On Optimal Social Investment in the Sciences and Humanities

Franz Gehrels ()

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2010, vol. 38, issue 3, 325-330

Abstract: This essay examines the optimization of public, non-profit investment in the natural and social sciences and humanities, given that the individual project outcomes are spread over time and are uncertain. The more distant the results, the greater is the uncertainty, as measured by the success-or-failure variance. Diversification into many simultaneous projects reduces but does not eliminate this risk. By contrast, in a deterministic, no-risk model, there is no way to optimize undertakings in pure science other than to accept social or political consensus. The commonly-used planners’ discount rate of zero is shown in the Appendix to have the additional property of leading to the Golden Rule. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2010

Keywords: Optimal; Investment; Sciences and Humanities; Uncertainty; D70; D80; E20; H50; O46 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11293-010-9234-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:atlecj:v:38:y:2010:i:3:p:325-330

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11293/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11293-010-9234-2

Access Statistics for this article

Atlantic Economic Journal is currently edited by Kathleen S. Virgo

More articles in Atlantic Economic Journal from Springer, International Atlantic Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().