Summary of Metascience 101 - Introduction - by Josh Muthu

The following is a brief summary of “Metascience 101 - EP1: Introduction” from The Macroscience Podcast. It was really interesting - I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The US federal government is the single largest funder of basic scientific research in the world. Scientific knowledge is a merit (in some cases a public) good, and so would be underprovided by the private sector alone. Therefore government intervention is required. There are lots of different funding mechanisms, because not all science is the same (e.g. public funding vs. private funding vs. universities). In general, there is more grant-based (“push”) funding for basic scientific research (which is not very commercialisable). More commercialisable research is more concentrated in the private sector, where funding is through tax credits and patents. The social returns to science are huge - currently, public spending/interventions are insufficient. Firms (such as pharma) underinvest in long term research, d

The following is a brief summary of “Metascience 101 - EP1: Introduction” from The Macroscience Podcast. It was really interesting - I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The US federal government is the single largest funder of basic scientific research in the world. Scientific knowledge is a merit (in some cases a public) good, and so would be underprovided by the private sector alone. Therefore government intervention is required. There are lots of different funding mechanisms, because not all science is the same (e.g. public funding vs. private funding vs. universities). In gene