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Comment by jamesdwilson | Hacker News Reader

Ask SpaceX, General Electric, and the thousands of other companies that rely heavily on science.

That's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth.

And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow doubt a thousand investors could have better predicted the future value of the transistor any better than the handful of electrical engineers working on that frontier.

but companies such as cocacola, and well, many many others, are researching things all the time for discoveries that benefit their company.

That's great for solving known problems, like maybe Coke could estimate that reducing turbulence in their pipes in Warehouse ABC would save them a half million dollars a year. Then they can set aside money, maybe insure the project against failure, the insurance company has some idea what to charge them for such a policy, and so on.

But when Einstein was working on Relativity nobody could have foreseen what it would make possible. In that case the discovery was made and then eventually the business sector found a way to sell it, decades afterwards. Today we know what GPS makes possible so we know what it's worth, but in 1905 there was basically no market value for it.

good points, thank you

These companies rely heavily on science that has in some part, usually some large part, been funded by government funded research programs.

that is not an argument that it is needed

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