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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.'"
I need to grab some popcorn.
Can Progress Survive Austerity as a Foregone Conclusion?
As a researcher, I think giving to the most elite is a moderately good idea. Reading most of the research that's generated by people like me, you realize it's just PhDs trying their darnedest to ++publicationCount, which is a pretty stupid thing for taxpayer dollars to fund. The major work, more often than not, comes out of well-renown labs, and the students who come out of those labs.
On the other hand, lots of the fundamental knowledge necessary for the "major work" mentioned earlier comes from the incremental work that isn't sexy in its own right, but very necessary nonetheless. No simple answer here.
The US really should accept that it doesn't need one of everything and there is no shame using the resources of other countries rather than duplicating them.
I do security
For some stuff, the science is "easy", but it's the needed engineering that costs an arm and a leg (Space Shuttle, LHC, etc, etc)
Which means you can't go "brute force" anymore on problems.
Think, rethink experiments, use creativity. It will be better.
I am sure there are new things to be discovered "on the cheap"
Not that I'm agains LHC, on the contrary. But what if someone finds a way to have 10Tev collisions using a different and easier method.
how long until
Alt-Med has been growing like gangbusters, its popularity at an all time high: it must work.
You mean people are idiots. Most alt-med is garbage that has either been demonstrated to be ineffective or equivalent to a placebo (e.g. acupuncture), actually harmful (e.g. taking HIV-positive people off ARVs to "cure" AIDS), or not even worth investigating (e.g. homeopathy). The rest of it isn't alt-med, it falls under the purview of regular straight-up medicine (e.g. nutrition). Medicine should be evidence-based. Alt-med isn't medicine because it isn't based on evidence. That said, the pharmaceutical comapnies need to be regulated better and the FDA, NIH, etc. need to end their immense conflicts of interest.
Diminishing marginal returns are very relevant for where government funding should go. Thus in general, small scientific programs are much more likely to have a very high output proportional to their cost than large programs. Since all science funding is tiny, cutting into it makes very little sense in that context. Of course, this is aside from the other serious issues with the recent pushes for austerity such as how in the US this apparently means cuts to absolutely everything except for military spending.
Really, people.
Perceived need is infinite. Resources are finite. Further, as we push back the boundaries of knowledge, the experiments get more and more expensive.
We can argue all day about priorities, but let's actually talk about those priorities - simple, pointless whinging (such as 'US particle physicists have to drive from the back seat' because the Euros have the LHC....) is little more than tantrum-throwing.
In a democracy, there is ALWAYS going to be a pressure from the mass to address their needs with Bread and Circuses. It's not the best long-term solution for anything (well, unless your goal is to breed a larger underclass), but the fact is that you have to sell your idea, or implement a tyranny in which your priorities 'win'.
-Styopa
Multiple people working on the same thing leads to different ideas and more innovation, having only one group of people working on something adds only one perspective.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
>Alt-Med has been growing like gangbusters, its popularity at an all time high: it must work.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
It's only popular because people like you have been able to dress your snake oil up in white coats and "professional" language. It's marketing.
>Mark my words.
I've marked your words, and underneath I've written "raving loony."
You should be sued into the ground. Indeed, if a single person has died because you discouraged him or her from seeking actual effective treatment in time, you should be charged with manslaughter, at a minimum.
--
BMO
Less duplication? In scientific research? So instead of the replication and confirmation/expansion of results, which used to be at the foundation of the scientific method, every "experiment" or study will now be done once and its outcome accepted unquestioningly as the final word?
Clearly, all we have to do is eliminate all funding for genetics (evolution), geology, and climate research, and they'll be plenty of money left over to test all of our new weapons at least twice before putting them into the field.
has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans.
Flamebait like this in the article summary just will veer the discussion completely off-topic.
It's also why I now have AdBlock Plus turned on when I (less frequently) browse this site.
Tone down the obvious political bias! Thanks!
Just imagine how much cash we'd have for research if we would have forced the banks to do the same thing that GM was forced to do.
Declare bankruptcy, wipe out shareholders, and trim bond holders. Those are the people that invested in risky behavior and they should have paid the price.
The swedes did it and they recovered from their banking crisis.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/go-swedish-part-47/
the rich benefit disproportionately from government services, they should pay their fair share for them.
So to you, "fair" is that 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? On top of that, those non-paying 5 people are the ones consuming most of the benefits! This all seems "fair" to you?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I'll make no further comment on your alt-medicine nonsense, others have already ripped you a new one. I'll simply refer you to this site.
Why not give a small amount, even 10% of that research money go towards helping alternative medicine practitioners prove that their work is actually effective? We know it it from the millions of satisfied patients, now we just need some money and lab space to prove it.
There is plenty of money in the Alternative Medicine industry. Have you been seen what they charge for useless homeopathic medicines? Tell you what, why don't you put some of your money into just a few peer-reviewed scientifically sound research projects that don't rely on anecdotal evidence to prove their conclusions. Once you get something that proves your basic approach to medicine is sound, then we'll start throwing money at you. Until that, why should you get any more money than astrologists, psychics, or perpetual motion "inventors"?
The non-paying 5 are not consuming most benefits. They have no factories to be protected by the police, they own no deposits to be insured by the government, they own no home to be protected from fire. They do not use the roads to make money, nor do they benefit from the legal system to uphold their patents or copyrights.
Take $10,000,000 + "we think X causes cancer" and you will get, surprise surprise, "proof" that X causes cancer.
And "alt-med" is different? If you take $10,000,000 + "we think X cures cancer" and you will get, surprise surprise, "proof" that X cures cancer. Then all of the sudden we're all strapping magnets to our heads and yelling into our cell phones at a minimum 18" distance to avoid tumors because of the latest "study". The reason "Big Pharma" is so successful (aside from very favorable patent law) is that their research shows tangible, measurable results. "Alt-med," even after thousands of years of research and practice, simply makes the true-believers feel good while doing little to actually treat the ailments or showing any benefit for skeptics who undergo the same treatment.
On the other hand, things like "I wonder how X works" gets funded because it fills in gaps that we simply don't even begin to understand and similar "fill in the gap" research is largely responsible for the tech that we have now but lacked only a couple of hundred years ago.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
has a hard time holding the line against health care or tax cuts for the richest Americans.
- and my comments are routinely moderated as 'troll', while obviously trolling is done on regular basis in the 'story' summaries?
You can't handle the truth.
The rest of the World has been doing good research without the colossal budgets their American colleagues enjoy (I know, I was part of a project that operated on a shoestring - but we still found the free brown dwarfs in the galaxy). Maybe there will be fewer spectacular programmes, but of course great research will still get done. Of course, you can always join international collaborations as partners to pool resources, rather than be the rich kid having all the toys to themselves.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but Americans have had it so good for so long they didn't even realise how fortunate they are. Even with less excess wealth about they are still by far the richest people per capita - although certainly indvidivual Americans have it very tough at the moment - so it sounds a bit whiney when we hear that some program is being reduced because the US is going from (comparatively) very wealthy to just wealthy. Be grateful for what you already have, and appreciate all the things you also have that don't require lots of money (your health, friends, family, girlfriend, more opportunities than most Africans can dream of, more cheeseburgers than even Garfield can dream of, Mom's basement, and that fact you even have a computer to read Slashdot on!)
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...
It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes. Thus any meaningful tax cut, for any purpose, will cut taxes for "the rich" more than it will cut taxes for "the poor".
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?
Historically, the US government has not managed to collect more than 19 or 20 percent of GNP in tax revenue. Even when the highest tax bracket was 70% or even higher, revenues as a percent of GNP were not higher than when the highest tax bracket was under 40%. If you think you can fix the USA's financial problems by taxing the rich, you need to explain one of these: (a) why this time it will be different, and the government will collect over 20% of GNP; (b) why GNP will grow faster with higher tax rates; or (c) why the high tax rates will limit the growth of GNP and collect less tax revenue, but it's worth it because it is important to keep the rich from getting richer.
My own view is that if 19% is what the US government can realistically collect, we should be trying to grow the GNP of the US so that the government is collecting 19% of a larger GNP. That means reducing taxes, regulatory burden, and uncertainty.
But don't take my word for this; see some references:
Thomas Sowell: Dissecting The Demagoguery About 'Tax Cuts For The Rich'
Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy: The 19 Percent Solution
Disclaimer: I'm either middle class or posibly upper-middle-class, but I am not remotely "the rich" and tax cuts for "the rich" would not directly benefit me.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The lie comes from focusing on only one tax from one level of government.
This link http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-rates-for-rich-and-poor.html shows the effective federal tax rate:
From a recent CBO report http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9884/12-23-EffectiveTaxRates_Letter.pdf, here are effective tax rates (total taxes divided by total income) for 2005, the most recent year available:
Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent
For state and local taxes,http://www.itepnet.org/whopays3.pdf shows that lower income pays a higher tax rate (11%) than higher income (7%).
"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 disproportionately from government services, they should pay their fair share for them.
So to you, "fair" is that 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? On top of that, those non-paying 5 people are the ones consuming most of the benefits! This all seems "fair" to you?
Yes, it's completely reasonable, for 2 main reasons:
1. Trying to get anything out of the non-paying 5 is about as effective as trying to squeeze blood from a stone. They don't have the money, that's why they aren't paying. Trying to get anything more from the chipping-in-but-still-not-huge contributors also is hard to do right now.
2. The guy who's paying almost the entire bill has the ability to make the rules about who gets what.
The other issue is that once you take away the silly analogy of a country with 10 people in it and get back in reality, you discover that your numbers are misleading at best: The groups you've described only apply to income taxes, and ignore all other kinds of taxes (most notably payroll taxes). And the 1 guy with a lot of cash is paying about 70% of the total bill, not "almost the entire" amount.
The alternate analogy here: Imagine 10 people living in a house with a roof that needs $20K worth of repairs. 1 person makes $100K, 4 people make $50K, 2 people make $15K, and 2 people make nothing. How would you going to come up with the money to pay for it? Would you kick out the people making nothing, knowing that they have nowhere to go and will likely die of exposure or starvation once winter comes? Would you try to ignore the need for repairs until the roof collapses?
I am officially gone from
It might be the coming of the age of austerity for the west but that certainly isn't true for the east, at least not for China. Pick a discipline, any discipline and you will find evidence of China waxing where the western world (mostly read the US) is waning. If people think the west (also read mostly the US) can continue to dump countless billions of dollars into the money pit known as the middle east through our wars, through our relentless thirst for petroleum, while stripping every last drop of resources from education, basic research, technology research, social services, infrastructure, etc. and still survive as anything other than a crumbled husk of a world power they are terribly mistaken.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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?
Private enterprise, as much as the left wing hates it, knows when and how to cut research that is a dead end.
Research is the discovery of unknown. One never knows when it will lead to a "dead end". If one knew, then it would not be discovery.
Private enterprise has a goal of solving a problem for profit. This can be quite different from government funded research in an important way because it restricts the potential for discovery.
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.
Government doesn't ever realize a black hole of research because the researcher will always say "A break through is immanent", just to get the next grant for the next ten years, until he can retire. Private enterprise, as much as the left wing hates it, knows when and how to cut research that is a dead end.
Wrong. Private enterprise simply doesn't invest in research, unless it's something that's basically a guaranteed win that'll return a profit in 5 years or less. Private companies never do fundamental research, because it costs too much and if it does result in profit, it won't be for decades. Companies used to do more of this, back in the 50s-60s, but look at one of the main companies that did this: Bell Labs. Bell was a giant telecom monopoly that had to spend some of their money on something that looked good so government regulators wouldn't mess with them, so they created Bell Labs and put a bunch of people to work chasing their dreams and inventing Unix and C.
The days of a single telecom monopoly are gone, and I don't think anyone wants to return to the days of being required to lease your phone at a high price and pay by the minute.
Cuts happen, it's just the way it is, stupid or not. There are a few things we could do to actually improve the research infrastructure in the country and get more out of the money we do have.
Primarily: stop giving out grants, move everything to industry style contracts. It's time to recognize that industrial research labs and academic research labs are operating on the same level. This does a few things: it allows the government to specify public ownership of research results (right now Universities keep their IP and defense contractors do not... odd, yes?), second, it leads to the normalization of lab pay. If you're on a contract, you should be paid the professional rate. Graduate tuition is simply academic administrators picking the government's pocket, things need to move to the cost plus fee model used in industrial contracts. Under a contract, that money would be moved over toward salary and benefits instead, a very good thing. A school could continue with the myth that their "students" are part time workers who require large amounts of "training", but then a government contracting officer could actually require proof of that statement, and details of the "training" being done.
Another thing that would help would be an acknowledgement that not everyone is cut out to run a lab. Long term research positions for people with PhDs should be viable career options rather than "spouse" prizes. There are many, many people out there who are great researchers and great team leaders, but can't write a grant to save their life. We still want those people to succeed at research.
Ok... long enough... essentially, anyone who tells you there isn't waste/fraud/abuse in scientific funding is full of BS, we can still do a lot better. If we're not willing to try to improve, we're going to keep losing money.
I'm sorry but that's just plain mistaken. The modern university hoards the results of it's researchers as a means to fund their own bottom line and they are every bit as much pandering to Corporate interest as any other industry today. Corporations have cut research spending because they have become myopic and obsessed with quarterly earnings. The idea of investing any significant amount for the possible long term benefit to the company or humanity in some distant future is a quaint idea from some distant past that would get a modern CEO shot before the sun rose. What you say may have had some resonance 30 years ago, today the simple truth is major universities are just another corporate whore looking for their slice
You could cut all funding for scientific research or 10% from Defense. In the former cause you would decimate the American university system, and the economy as a whole. In the latter case you might have to do without the Joint Strike Fighter (the total cost of which is ten times the entire research budget) or about four nuclear subs. In neither case would you even put a dent in overall spending. A bit more perspective: federal spending on research is equal to approximately %30 of the amount paid for interest on the National Debt.
Fighting over rounding errors in the budget like funding for research, the top income tax rate, education, etc. is simply another way to divert attention from Defense and Health and Human Services, which are by themselves larger than the economies of many countries.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Many big companies used to invest in long term research, and some still do: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Xerox, Nokia, and others. In addition to their own research labs, they also have been paying for university research, gave scholarships, collaborating with researchers, participating in the scientific community, etc.
A company that hasn't been doing any significant research in 15 years is... Apple. All Apple ever does is suck up other people's research results and computer science graduates, charge inflated prices to students, and write inane patents.
If Apple's irresponsible business model catches on (invest everything in marketing, design, and lawyers), there isn't going to be a US computer industry in a decade or two.