This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 4th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Government funding of science has fundamentally altered the direction of scientific progress

and not for the better.

Terence Keeley is a clinical biochemist and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

He argues that government directed research agendas gives rise to less competition in scientific inquiry and does nothing for economic growth.

Why is the attitude so pervasive that in order to have science, the government must be intimately involved.

Well, that's because people generally assume that without government there would be no science,

because people think there would be no incentive to private... no or exploring space. The problem with that belief is that it's not true and in as much as it's

true it's not actually fair on the taxpayer.

Does science have public good characteristics? That is, we typically

say that public goods are things that the private sector would underfund because the benefits are private.

Yeah.

Well, of course there are two definitions of public goods.

There's public good in the economic sense that without it there would be something

of economic value that society wouldn't have, in this case economic growth, and then there's

a public good concept of it's good for all of us to realize that the earth is round and the space is large and the animals evolved.

So these are the two public good aspects of science. What happens at the moment in America for example

is half of all basic sciences funded by the government and half of all basic science is funded by the non-government sector, half

of which is industry and half of which are the foundations.

Now if you look at America before 1940 when there had been effectively no government funding of science since in fact the

foundations of the republic, almost all basic science in America was then funded by these

...