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Comment by tinkerdol | Hacker News Reader

> They’re caused by culture, and luck and magic as much as and more than they are caused by the “three factors”

Germans don't believe in luck and magic, maybe that's why they make great industrial engineers :) Although you're right that it's surely a complex process. We'll have to wait and see how much and which investments really pay off, but in the meantime it is nice to live in an environment where billions are invested (check out http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/ to read details about a new European wide program).

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It bothers me a bit when people (politicians, supporters, big business guys) throw around big numbers about how much has been Invested in something. Investing billions is easy. Getting billions in return from your investment, now, that's quite a bit harder. Investing less money for the same return, also hard.

Anyway, these billions should be counted on the negative side of things, is the point. Tell me instead of the return on your investment!

Good point, I have no idea what the return will be. However it is still pleasant to be employed as a researcher in this type of environment, and is something I think the US should do more of too, including increasing the funding of NASA. Which leads us to an interesting question of how you even measure the benefit of such things... what was the financial gain returned from landing on the moon, for example? Lots of types of research have no direct financial gain yet still add to the overall progress of society. (Although this point might be straying far from the original intention of the article.)

I think it boils down to honesty.

I think it's fine to put money into fundamental R&D, NASA and the like. But, that's an expense. Treating it as such, lets us ask the right questions.

I didn't invest €3,000 last year in lunch, I ate €3,000 worth of lunch. The right question is "was it tasty?" In the kind of discourse that gets put around policy, I would be asking "what productivity gains did I make be eating lunch?"

That would be contrary to investment. Investing means putting off short term objectives for a chance of maximizing better long term ones. A nice lunch is a goal in itself, i.e. it makes you happy or w/e.

As far as I know, R&D is not a fundamental entertainment or the like (although NASA is), so it is an investment.

Horizon 2020 is giving out 80 billion Euros between 2014 and 2020. That's a big amount roughly $15 billion per year. In the US, private venture capital being invested is around $4 billion, per month, or $48 billion per year.

Plus, there's the baggage of accepting public money. In private money, your failures are fairly private. Its not front page news when Kleiner Perkins put $30 million into a failure. But Solyndra failing was a huge deal in the US. In Canada, where I grew up, public money going into failures is always newsworthy.

When 50 million Euros of that 80 billion goes to some fraudster, it'll put the whole program at risk. That's why its difficult for countries to legislate innovation. There's a large party of people who are rewarded when those investments fail.

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