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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.'"
Can Progress Survive Austerity as a Foregone Conclusion?
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
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.
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!
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
"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
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.
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.