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Government Funding of Basic Science? Knock It Off.
For decades now, even free-market economists have argued that the government should fund basic scientific research. I myself have always felt suspicious of the argument — this is one reason I remain skeptical of NASA, despite the ridicule of my comrades Rob Long and James Lileks, who can barely contain their pleasure at the thought of spending untold sums to send someone to Mars — but I confess that I’ve never possessed the analytical skills to investigate the argument, let alone refute it.
Along comes Matt Ridley in this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, where he has published a brilliant essay called “The Myth of Basic Science.” Excerpts:
[I]t has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer….[Yet as Terence Kealey, a biochemist who became an economist argues] there is still no empirical demonstration of the need for public funding of research and that the historical record suggests the opposite.
After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. After World War II, the U.S. and Britain began to fund science heavily from the public purse. With the success of war science and of Soviet state funding that led to Sputnik, it seemed obvious that state funding must make a difference.
The true lesson—that Sputnik relied heavily on Robert Goddard’s work, which had been funded by the Guggenheims—could have gone the other way. Yet there was no growth dividend for Britain and America from this science-funding rush. Their economies grew no faster than they had before.
In other words, the government should spend a lot less even than many on our side had supposed.
As for Brothers Long and Lileks, why should NASA spend tens of billions to send a man to Mars when 21st Century Fox has already put Matt Damon on the planet for just $100 million?
Published in General
In my perfect world, the government would not fund basic science, or much of anything else for that matter. In that world, individuals and enterprises would be left with far more disposable income to be able to afford to fund scientific research and a host of other endeavors out of their own pockets.
Sadly, we live in a very different world, one in which the government takes up a huge part of the economy. Why target science when there are so many other ways that the government wastes money? Spending on science may not be the most efficient when the government does it but at least it provides some benefit, as opposed to yielding nothing or actively doing harm (e.g., welfare state, Planned Parenthood). Let’s take care of the worst uses of government funds first, then there will be plenty of money left in private hands to fund science, art, music, theater, or whatever our hearts desire.
One possible exception to the wholesale defunding of science is likely defense-related research which has limited commercial application. Given that defense is a core responsibility of the federal government, science in support of defense would seem to be an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money.
A footnote to my previous comment:
Much of the funding for NASA in the decade or two since its inception was a thinly veiled way to advance defense-related technologies. Intercontinental missiles and surveillance satellites were a major goal of the space program. There were also geopolitical considerations during the Cold War.
Yes, let’s argue about that some time, but I
Matt Ridley has so far argued only against funding of applied research, not basic research.
And if we’re doing this by appeal to authority rather than by arguing the case, I’ll admit that having anonymous on the one side is significant, but on the other side are such luminaries as C. Northcote Parkinson, Newt Gingrich, and Margaret Thatcher.
This is the only appeal to authority needed on the Federal level. States can do as their people let them do.
Government spending took up a lot less of the economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries than it does today, from 7% of GDP in 1902 to about 35% today. When the government sucks all the air out of the room, there’s not much left for everyone else.
In other words, it’s not 1900 anymore.
The true lesson is that Sputnik and the US space program relied heavily on the work at Peenemünde, which was funded by the German government. Goddard was important, but there’s no Vanguard rocket without Wernher von Braun.
But we should be much closer to that goal, and just conceding that things are as they are is not how we move the needle back.
I am conflicted about funding for things like NASA, because of programs like Apollo. Frankly, there were several programs in that broad age of engineering which should rank as marvels of humankind.
There is a gripping hand kind of argument that in the marketplace of international conflict, market forces will always result in government crash programs to achieve unbelievable things at ridiculous expense.
Most folks, when they figure out they have taken the wrong road, will either stop and retrace their steps to find the right road or try to find a way from the current road back to where they should be going.
Our basic science policy was set post-WWII by the result a small civil war between two opposing groups: the “fund all basic research, regardless of potential uses” crowd, and the applied research crowd that argued the government should only fund big projects with specific aims, such as going to the moon, etc. Vannevar Bush’s letter to Harry Truman (“Science – The Endless Frontier”… it even sounds like a marketing pitch, doesn’t it?) basically sealed the victory of the basic crowd over the applied crowd. What’s funny is that Sputnik… a huge example of targeted, specific, applied research with a technical goal in mind… didn’t sway Ike when the Soviets beat us to space. He doubled down on the basic mantra. But of course, we had our cake and ate it too. The NASA missions were our most obvious science expenditure, and yet they were applied to the bone. Things like basic lunar geology research were small peanuts compared to building a rocket that would work.
All of our biggest advances, in computing, medicine, genetics, communications of the past 60 years have come from either private labs (UNIX at Bell, the 8088 family at Intel, the iPhone at Apple, etc) or targeted, applied research by the government which cost very little and commercialized big… the origins of the Internet with J.C.R. Licklider at MIT under a DoD contract comes to mind here.
Move the needle back, by all means. But don’t pretend that the fiscal situation is the same as in was in 1900. My comment was a response to the Ridley quote, which attempts to draw an inference from the “historical record.” Well, the inference is not justified for the reasons I outlined. It’s badly reasoned and ill-supported, as is much of the rest of the ‘brilliant’ Ridley piece. There’s a huge difference between a 93% private economy and a 65% private economy. Somewhere in that 28% of the economy that is not being confiscated there’s plenty of room for private funding science, as well as any number of other endeavors.
Priorities matter. You want to go after science funding? Have at it. But first go after the things that do harm. Not only will you stop the harm they do, you’ll also free resources that will make government funding of science unnecessary, as it arguably was in 1900. But it’s not now as it was in 1900, so let’s not pretend it is.
Peter, You are right. I have spent forty years in publicly-funded research universities. The longer I have worked in them, the more sceptical I have become about taxpayer dollars spent on external research funding. It is pretty clear, as I explain in Universities and Innovation Economies, that the more governments have funded research, the less first-class work we have seen, both in the sciences and the arts. Big Science took off in the mid-1960s. Between then and today the number of American research scientists per capita grew three-fold and the federal funding of medical research expanded over 200-fold. Yet the nineteenth-century, the age of limited government, was the greatest century of scientific advance, by a long shot. In the twentieth century, the most important period was the 1910s—not the era of Big Science. The major advances in pharmaceuticals for example occurred between 1935 and 1965. Both in the arts and sciences the grant system is a bureaucratic allocation of resources. Like any other it rewards conformity, form-filling and time-wasting. Much of any grant is consumed by grant-seeking, reporting and auditing—not thinking or reasoning. John Maynard Keynes was the first chair of the first government arts council, the Arts Council of Great Britain, which was established in 1946. From that date one can chart the decline of modern art into that pitiful species, bureaucratic modernism. Big Science followed Big Art—with a similar decline in average quality.
Universities are quite aggressive with patents. Just google “WARF“!
They have used political clout to secure favorable laws that normal patentees and applicants do not enjoy.
Perhaps the further subsidy provided by favorable patent laws was created to justify the funding you note. Absent the favorable laws (reduced fees and limited defenses against university-owned patents), the universities would have less to show for all their funding.
I worked at a defense contractor and our combined overhead rates and program rates (in general), were on the order of 35%-50% – depending on the program. Some wound up at 150%-200%.
I’ve also worked at a college. Considering the differences between the two that I experienced, I’m confident in assuming that universities are not better than the private sector at this – at all. Because they don’t have to be.
Funding of basic physics course in the k-5th grades would yield (big) bang for the buck.
The process funds our PhDs. It’s good to have PhDs in science. The rest is bureaucratic overhead. Universities do what interests its falculty and occasionally tweak a project to qualify for a new grant, but in general the grant process is time consuming for little to show. It requires a bureaucracy in Washington and one in each University to justify what they’d do anyway. All things government grow and as they grow they corrupt and corrode. We’re probably better off with some modest programs that pull bright students into science from an early age.
#48
Melissa,
The problem is not funding but the will to teach.
Imagine the problems with a school:
The worst space-based government expenditure in cinematic history was the one that went towards making sure Jodie Foster could see her father again. In the movie’s telling, the only people opposing that goal were a bunch of crazed Christian terrorists.
Reform Conservatives are big fans of funding basic scientific research, which is one of the reasons I’m not huge fans of theirs.
#48 (somehow the quote is not working here)
Melissa,
If you are saying we should have more science in K-6th, many here would agree with you. And at that level, reasonably educated teachers should be able to teach an appropriate (pre-developed) curriculum.
My High School Physics teacher always complained that we should know calculus before attempting Physics, and he was right.
Philosophically, I oppose government funding of science and, well, just about everything not absolutely essential. That said, we would be awfully vulnerable, I think, if the Government did not fund (or otherwise encourage) military defense research.
As for NASA-type projects, we once saw going to the moon as defense-related, because from a base on the moon (we thought), we could have military superiority over the entire planet. Some projects like going to Mars cost so much, that only the government would or could fund it. Do we can see any practical commercial application at this time? If there is no likely commercial application, how will anyone’s life be improved (outside the recipients of government money for the project) by taxpayers paying to send a mission to Mars? So, just because we want to prove we can, why should we? Must we assume there will be intangible benefits we cannot presently imagine? (Tang, the drink, was once cited as a benefit of research for going to the moon. Where is Tang today?)
Would we be at a military disadvantage if Russia or China spent their resources to get to Mars first? I doubt it.
As for basic research (or “pure research”) and applied research, if the government pays for it, in whole or in part, the grant recipient should be barred from receiving a patent to prevent others from using it.
My 2 cents.
NASA is so territorial about taking credit for any invention they were involved in that 51 U.S.C. 20135 (d) specifies that when a patent application “appears… to have significant utility in the conduct of aeronautical and space activities” the inventors must file a declaration or oath explaining whether or not NASA funding was involved.
In an infamous case, Bert Rutan lost a patent application because he missed the tight deadline for filing such a declaration or oath. He was later able to revive. In re Rutan, 231 USPQ 864 (Comm’r Pat. 1986).
^^^Winner. (Had to wipe the coffee off my monitor.)
I don’t know the answer to the question about government funding of science. But I do know that it is incredibly important that we go to Mars, and eventually to the stars.
The dinosaurs lasted on Earth for 165 million years. Does anyone believe that the dominance of humans will last as long? Not I. We’ve been pretty lucky to make it a few thousand years so far. The continued existence of our species will, eventually, depend on colonizing other worlds. In a sense, that is really the only important task for our species. We are in an existential race for survival, between establishing a foothold elsewhere in the universe and our coming extinction on Earth. The next step in that race for survival is reaching the planet nearest to us.
Unlike the dinosaurs, we have the opportunity to survive our extinction event. If someone would like to tell me what we could do with a few billion dollars that is more important than the survival of humanity, I would love to hear it.
What extinction event would render all of Earth less hospitable than Mars?
Asteroid. Nuclear war. Severe ice age. Bernie Sanders elected President. Anyway, the point is not to colonize Mars. The point is to colonize somewhere. Mars is just the next step. “A journey of a thousand miles…” and all that.
None of those would make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Even the Texas-sized asteroid from Armageddon would likely eject enough material into space as to devastate the surface of Mars.
You are then left with the conundrum that if your goal is to colonize outside our solar system, the most efficient use of current resources is not to colonize Mars. A better use of resources might be research in physics that would lead to new propulsion systems.
Chris Campion,
What I know is that when I am working on a collaborative SBIR or STTR with a small company is that I at the University get 1/3 and the company gets 2/3 and I have more total man hours on the project than the company. Not all of it is in F&A overhead, a lot of it is in higher labor overhead and higher wages. A PhD post-doc at a university is lucky to make 60k per year. That same PhD in a company is likely to make more than 80k per year.
I think that outside the solar system is a given. The exact allocation of resources is up for debate, but the importance of the goal is not. Sooner or later, there will be an extinction event for mankind on Earth. If we don’t have the backbone to spend a few dollars (as a percentage of GDP, it really is just a few dollars), then we don’t have the backbone to survive as a species.