That's a bit like saying that employees create very little value until a product is sold. Realized value != created value.
It is precisely the lack of competition on this front (research) for decades and the abstract nature of the value created that has led it to be so badly undervalued.
If you could quantify fundamental research's value to the economy (without hindsight), it ceases to be fundamental research. Again, by definition, fundamental research does not have application. If it has no application, it has no interface to the economy. I'm not saying R&D or fundamental research has no potential economic value. It has no current avenue for realized economic value. And our system is incentivized for short-term gain. You could be a magnificent fundamental researcher, but if your work doesn't add to the economy in a relatively short timeframe, you probably won't be paid very well compared to a lesser researcher who does.
This is exactly my point. This ^ is categorically false.
>If you could quantify fundamental research's value to the economy
It seems like you're committing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
I think you are misunderstanding the fallacy you linked. I've already said multiple times there are multiple dimensions to value. The economy is specifically about goods and services sold, so yes, we should measure production. It says nothing of other dimensions. You can have a job that is of immense social value (e.g., clergy or dog fostering or whatever) while only having marginal economic value. So what other non-productive economic dimensions do you suggest? I suspect anything you name would go into a different category than economics (e.g., quality of life). That's fundamentally misunderstanding my point.
You seem to be saying "See that idle factory over there!? Look at everything it's contributing to the economy!" and I'm saying "It's not contributing anything because it's idle." And there may still be other dimensions to its value. Maybe the architecture has artistic value, or it's history has cultural value. But none of those domains move the needle at all for economic value. I have been very clear in constraining my argument to economic value for a good reason, and it's not about your linked fallacious argument.
Since this discussion concerns wages, my claim was that economic value addition is the most highly correlated with pay. You may say we should compensate people more for what they bring to society rather than just what they bring to the economy, and I would probably agree. But that's not the system we're working under and that is my point.
I'm saying that factory has value - sometimes quite a lot of economic value.
The specific example you chose is actually interesting because in the west we largely do view idled factories as valueless and have shifted to a just-in-time manufacturing philosophy whereas Russia has taken the opposite approach of building in a lot of slack into their industrial capacity so that they can scale up quickly.
The practical upshot of this is that our differing conceptions of value are a large part of why we are no losing the largest land war in Europe since WW2. We simply don't have the capacity to scale production to necessary levels.
This is an aside, though.
>Since this discussion concerns wages, my claim was that economic value addition is the most highly correlated with pay.
Yes, this is still false. It correlates with leverage, of which your ability to give the impression of economic value addition is just one part.
