This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 15, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Many people believe that science and research are essentially public goods,

needing support from the government.

Cato Institute adjunct scholar Terence Keeley argues that there are significant upsides

to leaving science in the private sector.

If you're a rich country, you need an awful lot of science.

If you're a poor country, you need roads, you need electricity, you need

the simple things that's staff of life.

But the richer you are, the more you have to invest in science.

And the signals are there.

I'm about to come to what those signals are. Now some of these

countries such as Switzerland or Japan were basically, let's say fair regimes where the government

is funding very little R&D or science.

Some of these countries, like Australia and New Zealand, were almost wholly nationalised.

In 1979, if you were an Australian company and you wanted to do R&D, you didn't risk or hazard shareholders money, you wrote a grant.

It's extraordinary.

And the money came from the government for your R&D.

So we have enormously different policies between the different countries, but the outcome you can't tell from the graph which are the privatized countries and which are the nationalized countries because the signals are there and then responding to the signals

is either the government or industry but the same sort of response is coming in an

advanced capitalist country. So this actually is implicit evidence of

crowding out because those countries where the state has moved

...