Please notice that the title of this post promises a “paranoid response”, not a careful analysis. It’s one of those unscheduled features of this blog. Kind of like a snow day.
Yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed has an article about the U.S. Senate getting kind of testy with the director of the NSF about certain research projects the NSF has seen fit to fund. Regular readers know that I think we can have a reasoned debate about funding priorities (especially when that funding is put up by the public). It does not sound to me like the exchange in the Senate was that kind of reasoned debate.
Category Archives: Doing science for the government
OK, let’s get rid of basic research.
Yesterday I flailed vaguely in the direction of a case we could make for funding basic research with public monies. I was trying to find an alternative to the standard argument usually advanced for funding such research (namely, that basic research frequently brings about all manner of practical applications that were completely unforeseen when the basic research was envisioned and conducted). The standard argument makes a reasonable point — we can’t usually tell ahead of time what basic knowledge will be “good for” — but it strikes me that this strategy boils down to saying “basic research is really applied research, only the applications are fun surprises down the road.”
Some of us, I think, see basic research as potentially worthwhile even in the absence of applications down the road.
But who cares what the technocrats think! If it’s the public’s money, then it’s the public’s opinions that matter here. Why on earth should they fund research whose only payoff is to deepen our knowledge and understanding of some bit of the universe?
As commenters to the earlier post point out, the public cares little for expanding the knowledge base if it doesn’t translate into direct benefits to them — in health care, gas mileage, tastier chips, tinier iPods, whatever. Scientists are free to pursue the answers to the deep foundational questions that keep them up at night, by why should we have to pay for it?
Maybe basic knowledge isn’t the same kind of societal good that a museum or a park is. (Maybe it is, and the public doesn’t want to fund museums or parks, either.)
So, it is resolved: The public shall no longer fund basic research. What now?
What’s in it for us? (Why spend public funds on basic research?)
My ScienceBlogs sibling Kevin Vranes asks an interesting question (and provides some useful facts for thinking about the answer):
Why do we even spend taxpayer money on basic science research? Is it to fund science for discovery’s sake alone? Or to meet an array of identified societal needs?
The original post-WWII Vannevar Bush model was that the feds give money to the scientists for basic research, the scientists decide how to allocate that money, and society gets innumerable benefits, even if a direct link can’t be made between individual projects and economic growth.
But it turns out that of all the American taxpayer cash spent on S&T R&D, only a small portion goes to the agencies engaged in basic science research. About 55% goes to defense R&D and 20% to NIH (see chart). The National Science Foundation, the flagship of basic research for the U.S. government, gets only 3% of all federal R&D funds.
The first thing to notice is that we taxpayers aren’t spending all that much on basic research. So quit telling the guy down the street with the NSF grant that he’s working for you. Most of what we’re funding, based on these numbers, is the defense of our bodies by modern medicine and the military. (Yes, there’s maybe some offense in the defense R&D.)
But the more interesting question, to my mind, is whether there are persuasive reasons for funding more basic research than we do — or, for that matter, for funding it all all.
What do publicly-funded scientists owe the public?
Yesterday, I discussed what scientists supported by federal funds do, and do not, owe the public. However, that discussion was sufficiently oblique and ironic that the point I was trying to make may not have been clear (and, I may have put some of my male readers at greater risk for heart attack).
So, I’m turning off the irony and giving it another try.
The large question I want to examine is just what publicly-funded scientists owe the public. Clearly, they owe the public something, but is it the thing that Dean Esmay is suggesting that the public is owed?
In which a very dangerous professor horns in on my turf while cracking me up
Michael Berube is a noted danger to the youth of America (and has the votes to prove it). He is also, it turns out, blogging about ethical issues in the practice of science.
Which, last time I checked with the Central Committee of Academic Mind-Control, was my turf. I trust that Comrade Berube will reflect upon this, and on the cult of personality that seems to be growing around him, during the weekend self-criticism session.
Interloper or not, he does have some useful observations about the right relationship between the people’s scientists and the people’s government.
“Hush your mouth!”
[I’m blogging on this at the request of my mom, who also requests that I try not to blog so blue.]
As Chris, among others, has noted, there’s a piece in the Washington Post about global warming. The piece includes an all-too-familiar feature: the government scientist (here James E. Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies) whose bosses are trying to get him to settle down and not say so much about what he thinks the science says. Deja vu all over again.
Because I know others will attend the the specifics of the global warming science and policy issues here, I’m going to restrict my focus to what I see as the central ethical question: what are the obligations of the government scientist?