Comment by foldr
16 hours ago
It doesn’t always work like that in practice. I can’t read a bunch of papers on fluid dynamics and composite materials and then build a modern airliner wing. If you fund the science, you get the experts.
16 hours ago
It doesn’t always work like that in practice. I can’t read a bunch of papers on fluid dynamics and composite materials and then build a modern airliner wing. If you fund the science, you get the experts.
But often it is like that. I point to the US before WW2, and China more recently. Scientific spending seems a consequence of economic dominance, not a cause. It's a kind of potlatch, a demonstration that the society has the money to burn for a status activity.
Science has more value than just economic value. But I think it’s rather obvious that a lot of large European and American industries exist largely as a result of scientific and military spending. Boeing and Airbus are the examples that spring to mind. China is still quite a long way from competing with either, and it’s not for want of smart people or general manufacturing expertise.
That sounds more like applied science in support of specific (and large scale) development activities. That can't be used as a justification for science of any kind, and not as justification for pure science. To do otherwise is to engage in a kind of cargo cult reasoning, confusing correlation with causation.
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