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thurken t1_iv4wt18 wrote

Reply to comment by Killingagency in [OC] Forbes 2022's Most Philanthropic US Billionaires by row64software

No they come first from for non-profit science, which is the biggest breakthrough. I'm not saying companies are useless: they leverage greed to accelerate the productionizaton, scalability, and marketing of science breakthroughs and this is useful. But here we're not talking about not having companies, but after having successful companies and making billions, giving some of these billions away. If you want to be convincing you should cite examples of billionaires not giving their billions and making our life liveable because of that.

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Killingagency t1_iv4ygc9 wrote

science comes mainly from universities which are for profit.

Also a lot of breakthrough comes from R&D, which is also science but well funded and with a clear goal.

I would much rather have Musk invest all of his wealth into R&D at SpaceX than give it to charities.

Edit: public universities are non-profit officially, but they do indirectly profit from their research by attracting more students. They are world aparts from charities.

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SpunkyBananaSpunk t1_iv4znmx wrote

Universities that do research are all not-for-profit. and universities generally don't make much money from research. There really isn't that much profit in basic research which is why it is important to have it publicly funded.

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Killingagency t1_iv50b0u wrote

Well yes and no.

State funded (public) universities are officially not-for-profit. However they are no charity and behave themselves as a for profit organization. They maximise their amount of students, maximise their quality and minimise costs, they are at risk of going bancrupt and have many deals and ties with businesess. Their quality of research indirectly attracts students and with that money.

Besides the world surrounding research is definitly for-profit mostly, journals and publishers play the key role and are generally for-profit. The only people not really earning well on their efforts are the researchers themselves.

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