Slashdot Mirror
Can Long Term Research Survive the Coming Age of Austerity?
Hugh Pickens writes "Alexis Madrigal writes that everyone agrees you need science and technology R&D, but when budgets get tight, research into quantum dots or the fundamental forces that cause earthquakes has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans. Different countries are taking different approaches. Japan is focusing on its most elite researchers, giving up to $50 million to 30 different people. Other countries are just giving up on some areas of research to focus on others; for example, US particle physicists who will spend their careers trying to drive from the backseat as our European counterparts run the Large Hadron Collider. A third approach might be to reduce redundancies in research. 'An idea to provide funding in a larger number of key areas that would avoid duplication is to create dedicated research centers where several investigators can work in parallel on complementary topics,' writes Joerg Heber. "If we do less research we need to do it right. And using this crisis to think about our research infrastructure needn't be a bad thing. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform the academic research system in a more comprehensive and fundamental way than the academic community and the politicians normally dare to think about.'"
Most of this type of funding is a rounding error in the budget. The NSF gets $7B I believe. It's really not worth talking about cutting except for ideological reasons...
While the assorted clever mechanisms for ensuring that trickle-up economics continues to work are fascinating(and important to keep an eye on), it's more complex than a mere ponzi scheme:
Ponzi schemes are zero to negative sum games with a fairly clear redistribution of a fixed amount of wealth among a population, with a heavy redistribution toward the top of the pyramid. The real economy, though, is stranger. If you look at the matter in terms of 'real' wealth(ie. the goods and services that people actually want for their own sake, rather than the assorted intermediary constructs), the world has basically never been better off, with the exception of unpleasant looking mid to longterm numbers on petrochemicals. And yet, the correct perturbations in the framework of legal fictions that we lay on top of that can actually make people, on average, worse off.
That's the part of economics where my intuition just sort of curls up and dies. Your classic "The crops failed, so the supply of wheat is at 50%, ergo famine" is easy. The "a fixed quantity of wealth is distributed among hypothetical investors, one of them starts a ponzi scheme, now the distribution is different." is also pretty easy. But when "We have so many available houses that getting a place to live is now cheaper than before!" becomes an international crisis, you know that your head is rammed so far up the ass of the twilight zone that comprehension is going to be difficult...
"A lot of companies would like to put money into R&D however the Scientific community tends to shun Private Enterprise as the evil daemon."
That's not the case. Or to clarify for some departments this is not the case, for instance engineering departments have long been heavily funded by private enterprise. In the life sciences it used to be that you didn't go after private money; there wasn't any as biotech's really only been around since the 1980's. However the competition for academia's traditional funding sources (federal agencies like the NIH and NSF) has gotten...untenable. NIH grants were designed for about a 30% success rate: about one applicant in three won a grant. So if you were competent you could keep your lab running by getting a grant on your first or second try and have overlapping grants. Rarely did someone get laid off or projects interrupted due to lack of funds. Now grant success rates are typically half what they were, and success rates in the single digits are increasingly common. Academic researchers are increasingly at risk of losing their jobs, projects get side tracked by the desperate and continual writing of grant proposals. This has been the trend over the course of my career starting in the late 90's and there is no end in sight. The traditional funding sources in the life sciences are no longer something you can depend on to keep your lab running, so you look elsewhere. There is pressure on academics to get patents on their discoveries, to form start up companies, and to form partnerships with private industry. This started before I did, and was merely uncommon by the time I entered grad school. Now it's everywhere and a decent patent is worth more to an assistant professor up for tenure than a Nature paper.
The rich benefit disproportionally from stability. Put it this way: How much happier is each segment of the population living here than any backwards place in the world with little police and poor sanitation?
The rich have everything to lose; they are usually making their money from large businesses that could suffer or fail entirely without police, without the sanitation necessary for cities, and without fairly stable government (taxes, property ownership/deeds, etc). If they lived in a place like that, a huge number of costs would appear--armed security guards, bribes, custom-built sanitation, etc. Oh, there would still be rich people, as indeed there are, but they'd almost certainly be terrified every day that organized crime may come knocking on their door and take away their money, their children, their goods, or their lives. Compared to that, taxes are a percentage of their income. Where would you live?
The middle-income (who are generally tradesmen) benefit a great deal, because they depend on people paying them fairly for their knowledge, their ability, or their goods, but they are not balanced on the edge of a knife. They aren't extremely obvious targets, but they'll probably deal with a certain number of criminals every year. They probably know how to, or have the resources to, acquire sanitation, but it's on a personal/familial scale, not distributed across an entire company's holdings. In general, they probably prefer to live wherever they were born, because they know the ins and outs of the place.
Poor people in first-world countries have to work every day, may hardly get breaks, are treated poorly, live in crappy housing, and if they're stuck with a knife, often there's not a lot that people will do. They have it better than poor people in third world countries, but how much better? Especially when they're taxed for the luxury of living in your country--which will be robbing them of purchasing power that they may desperately need?
out of 10 people, 1 person pays almost the entire bill, 4 people pay a little bit, and the remaining 5 pay nothing at all
This is a classic Big Lie, which has been repeated so often that not only does the right wing now treat it as gospel, but the left wing is starting to let it slide in debates. In reality, when you look at the total tax burden (not just the narrowly defined "federal income tax," which does not include the FICA taxes that everyone with a paycheck pays) of federal, state, and local taxes, poor people pay an equal or higher percentage of their income in taxes than rich people do. You can argue all day about whether you think this is a good thing or not, but as the saying goes, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.