wild to come across people on HN who don't understand that putting economic scrutiny on scientific studies and questioning the public funding of science will both slow the development of yet unknown useful knowledge, as well as slow down economic growth
the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted
by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research
to give two examples
1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"
2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.
Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.
So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.