This is not a good thing.

> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?

That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.

And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.

> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?

The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.

I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups

That’s productivity fetish. Not everything is about being productive, research is about finding new things. No one knows how to do this reliably at scale, so the best we’ve come up with is having lots of people working on a range of topics, and hoping a few are fruitful. This idea we can just retweet the unsuccessful researches to private sector doesn’t work, because we don’t know how to not do unproductive research.

Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.

>Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.

All of those companies exist on the backbone of work that was done by government funded labs. You are just seeing the investments pay off.

PHds aren't engineers. The whole point of a PHd is basically spending a whole bunch of time working on something, with a very slight chance that it may or may not work - this is not something that is compatible with a private sector in any means. The point is that as a collective, you hope that someone has a brain blast moment and discover something that engineers can then take and make viable.

citing rocket companies feels funny when most of the research and some non-trivial % of contracts comes (came?) from gov’t (mostly defense) spending

I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.

Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.

Over the long run, the benefits of private sector mostly accrue to the private sector.

Over the long run, the benefits of the public sector mostly accrue to society.

Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.

For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.

It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.

But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?

Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.

For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.

> Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.

The private sector is good at doing more efficiently what the government already figured out how to do.

Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.

I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.

I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.

Incredible false dichotomy. I don’t even know where to start dissecting this "argument".