The Dismal Blog

            While thinking about how open-market funding of science has changed its output, I began thinking about a very usual argument. This argument has been brought up by many disgruntled older individuals concerning how markets stifle creativity. Many discuss how creating an award system for say the best picture actually hurts the creativity of the participants. In this way, most discuss how music specifically has become an industry and mainstream music has lost much of its artistic value. It might seem a stretch, but the same forces that have hurt creativity in music might also be the forces behind a move from science away from theoretical research and towards product-based research

            Most of the time individuals people note only that creativity seems to be hurt in our current system for music. That each album sounds the same as the other, each movie has a similar plot. Complexity within music, literature, and theater seem to have spiraled downwards to the bare minimum. It would be useless, however, to make general statements without understanding why creativity is important and why the current system destroys it. Creativity itself is typically ascribed to something only after its creation. That creativity is usually ascribed to something that sets itself apart from the typical. It is this nature, its being unique, through which the work creates something new for society. Creativity itself is the life-blood of a societies evolution. While some offshoots of art and media may seem fruitless, their existence which is brought about from the creativity of the artist is the only process by which something new is brought into world. In a very abstract sense, creativity is the only way in which we progress in society. When we apply this to science, it becomes even more important. Without the “creative” and radical views of Galileo and later Copernicus, it may have been decades or even centuries later that we discovered that the Earth is not the center of the Cosmos. That lost time would result in lost discoveries later, and the loss of entire individuals from scientific history.

            As it becomes evident that creativity is something we should strive for in society, the question becomes “why do free-market dynamics stifle creativity.” The first reason is self-evident, the only way to “sell” your product to appeal not to the minority, but to the majority, and in appealing to others you are more prone to find something which relates to them and is by nature less creative. You only have to look to American Idol, Making the Band, and a majority of films today to notice that a whole system of appealing to individuals has been discovered and marketed. The second reason is the fact that markets promote systemization of any industry. In finance, giving your money to someone is an investment decision that must have a clear understanding of returns. A creative process by nature has no idea of “returns”, but a systematic process does. I could go to individuals and say “I would like to explore making my own music”, but I am certainly not going to receive funding for this. Moreover, if I had a recording already created of my music, they would spend awhile trying to figure out how well that recording would sell to the public through again known systems. These systems reject things which would be different more often than those that appeal to a usual group and a usual money market. Finally, in our ideal for a full free-market capitalist economy, we have inevitably moved funds away from supporting “creative processes”. In terms of an investment decision, these creative art forms are wasteful and destroy economic value. If I cannot see the value in terms of economic cash flows, I would never choose to invest in this, unless I were donating money—which becomes less likely with developed capital markets since the returns on donations for the investor are 0. Donations to the arts is even more rare as individuals would rather donate to a “cause”.

            The last point is how does any of this relate to science? Well as alluded to before, different scientific leaders and discoverers had to be creative to develop their ideas and science. This creativity is essential for progress in science and it is often an incredibly random process. Allegorically, we think of Newton’s idea of gravity coming from a falling apple, but in reality many times discoveries in science necessitate an almost random redesign of the pieces. If scientific discovery could be systematized we would have already created computer programs to do R&D for us. Ironically, much science funded through capital markets goes towards processes that can by systematically approached like biotech or tech industries. Theoretical physics would find it hard to be supported by public capital markets as the process for discovery is hard and the returns are often not seen for decades. While Einstein’s work in relativity was the foundation for nuclear power and many other scientific discoveries, it would have been impossible for a present day Einstein to go to the markets and request money so that he could pursue his research. One thing that might be useful would be a private philanthropic effort to fund science research like physics in order to help promote our societies progress.