Documentary: Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- Read the conference REPORT: arxiv.org/abs/...
Filmed during the International Conference on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics, Pittsburgh PA, May 2024
www.pqi.org/in...
Conference events playlist: • Panel: International p...
Highest resolution Vimeo link: vimeo.com/1051...
Firstly, kudos to you for organizing the conference. Your report is excellent. Also more excellent that it is direct, to-the-point and not tedious and verbose and not hiding the key issues. Amazing really. Can't have been any bureaucrats at the conference ;-) However, one slight "elephant in the room" is funding. You mention "funding agencies" a lot. Like this section: _"The cost-savings potential of efforts to reproduce results that can enable the timely correction of unreliable research claims, is high. Yet attempts to reproduce results, even those of perceived exceptional importance, are costly and time-consuming when considered independent of their potential"_ - while this is true, it hides one key issue, which is the "funds" themselves. I'll email you a longer version, but I think it needs to be in your report. Why? Because it is _not_ the scary issue that it seems and that your report skirts around (perhaps because it is scary?). Perhaps you already know this is not a critical issue and so that's why the report does not mention it - if true then that is even more amazing! Kudos to the lot of you.
But any neoliberal/IMF economist reading your report would have a stroke or an aneurysm. Why? Because _they_ do not understand public funding operations. While you physics geeks maybe do(?)!
The thing is, the currency is never the issue provided the funding agency is public (government). Why? Because there is no "tax payer" funding the government, and no bank lending to the government, to think there is would be a gross myth. In fact the reality of State monetary operations is the other way around, so the mainstream economists have it completely backwards. The government is the sole source of that which can be redeemed for tax liabilities (aka. "the currency"). (Bank credit is a source of increased $ circulation, but not net financial records, due the need to repay principle + interest.) Only government _alone_ is not subject to any fiscal spending constraints (other than what is self-imposed by legislation). The constraint on government is, *(a) political* ⇒ inflation psychology (gets a government unelected), and *(b) real* ⇒ availability of real resources, not the availability of their own IOU (aka. "the currency").
They, government, cannot ever run out of their own IOU. They have an infinite supply (they just mark-up bank accounts with a computer, no gold or "tax payer" or bank lender is around). They always redeem! (Why would they not!) The issue for government budgets is thus not the currency r the residual annual deficit, since the imposed coercive tax liabilities are sufficient to drive demand for the otherwise worthless currency, the issue is _what _*_real_*_ resources to move from the private sector into the public sector._
This is a political decision. The claim on the government funding agency is thus not a question of "finding the money" but rather a question of what real resources will be used that could be better used in other ways. We'd say governments are not like households. The budget constraints are completely different in category. The constraints are like the raw materials, the labour, the electricity, the computers, etc.
CMP as a whole could run up against such limits because the more elaborate experiments can pull out tonnes of resources from the private sector. But it is unlikely any _one_ research group will deplete real resources so as to cause any inflationary bias. The issue is more for the entire field of CMP, or all of science in general.
But you folks should realize you are probably far from reaching such real resource constraints. The evidence is unemployed CM physicists. Any single qualified unemployed CM physicist is a needless waste of a human life. A government policy mistake. Such workers can _always_ be hired by government with zero inflation pressure, because the private bid for unemployed labour is by definition zero.
See also my course here: smithwillsuffice.github.io/ohanga-pai/questions/001_basic_ohangapai/
Great documentary. Glad RUclips’s algorithm suggested it to me. This seems highly relevant, now more than ever, for all of science, as mentioned in the video!!
Erroneous little point again on page 18: _" As Musen et. al. (2022) observe, “National funding agencies increasingly view the results of the research that they support-including the data-as a public good, and they view the availability of FAIR data as the means to deliver to taxpayers the benefit that they have paid for." This is wrong, completely backwards. The "tax payers" did not pay for single thing. The pay-for from the ledger for a monopoly issuer of a currency is in real terms - the real resources claimed. Not the tax receipts. Tax receipts are a redemption operation, not a funding operation. Revenue is from the French "revenir" = _return back to the issuer._
Tax liabilities imposed by force drive continual _demand for the currency_ not supply of currency for the issuer. All money is an IOU of the issuer, by definition. The problem is to get others to accept it for payment. Governments solve this problem by imposing tax liabilities payable only in the currency they monopoly issue. (Banks do not issue net currency, only credit, which nets to negative currency due to a positive rate of interest charged.)
Correction: In the ledgers every credit is someone's debit. One sector's assets are another's liabilities in money terms. Money is an accounting record of credits and debits. So bank credit is not exactly "negative money". A bank credit is the banks asset and the borrowers liability. When the credit is spent it often becomes some other banks liability (a demand deposit). But is still the originating banks asset, due to the interest payment flow. So semantically bank credit is more like a tax, a "tax on borrowing" so-to-speak. However, from the stand-point of the non-bank non-government sector, bank credit is net a demand deficiency. Governemtn debt is the opposite. Governemtn Debt = all the non-government sector savings, to the penny.
The problem with Governemtn Debt is not that it is too high, but that it is too low. The evidence is mass unemployment. However, there is a huge problem with even a low Governemtn Debt, which is that it is grossly unfairly distributed.