I disagree with your point 1): very many Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and being supported by welfare initiatives such as unemployment, medicare, and food stamps. Some significant fraction could be employed doing basic research instead of sitting at home watching TV and looking for jobs that aren't being offered by corporations that are making more profits than ever through fractional reserve lending and bailouts.
An example of underemployment in our industry: there are very many individuals with government funded computer scientists with BS, MS, and PHD degrees, that are employed in lucrative positions as code monkeys and computer janitors. These people should be inventing the next UNIX and IPV8 and advanced networking algorithms and image recognition and self driving cars. I'm not educated on whether strong AI is a pipe dream or not but weak AI has helped with image recognition and encryption breaking and genetic learning and spam filtering and web searching.
I think your initial point that "citizens acknowledge and accept that most government funded research won't pan out" is highly highly controversial in the US among some democrats, republicans, and most libertarians. Many want to cut non-military blue-sky research completely. These people call themselves neo-conservatives, President George W. Bush was a champion of the ethos. Liberals and normal conservatives are a bit sneakier on their wishes to de-fund research.
I disagree with your point 1): very many Americans are unemployed or underemployed, and being supported by welfare initiatives such as unemployment, medicare, and food stamps. Some significant fraction could be employed doing basic research instead of sitting at home watching TV and looking for jobs that aren't being offered by corporations that are making more profits than ever through fractional reserve lending and bailouts.
An example of underemployment in our industry: there are very many individuals with government funded computer scientists with BS, MS, and PHD degrees, that are employed in lucrative positions as code monkeys and computer janitors. These people should be inventing the next UNIX and IPV8 and advanced networking algorithms and image recognition and self driving cars. I'm not educated on whether strong AI is a pipe dream or not but weak AI has helped with image recognition and encryption breaking and genetic learning and spam filtering and web searching.
I think your initial point that "citizens acknowledge and accept that most government funded research won't pan out" is highly highly controversial in the US among some democrats, republicans, and most libertarians. Many want to cut non-military blue-sky research completely. These people call themselves neo-conservatives, President George W. Bush was a champion of the ethos. Liberals and normal conservatives are a bit sneakier on their wishes to de-fund research.