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The Economic Laws of Scientific Research

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Kealey's "The Economic Laws of Scientific Research" is one of those great libertarian books that proves a difficult and counterintuitive thesis. Kealey's thesis: that science is best left to the private sector and that government funding of science is a curse in disguise. At first thought, this idea seems counterintuitive. Hasn't government funding of science produced all kinds of advancements in technology? What about the internet? the various benefits of NASA and the Defense Department? Kealey shows that all of these benefits have been produced through very inefficient means.
Private sector firms somehow manage to generate scientific discoveries at a far greater rate than the governments of the world despite having much less money. Kealey points to the fact that the U.S. has generated far greater scientific advancements (mostly through the many business firms that dot the U.S. landscape) than the former Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. employed a very high percentage of the world's scientists and engineers for several decades, and yet failed in the technology race. Kealey demonstrates that there are sound sociological reasons for this.

Buy it; read it.

Wow! A marvellously entertaining book, despite the horribly boring title. This must be one of the best exposures of the destructiveness of Big Government yet. Anyone who thinks that the free market is OK for making shoes and pizzas but that the really "serious stuff" like scientific research wont happen unless paid for by government should get a load of this book. From Roman times, through the Industrial Revolution to the present, the author shows that nearly all the important scientific and technological advances in history have come from private sources, from tradesmen or industrialists who had a "problem" and needed to fix it, and not from tax-funded laboratories. Worse than that, the more government has spent on science the slower has been economic growth. Should be required reading for all Ministers for Science Policy, not to mention Prime Ministers, Presidents and Heads of Treasuries.

It is a most systematical and wonderfully written apology for the introduction principles of market economy in the policy of basic science funding. The bad news: The logical application of this theory will resulted in the elimination of all economically uneffective state funded science agencies. The good news: This action will dramatically increase salary of good scientists. Why? Read this excellent book. All explanations are there. After publication of this book the future of system of State Socialism in Academia looks very dark. The best time for the system of state slavary is over.

Kealey's excellent exposition on the driving forces of well-directed science was definitely a text which contradicted many of the conceptions which I have developed over the years through "common wisdom." Effectively, the text is a treatise against the Baconian model of economic growth through which scientific research is the primary cause. In the name of such a model, most contemporary policy-makers and scientists insist that it is the role of government to fund "primary research" in order that applications may be derived from it. While one could definitely take this consideration down the epistemological rabbit hole, Kealey merely lays out the facts and statistics which are ultimately bolstered by common sense.

The central argument is that market-directed research is the greater impetus for technological and economic progress than centrally-planned research and technology. Through a whole variety of examples and statistics, the author lies out the overall path of technological development in history and how it developed a need for science, thereby connecting scientific research much more directly to the "situation on the ground" of reality, allowing for productivity (and hence capital) growth in the market as it stands. Additionally, he discusses and refutes many of the contemporary arguments about slow-downs being caused by a lack of funding. Once again, statistics are used to explain the general developmental paths of societies, but common sense once again can verify this by the truism that more complex systems are inherently more difficult to grow with haste.

These remain mere guideposts to Kealey's considerations since the text itself is a comprehensive, yet accessible, historical/statistic reflection on the proper roles of the market and government in scientific research. In an age which ascribes near necessity to the latter and little to the former, this text is an important counter-argument which deserves consideration, in particular because of the strength of its lucid common sense.

While the book has a decent number of interesting and important ideas about a proper organization of the scientific endeavor, it hits the wall in one aspect. To take the words of another reviewer: "Kealey points to the fact that the U.S. has generated far greater scientific advancements than the former Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. employed a very high percentage of the world's scientists and engineers for several decades, and yet failed in the technology race." History anyone? Either the author is completely history ignorant or his way of measuring scientific advancement is questionable at best. I'm not going into details of where the Russians multiply beat the Americans - you either know world history or you don't. It is true that the western society has created what we know as a "technological revolution", but it is important to notice that it is an "engineer" driven progress, not "science" driven one! Scientific ideas do not depend on the socio-economic environment to nearly the same degree as engineering does! And Science and Engineering are two VERY different things... Good competitive economic organization helps you to "implement" things, not to "invent" them!