Quote from: hugolp on July 08, 2011, 09:48:40 AM

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...and that's very speculative. what would the behaviour of human beings be.

But then, how can you compare? If the government is taking the money, the government is the one producing the investigation. But how can you claim that if left with the money the private sector would not have done better?

I'm not.
It's hard to claim either way, it's predicting human behaviour.

if it wasn't perceived as governments role to do research, maybe bill gates and others would start a research fund instead of inoculating africa (or whatever he's doing). who knows.

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But this applies to everything. Even in non-boom times, a large part of investments is wasted. I've come to see it as a kind of decentralized, randomized discovery process. A boom/bubble is just a speedup of the normal rate at which this happens.

boom/bust in individual businesses or even sectors of the economy is natural.
synchronized boom/bust of the entire economy is caused by central banks. without central banks a boom in one sector would drain the resources of another sector and therefore provide a regulator.
people don't like to give up food for network equipment.

...ahm...bitcoin! just to stay on topic...