often growing far faster than they can actually conceivably spend it. Maybe the best example of this is Mackenzie Scott who in 2019 got $35.6bn in Amazon stock when divorcing Bezos, has given away $14 billion (5.8 in 2020 alone!) AND Forbes has her at 34.9 billion in net worth (Amazon has done 30% better than VOO since 2019 for context. So, not counting her givings, it's the difference of about 5bn)
The honest answer is because there isn't enough funding through government and philanthropy.
You'll find a really odd opinion, that many people think engineering endeavors are significantly more important than research ones. When instead the truth is that both are two sides of the same coin. After all, research funds the next generation of engineering.
I think there's an unfortunate effect of this because there is quite a bit of science that is beholden to corporate... let's say "motivations"(?) rather than more free intellectual pursuit. Then the money that is more free is much more competitive and frankly people are metric hacking to get there (publish or perish paradigm is weird when you have to frequently publish novel works). The system was fine but the environment changes and eventually all metrics are hacked.
For personal values, I think it is quite important to fund research. From the very basic low level to even higher engineering research.[0] I'd actually be in favor of 5-10xing the federal science budget. I'd argue this should be primarily funded through federal grants, because people will take that research and go make things which will then be sold (world wide) and we'll tax through that. It's like venture capital if it was less risky but had a longer time frame for ROI.
The category of "General Science, Space, and Technology" accounts for 20.5 bn dollars[1]. The problem is, people understand this to be a big number and hear about these huge costs (often of projects that last decades!), but this is actually 0.4% of the 2024 budget! 64% of that (13.2bn) is going into space flight, research, and supporting activities. The other 7.3bn is going to the rest of science! To put this into perspective, we spend 8.4bn dollars on salaries and expenses for Social Security. The Navy gets 16bn for research, Army 11.5, Air Force 8.2, and another 14 on "Defense Wide" (so a total of ~50bn).
edit: To be clear, I'm not against corporate funding of science or even corporations working with academics for research. I think it can often work out great. But I think there needs to be some balance or academia gets captured by industry. I think we can think of some where this may have happened (or is in danger of), including domains closely related to the topics HN cares about the most.
[0] If you're unfamiliar, the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is a often referenced and useful (albeit vague) map to point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer
[side note] A fun thing I do is talk about the ultra wealthy's wealth in terms of "CERNs" instead of dollars. Because numbers in the billions are just unimaginable (I have a physics degree and work with numbers this large -- or the inverse -- and if you tell me you understand this more than an abstract concept, I'll call you a liar). But we can imagine a CERN (which is funded by several countries btw and not a significant part of any of those budgets. Despite being the largest if not most expensive physics experiment ever). Which is a (roughly) 10 billion dollar super project that took (roughly) 10 years to build and costs (roughly) 1 billion dollars a year to operate. This actually makes for a good comparison for people like billionaires because their money is so massive that it is often growing far faster than they can actually conceivably spend it. Maybe the best example of this is Mackenzie Scott who in 2019 got $35.6bn in Amazon stock when divorcing Bezos, has given away $14 billion (5.8 in 2020 alone!) AND Forbes has her at 34.9 billion in net worth (Amazon has done 30% better than VOO since 2019 for context. So, not counting her givings, it's the difference of about 5bn)