@mekkaokereke @Jeremiah

Yes they are both kinds of investments, but the incentives and structure are still different enough that I think the comparison is not so direct. Sorry, this is long :) but I spend a lot of time thinking about these things.

As someone who has handled $10s of $M of money from NSF, and been on dozens of review panels, the discussions that go into funding decisions and the discussions that PIs have with PMs are extremely different from the experiences of my friends who have pursued VC funding.

I do agree with you on the point of benefit to the nation and world, as this is a indeed a specific part of NSF's merit review criteria: "broader impacts" are one of the two things we are told to base our reviews on (the other being "intellectual merit") Broader impacts are of course not calculated financially, but do often include statements of economic importance of the proposed research.

They also include things that are explicitly not (directly) economic, such as increasing social equity - for example, most sizeable proposals to the CISE (CS) directorate require a BPC (Broadening Participation in Computing) plan with measurable goals re: how the project will take specific steps to increase the participation of folks who are currently under-represented in the field. Broader impact also typically involves education, not surprisingly.

And yeah I agree with the point i think you're making that VCs can be potentially be held accountable for the social impacts of their work. But so far as I can tell, what VCs mean by VC, and the way most of us understand the term, follows the Friedman doctrine: "the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits". Is that 'fundamental' to VC? I dunno, honestly. Andreessen clearly thinks so, to a toxic extreme.

But not all investments work the same.

Let me give you an example from my own experience: I build infrastructure (pretty much all funded by NSF) for computer scientists, mostly in the cloud/networking/OS/DB, etc. areas. When I think about features we should add, I actually spend time looking for ones that do *not* make economic sense for companies, such as cloud providers, to build. 'cause if there's money to be made, industry (maybe backed by VCs, maybe not) is going to do it, and they're gong to have more resources and they're going to do it better. So what I go looking for is stuff scientists need that nobody is going to make money selling.

I also specifically tell my students, when they are looking for research problems to solve, to look *away* from the ones that have clear economic value. This is of course not because I hate economic value :) but because I do buy the notion that markets do, to some extent, allocate capital relatively well to solving problems where there is a clear chance for money to be made. So if we as academics are doing things right, we are looking for things that don't have short or even medium term economic value, we're looking for intrinsic value in the problems we're solving. And yeah, incidentally, some of them are going to at some point end up being things with large long-term economic value.

So to me, this is a very different game than VCs are playing, even at their most accountable and, hey, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, altruistic. Yes, funding business ventures and scientific research are both kinds of investments, and yes, there are definitely some similarities in the ways they allocate funds (both are highly susceptible to fads, for example). But there are deep differences that make accountability, etc. work differently.

FWIW, the NSF and others *do* have set of programs that look a bit more like a VC - SBIR is a good example of this.