Re: Innovations

[bgirard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bernard Girard)]

William Humel wrote :
>Science in the experimental domain can be expensive.  In the
>theoretical domain, it is cheap.  Something like a pad of paper
>and a pencil (and no doubt an eraser) would suffice for such
>great scientists as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, or Planck.  It is
>true, of course, that one needs the other, so on average science
>is expensive, but not uniformly so.  To the extent that economics
>is a science and Keynes was a scientist, did his work require a
>significant expenditure of funds?

Did you notice that all the scientist you cited were germans or austrians?
It probably means that German speaking countries spent, in the last years
of last century, much more than, say, Great Britain or France, to build
places where these scientist could work. Göttingen was one of these places,
Vienna was another.
With Hitler and the war the product of these investments (human capital)
was transfered to US.
Looking from Europe, the role played in the american ideological scene by
germans and autrichians (Mises, Keynes, Popper, Drucker,
Polanyi,Bertalanffy, Schumpeter, Courant, Neumann...) is obvious. Why did
they settle in US rather than in England (remember, Freud went ot England)
or Portugal? Because they could quite easily find jobs in US universities.
And they could, because these universities were rich enough.
One cannot say that science is cheap. It's expensive, and it's a very long
term investment.
In a way, the actual american ideological scene was financed by germans and
austrians of the last century. Cliometricians could try to play treir
favorite games of "what if...".

Bernard Girard
<bgirard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>