Pursuing Science Would Create Jobs, I Would Think

[Photon Guy]

Science projects can be expensive. Just look at how costly NASA is and even putting NASA aside, other science projects are expensive too such as the Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland. And back to NASA, they're now apparently going to try to create Oxygen on Mars, which will be expensive. 

Anyway, as expensive as pursuing science projects might be, a great benefit to putting more money into science is that doing so will create more jobs. If we're going to pursue science projects we obviously need people to do the projects and that means more jobs, so pursuing more science projects would mean more employment.

[Phi for All]

Just about every major pursuit is going to provide employment, but few investments give the kind of global returns that space exploration and other scientific endeavors do. The amount of new knowledge produced is fairly staggering, every time we take the risks to expand our knowledge and banish our ignorance.

[ahmet]

2 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

Science projects can be expensive. Just look at how costly NASA is and even putting NASA aside, other science projects are expensive too such as the Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland. And back to NASA, they're now apparently going to try to create Oxygen on Mars, which will be expensive. 

Anyway, as expensive as pursuing science projects might be, a great benefit to putting more money into science is that doing so will create more jobs. If we're going to pursue science projects we obviously need people to do the projects and that means more jobs, so pursuing more science projects would mean more employment.

from my view, contributing to science is, of course entertaining. but one should differentiate something and take decision accordingly. 

1) to me, science requires a bit education , but not higher (i.e. MSc and doctoral programs are not mandatory to contribute science. though,at least high school or primary school degree seems mandatory )

2) higher degrees generally require strict efforts , but to obtain a higher degree will not mean a parallel employment . 

3) This might be meaningless but I think that some cases might be relative from country to another country. For instance, while learning an amount of information might be useful in an A country, this might be very useless in a B country even if all aspects of the relevance of that information be same (e.g. how it is being taught)

 

if you are a young one and looking for some suggestions on how to select something on this issue:

then please take your decisions by your own and feel free please in the time of decision. 

and I can say that this would be a general case according to my personal approach based on my experiences. 

"generally the type of education that contains active applications ( in real) life brings more job options."

 

 

 

a recommendation: I think one another forum might be more suitable for this thread. While there is a branch "political sciences" among the branches of scientific classification and although  these days this issue is getting to be more popular and/or important time to time,I think that the processes in doing and contributing to science and their results might not be limited with political researches (i.e.politics) 

Edited July 2, 2020 by ahmet
nagation of one sentence and the size of recommendation text.

[swansont]

4 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

Science projects can be expensive. Just look at how costly NASA is and even putting NASA aside, other science projects are expensive too such as the Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland. And back to NASA, they're now apparently going to try to create Oxygen on Mars, which will be expensive. 

Anyway, as expensive as pursuing science projects might be, a great benefit to putting more money into science is that doing so will create more jobs. If we're going to pursue science projects we obviously need people to do the projects and that means more jobs, so pursuing more science projects would mean more employment.

NASA and CERN are not representative of science in general

[Phi for All]

16 hours ago, swansont said:

NASA and CERN are not representative of science in general

Indeed, and we're seeing the importance of funding scientific research at all levels, especially when there's no immediate monetary incentive to do so. A great deal of future employment relies on fairly inexpensive, unremarkable research that provides the basis for later invention and innovation.

[swansont]

34 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

Indeed, and we're seeing the importance of funding scientific research at all levels, especially when there's no immediate monetary incentive to do so. A great deal of future employment relies on fairly inexpensive, unremarkable research that provides the basis for later invention and innovation.

My own field is like that. Bill Phillips, who shared the 1997 Nobel for laser cooling trapping, loves to point out how that techniques is used in atomic clocks, and his funding from the Office of Naval Research has paid great dividends (in both technology, and training of scientists to engage in further innovation) A lot of relatively inexpensive table-top physics is out there.

[zapatos]

23 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

If we're going to pursue science projects we obviously need people to do the projects and that means more jobs, so pursuing more science projects would mean more employment.

If your goal is to create more jobs you should aim a bit lower than the LHC. 

A billion dollars devoted to growing and harvesting potatoes, or road repair, will generate a lot more jobs than a highly complex science experiment.

[Phi for All]

8 minutes ago, zapatos said:

If your goal is to create more jobs you should aim a bit lower than the LHC. 

A billion dollars devoted to growing and harvesting potatoes, or road repair, will generate a lot more jobs than a highly complex science experiment.

Science investments can help in unintended ways with these areas as well. If my state had spent a US$1B on fixing roads during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the repairs would have been a better investment since fewer cars would ruin the curing asphalt. We could have been relatively pothole-free for a decade.

I've always felt that being smart about growing an economy is more important than the economy itself. We pay more for our horrible roads because our private system employs more people than a smartly run public one that's focused just on building and maintaining excellent roads. I think science and critical thinking is the only way we have a hope of changing this. We can have a robust economy that's focused on being smart as opposed to one that simply employs lots of folks and makes a few of them inordinately wealthy.

[Area54]

24 minutes ago, zapatos said:

If your goal is to create more jobs you should aim a bit lower than the LHC. 

A billion dollars devoted to growing and harvesting potatoes, or road repair, will generate a lot more jobs than a highly complex science experiment.

Exactly so. And the difficulty for science is that one can, with reasonable accuracy, predict how potatoes can be harvested and how many individuals employed through the investment of a billion dollars; predict how many roads will be repaired and the economic impact of improved traffic flow and reduction in damage to road vehicles travelling on the improved surfaces etc.. But when it comes to science projects, especially blue sky reasearch, such prediction is - in the individual cases - wobbly at best. Unless the decision makers are blessed with the understanding that such research will, in total, deliver valuable and remarkable benefits, then the battle will be a tough one.

[zapatos]

Agree with both of you. How science works, and the up-front fuzziness of the future benefits, makes it a relatively hard sell for the average citizen. Road repair on the other hand is well understood.

If you are trying to put together a sales pitch for public funding of a science project, you need to get people to understand long term benefits. If the people think you are trying to create jobs so that highly educated people can do stuff like examine the mating habits of dung beetles, then you are not going to get much support. But if you want funding that will make sure your neighbor gets off unemployment and you no longer ruin your tires on that crappy road, people will be all for that.

[swansont]

On 7/3/2020 at 11:07 AM, zapatos said:

Agree with both of you. How science works, and the up-front fuzziness of the future benefits, makes it a relatively hard sell for the average citizen. Road repair on the other hand is well understood.

If you are trying to put together a sales pitch for public funding of a science project, you need to get people to understand long term benefits. If the people think you are trying to create jobs so that highly educated people can do stuff like examine the mating habits of dung beetles, then you are not going to get much support. But if you want funding that will make sure your neighbor gets off unemployment and you no longer ruin your tires on that crappy road, people will be all for that.

You can point to unpredicted benefits from past scientific discovery.