Speaking of Science Funding

*relabels my tuna factory as a VC firm to get the funding from Arnold_Kling’s proposal*

*hires lobbyist to make it plausible*

We need to keep in mind the Soviet experiment with state funding of research. Remember the 60 minutes episode on their research village with the top Soviet scientists and how little of their research was useful?

Hayek’s “Counter-Revolution in Science” explains the current fetish with scientific research. Socialists set up scientists as the high priests who would lead humanity to salvation. In reality, pure science has given us cool toys and little else. Most productivity enhancing inventions come on the job and are made by engineers, mechanics and tinkerers. Most pure science research is an amazing waste of wealth, not to mention the even worse waste in social science research.

What are your thoughts on using awards for primary research goals?

“Keith Yamamoto of the UCSF school of medicine and Tom Kalil of the White House office of science and technology policy both praised funding models that gave administrators at universities a few million dollars each to allocate themselves, using local knowledge, rather than forcing everything through the Federal grant process.”

I strongly doubt that my university administration, my colleagues in other departments, or even my colleagues in my own department are as good as judging my research potential as the reviewers for NSF who are experts in my area. In this case local knowledge is not geographically local but intellectually local. The fact that the grant giving is centralized should not be treated as prima facie evidence against NSF or NIH.

Unless you have the better metrics in hand, this post is your typically worthless conservative wishcasting. Get real. Basic research takes years to bear fruit and the privatization of such discoveries would vastly increase the cost of research. The savings of federal research is that all the knowledge produced is public, allowing private firms (with the engineers and technicians, etc…) to innovate productivity enhancing devices from the amazing pool of public knowledge. Besides, since all the increase in productivity over the last 30 years hasn’t been shared with workers, why would anyone outside of corporate owners care about increases in productivity? It isn’t going to my pockets (insert hand-waving supply-side drivel “rebuttal”).

Contra fundamentalist, research science is one of the most competitive fields I have seen (including being sole proprietor of my own business). Each NIH grant has 8-10 PhD researchers jostling for the money. The labs are stocked with graduate students, Post-Docs and technicians all with college degrees all making less than $40K/yr. This is a highly competitive, highly efficient system. I maintain a core equipment facility at a major research hospital. Cost, cost savings, cost reduction and sharing of expensive equipment is mentioned *continuously*. The easiest productivity enhancement to this field would be to up funding, because right now the best grant writers, not the best scientists, get the money. VC firms would just switch that to the best pitch getting funded.
I could go on, but the author’s prescription is so hilariously misinformed no corrective is possible in this space. But one last note – who would be the judges within a VC firm? Hopefully they would hire experts in the field to analyze proposals for malarkey. Wait, that sound like what we do now…

In reality, pure science has given us cool toys and little else.

Of course this is spectacularly wrong. The opposite is actually true – historically you get diminishing returns from engineering a well developed product, but can get large discontinuous jumps from improvements in scientific understanding. I’d also like to stress that the 3rd grade notion that scientists make discoveries and engineers apply them falls apart with new technologies; it can be very hard to tell the difference between the groups when the underlying principles are fresh.

Two easy examples off the top of my head are organic semiconductors and giant magnetostriction. Our understanding of these phenomena results from basic scientific inquiry that has resulted in products that people find very valuable. It’s hard to imagine a world where giant magnetostriction hadn’t been discovered; is someone really telling me that increasing hard drive storage capacity by more than an order of magnitude (with almost no change in production cost) doesn’t result in an improvement in productivity? Sometimes studying weird materials for no other reason than to catalog their properties leads to surprising results; that’s how much of 20th century science started, and it still pays off – high temperature superconductivity comes to mind. In a few years we’ll be able to add negative index metamaterials to the list – maybe we can already, and I’m just not aware of it.

There are two typical reasons that people think this little of “pure” research. Sometimes they do so because they’ve defined all research that doesn’t result in something that value as pure, and thus pure research is bad. Three cheers for tautologies. More often they simply don’t know anything about scientific research – they hear “pure” science and think of the LHC. To use physics as an example, everyone has heard the term “string theory”, but in reality almost no one works in string theory. In fact, more physicists work in condensed matter and materials science (how many books are there in Barnes and Noble on those topics?) than all other areas of physics combined.

I will give the commenter this: it’s refreshing to have someone be totally wrong on that side of the scientific fence. The population of Michio Kaku-reading scientific sycophants is much larger.

All of our modern technology originates in what was pure science at one point or another. Einstein’s theory of relativity was an explanation for a number of experimental observations that were at variance with Newton’s laws. Those experiments did not have a practical application in mind; they were conducted to better understand the universe.

Today, accounting for relativity is critical in the accurate operation of the Global Positioning System.

DNA was first discovered 1869, but it took a century of research before the first practical applications could be devised.

Nuclear physics and quantum mechanics required all kinds of fundamental science experiments before practical uses were found.

Penicillin was found completely by accident while performing exploratory research on Staphylococcus.

Pure research can take a long time to provide dividends, but the dividends it can end up providing are enormous.