The problem with science funding is that it comes from the government
February 19, 2012 – 3:50 pm by JohnMuch writing about science funding and policy reveals how a consistent libertarian morality and an understanding of basic economics could add valuable insight into otherwise vacuous writing. It also shows how handicapped scientists and science writers are by being stuck in the mindset that government should fund science research and that there are substantive policy differences between Democrats and Republicans. A recent editorial column in Nature titled Tough choices is just so weak and vacant of any real intellectual contribution that it made me cringe sometimes and shake my head in disappointment others. This editorial was, of course, written by the editors of Nature, who are Ph.D.’s and mostly current or former high-level researchers, not just science writers with degrees in Journalism or English and a background in science. I’m not sure if that makes their apparent political cluelessness better or worse.
The idea that science is a driver of prosperity is one of the few things on which the United States’ bitterly divided political parties still agree.
Oh, please. Don’t make me laugh. Since about the 1970’s, the Democrats and Republicans haven’t been bitterly divided over anything except how to direct their control over our social and economic choices.
The harder the cuts bite, the more those agencies will have to streamline their operations and merge or terminate programmes.
This week’s budget proposal, which contains many references to “tough choices”, shows that this process is already well under way. The Department of Energy (DOE), for example, wants to discontinue funding of several dozen projects that have not met their research milestones, or that seem otherwise unpromising. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is likewise cutting back on some $66 million in lower-priority education, outreach and research programmes. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been ordered to pursue “new grant management policies” to increase the number of new grants by 7%. And NASA is being obliged to make drastic cuts to its Mars exploration programme so as to finish building its flagship James Webb Space Telescope.
Conceivably, this process could get even more drastic. Last month, Obama asked Congress to give him the authority to consolidate and streamline agencies on his own initiative — and suggested that one early application would be to transfer the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Interior. If Congress were to give Obama that power, it is possible to imagine him — or some future Republican president — sending all of the NSF’s science-education programmes to the Department of Education, or merging the DOE’s particle and nuclear physics research into the NSF, under the guise of making management of science more efficient.
White House officials insist that no one in the administration is even contemplating such a wholesale restructuring. But the arithmetic of the deficit is unavoidable. Individual researchers, scientific societies and science funding agencies can no longer afford to be purely reactive, responding to each cut as it comes along. They need to be part of the debate, thinking systematically about how programmes and even whole agencies could be restructured to make them more efficient at using the scarce funds available, and more effective at promoting the best science.
[emphasis added]
Gee, there’s a problem with efficiently allocating scarce resources? If only there were an entire centuries-old scientific discipline that could inform this problem. This is a classic resource allocation problem in a politically (socialistically) run industry. Almost all basic science research and much translational and clinical research in the United States is funded by the Imperial Federal Government, and neither Republicans nor Democrats see any problem with that. Neither do most scientists, either because they can’t bear the thought of leaving science-funding decisions to the citizens who supply the funds or because they can’t bear the thought of leaving any decisions to ordinary citizens. Politicians decide how much money will be available for each agency or department, and bureaucrats and scientists within each agency or department decide how their money will be divided. Research funding is so insulated from market forces that it’s hard to even imagine it in a free-market context.
The funding, organization, and streamlining of scientific research should not be a political or bureaucratic problem. Because it is, scientific research experiences all the problems characteristic of socialist industries: apparent funding shortages despite mostly continual budget increases, funding that is subject to the tug and pull of political power, its zero-sum nature of resource allocation, decisions that are out of the hands of the people who have to pay for them or implement them on a daily basis, a tax base that questions the worthiness of the endeavors it has funded, the nonexistence of saving and reinvestment in profitable endeavors, imbalances in the distribution of goods or labor, and a complete inability to make economically sound decisions based on the price system of a free market.
I know from first-hand experience that basic research funded by the NIH and other agencies is entirely merit-based, highly competitive, and requires results to secure further funding. The questions almost no one asks are: Merit in accomplishing what? Competitiveness in attaining what? What good are the results? Should we even reward the particular things the scientists exhibit merit in? Should they even be competing for what they’re competing for? How has it been determined that what they have accomplished is desirable and that what they are competing for is worthwhile?
In other sectors of an economy to the extent that it is permitted, the consumers who ultimately pay for the end products decide whether and how much to spend on them, and their decisions determine how much is spent on the higher-order goods that go into the production of the consumer goods. The fact that basic research itself produces no consumer goods is irrelevant because the principles of economics apply everywhere to all resource allocation problems.
Absent government involvement in scientific research, individuals in businesses, non-profit organizations, and philanthropic organizations would decide how much money, land, labor, and capital to devote to a particular avenue of research on the basis of their estimated profit (economic and psychal) from it. CEOs, investors, stockholders, philanthropists, research team leaders, and low-level lab workers would respond to some combination of their life’s goals and the market’s prices to determine how to spend their time and money. Profitable (desirable) endeavors would flourish, and unprofitable (undesirable) ones would fade away, to be replaced by new and different ones or more of the old, proven ones. The enterprises that produced the most new and additional wealth for society would be reinvested in, to both continue producing wealth in the same ways and devise new, more risky, but potentially more beneficial avenues of research.
A short-term doubling of the research budget, assuming it could even happen, would not result in untenable expansion and a failure to plan for even the near future, or if it did, the people and businesses responsible for such waste and short-sightedness would be replaced with less clueless ones. Exceptional growth during one period would be followed not by crisis and uncertainty but by swift, smooth, natural adjustments to new prices, as always. Imbalances between the supply of lower-level researchers and their job prospects would not last long because people would respond to incentives according their perceived best interest; in other words, the demand for certain types of researchers would determine their supply, instead of political funding decisions determining how many graduate students and post-docs universities can afford.
People would, largely, make the decisions that affected their own jobs and their own companies, instead of making do with the money politicians allocate for them. Consumers, the funders and supposed beneficiaries of the research, would also have a say in the direction that research takes by means of their purchasing decisions. And instead of competing for a piece of the government pie at the expense of others in a zero-sum game, scientists would engage in a competition to produce new and additional wealth and constantly increase the size of the pie. It is a metaphysical impossibility for government action itself to produce new wealth; by definition, government can only destroy wealth or rearrange existing wealth. Government-funded research and development can produce wealth, but by restricting science research to the public sphere and insulating it from the constraints and benefits of the free market, it is greatly limited in its ability to add completely new wealth to the world.
Many scientists and advocates of government funding of research might say all of these decisions and adjustments and resource allocations already happen in largely the same way, it’s just that a different type of infrastructure handles the money, the ultimate funders are actually taxpayers who decide how to fund research in the ballot box instead of the marketplace, and the scientists are insulated from nefarious private interests. This would be a complete misinterpretation of the facts. The fact is that the free decisions and private ownership that allow the more free sectors of the economy to operate smoothly, respond to price signals, allocate resources efficiently, and produce new and additional wealth are completely absent in the arena of government-funded research, and the result is that virtually nothing about scientific research today resembles a free market.
All for the better, most people would say. If scientific research were subjected to the constraints of the market, many different types of people would have to decide, voluntarily and apolitically, whether a research project is economically worthwhile to society and not just whether it has scientific merit per se. A much larger proportion of research would be focused on producing profitable, salable goods and services. I say: What of it? If the supposed beneficiaries and funders of the scientific research have different goals from the researchers themselves, who are you to say their goals lack merit? Who are you to say you know better than they how to spend their money? Who are you say they would be wrong if they wanted to spend less money—even significantly less—on basic research from which they do not benefit directly?
Contrary to the desires of most people and nearly all scientists, the research sector would benefit greatly from a replacement of socialism with laissez-faire. Scientists would not find their level of funding at the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Avenues of research would not face the danger of being cut off because a new faction that’s politically opposed to the implications or goals of their research gained power. Younger researchers would not (typically) find their job prospects dried up after they entered the field during a great boom. Competition for all products and services would make research cheaper to conduct while simultaneously allowing for more of it. Researchers wouldn’t find themselves toiling for years in fruitless projects with questionable societal value. The career paths available to researchers wouldn’t be so limited, structured, and predetermined, as they are in academia. Endeavors that provided real, measurable value to the populace and to the economy would make a profit and secure funding in the future—but only so long as they continued to provide value. The regular consumers, the investors, and the philanthropists who funded the projects would be more encouraged and rewarded by seeing the actual benefits of their investments.
The problem with advocates of government funding of research is that they want it to be funded by government but don’t want politics to influence the funding. They want continually increasing budgets but cry “foul!” when the deficits they helped create result in a smaller budget increase than they’re used to. They want to take hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers but don’t want taxpayers who object to such uses of their money to be able to withdraw the funding. They want to fund research in a completely socialist manner but don’t want to suffer the consequences of the inefficiencies and price-blindness of socialism. They complain about politicians who dare to propose budget cuts when the entire economy is suffering, but it never occurs to them that the problem is the political funding of research to begin with, not the politicians themselves.
Everything that humans do in a social context is governed in some way by the laws of economics. Funding by taxation and allocation by politicians or funding by sales and allocation by businessmen are at the mercy of economic reality, even if politicizing the process distorts the effects of economic law. Therefore, scientists don’t have a choice between politics and economics; they have a choice of either economics or both politics and economics. Currently, research funding is, first, at the mercy of economics, which says all governments will be inefficient and face frequent funding crises, and, second, at the mercy of politics and all the uncertainty, pettiness, and dirtiness that come with it.
Aside from the economic problem of research funding is a moral one:
To do that, and to address the increasing demands from politicians and voters for evidence that fundamental research is useful, scientists must also find better ways to measure the effectiveness of the nation’s investments in science. The usual technique is to insist that principal investigators produce more and more reports, which tends to be a waste of everyone’s time. A consortium of six universities called Star Metrics, launched in 2010 and headquartered at the NIH, has shown that it is possible to do better by using natural language processing and other tools to mine the data and reports that the agencies already collect. But even that is just a beginning. Researchers and research institutions need to help to devise still better measures — because if they don’t do it themselves, politicians and others who know much less about science may very well do it for them. And who knows where that would end.
This touches on the moral problem of petitioning the government for more funds: those funds are taken by force from people and used to pay for things they might not have wanted to pay for. Scientists will religiously repeat the mantra, “But scientific research benefits the entire world and drives the innovation that improves everyone’s well-being.” That is obvious, but this completely ignores the immorality of forcing people to pay for something merely because it is supposedly good for them. (How many scientists, 99.99% of whom are hardcore leftists, would have liked to divert their tax dollars away from the Department of Defense and into, say, the NIH? Yet they would never allow such a choice to be extended to everyone’s tax dollars and would raise hell if a lot of people made the opposite choice. I’d bet anything that if all Americans were allowed to specify what their tax dollars funded and this resulted in increased military funding but decreased NIH funding, the vast, vast majority of scientists would say, “Well, we obviously need to raise taxes or rescind this offer, because Science is Good and the people clearly don’t know what’s good for them.”)
A good example of the morality of allowing people the freedom to spend their money how they want vs. the immorality of political funding decisions is any socially controversial research topic, say, global warming. In a simplified example, say that 51% of legislators at a given time (or over a substantial period of time, such as an entire presidential term) think global warming is not mostly anthropogenic and that even if it is, the material consequences of restricting economic activity based on global warming data are far too severe given the relatively small environmental benefit they would allow. Therefore, they vote to cut funding for research on global warming. In a free society, if 20% of the population supported global warming research and wanted to fund it, they could, and the other 80% couldn’t do anything about it. In a Statist society where politics determines funding, it doesn’t matter if 20% or even, in some cases, over 50% of the population wants to fund global warming research; if the politicians vote no, then those people’s tax dollars will go elsewhere.
Another thing about that concluding paragraph: It is almost comical how far scientists and policymakers will go and how convoluted their solutions will get, all because they insist on keeping science funding socialist. What a shining example of how one bit of government interference begets more and more government interference. The effectiveness of government-funded science is uncertain, so let’s form committees and write software to better analyze data, and if that’s not enough, we need to gather more input from more scientists to determine how to measure the benefits of all our research funding! And we also need to decide how to reorganize our bloated and inefficient bureaucracies that only exist because of historical peculiarities, but we need to make sure we get input from scientists and bureaucrats and policymakers alike! Or, you could subject your results to the true test of the free market, like all actually beneficial sectors of the economy, and the inexorable justice of the price system would constantly drive all resources in the direction of their most efficient and desirable uses.
Scientists also don’t take into account the opportunity cost of forcing people to fund the research that scientists deem worthy of funding. It is a basic fact of history that the self-interested choices of free people have enabled the explosion of wealth, technology, and productivity that have increased billions of people’s well-being astronomically, and the same voluntary choices of free people would enable a similar increase in the economic efficiency and societal value of basic scientific research. To deny this is simply to deny economic and historical fact. Free markets and freedom of choice aren’t just optimal in every sector of the economy except basic research; they are optimal always and everywhere because freedom of exchange and the resultant price system and profit-and-loss system allow people to make choices that are in their own best interest (economic and psychological), which is far better than politicians or scientists can do, regardless of the amount of data they have.
