Arnold Kling discusses science funding. Constitutional political economy offers a perspective that is too often left out of these discussions, which usually focus on the merits (or lack thereof) of pure, basic science and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The implicit–and I believe false–assumption is that we can design a set of coercive mechanisms that will generate the precisely correct trade-offs between scientific output and all other possible goals and, therefore, a net increase in social welfare. At the margin, I suspect that Kling and I would agree that the social benefits of additional science funding would be frittered away by rent-seeking. Here’s one data point: 2.96 million Google hits for the phrase [grant-writing workshop]. Obviously, putting it in quotes reduces the number by a factor of ten or so, but 200,000 is still a lot. Interestingly, Google auto-suggested that I include “NIH” in one variation of the search string.
Thus, even if we grant all of the methodological prerequisites necessary to claim that government science funding is necessary or beneficial, it is still far from a clear-cut case. Even when it is playing against a stacked deck, liberty wins. Enthusiasts for intervention set far too low a bar to clear. The possibility of “market failure” as it might emerge from a standard model of perfect competition is not a prima facie case for state intervention. It is (at best) a starting point for further inquiry. Here’s an excellent treatment of this point in the context of the Misesian/Hayekian research agenda and “robust political economy” from Peter Boettke and Peter Leeson.
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Hayek explains in “Counter-Revolution in Science” the current fetish with science: Saint-Simon set up scientists as the new high priests who would lead humanity to salvation and eternal life. Modern socialists maintain the faith with a twist: pure science will make us richer. But the USSR had the top scientists in the world and spent itself poor on basic research.
The truth is that pure science contributes very little to economic development. Innovations that increase productivity almost always come from private companies trying to solve a specific problem, and most of the innovation comes from engineers, mechanics and tinkerers. Pure science research, especially that funded by the state, is an enormous waste of wealth.
True, and when R&D is done by the private sector, there are always basic discoveries that come along with it – for example, when developing a method to be used to develop a product for sale.
There are two questions I love to ask people who want the government to fund something:
1) What sort incentive structure will this create?
2) How will actual people respond to these incentives?
The biggest problems that proponents of government science funding face is that said funding has the tendency to encourage “science” that may be less than useful to society. Also, since the funds are administered by humans, and every human has biases and imperfections, there is a tendency for the research that is funded to reflect the biases and imperfections of administrators. Oftentimes, these biases remain entrenched for quite some time (e.g. alternative medicine).
In graduate school, when the grant categories (what they were looking to fund) would come out, there was usually one category that happened to be what one of the panel members (those who created the categories) did research on – very curious….
As I was reading this a question came to my mind. How many employers would hire someone from the government for their technical or scientific expertise? The hiring of government employees by the private sector is overwhelmingly for their political connection rather than their productive ability.
Art,
Isn’t “Constitutional political economy” a contradiction?
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