As a scientist (physics, not polar ice), scientists alone are too few to advocate for science alone -- we literally cannot do it.
If you want scientific research as you know it to persist in the United States, please take a moment to help support for science in Congress go viral in your community.
Empirical science is non-partisan. It is good and helpful to know what's true.
If your friends are devout readers of the bible, point 'em toward Philippians 4:8. While I'm not religious, that passage has resonated for me my entire life.
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
> NSF has been opaque about these plans—intentionally so, Wellner believes. “They are purposely not putting anything in writing,” she says. And the planned cancellation is leaving in limbo the scientists who have cruises planned for the Palmer this Antarctic summer, which begins in December.
Incompetence (we didn't think about this out loud), or malice (we didn't want to leave a paper trail)?
Consider the video "Staffing an Office" where Jeff Small, a former advisor in the Department of the Interior says “When you work for the federal government everything you put in an email, text, or note is FOIAable and releasable to the American people. At interior, we had a ton of in person meetings which allowed us to speak a little more freely about the topics of the day.”
Or the video "Advancing the President’s Agenda" where former OPM director Donald Devine says "You need to keep your agenda pretty close. You got to be careful who you tell it to because if you run it through a normal process…it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow..."
It's pretty clear that the architects of our current executive branch want to keep their objectives out of the public record and out of the press. So let's go with malice.
And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
>And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
Dude, every single government ever in the history of humanity works this way. The appointed administrators of ancient rome were scheming up ways to serve their benefactors without leaving a tablet trail that their benefactors opponents could complain about. When I worked for a podunk state department of a well run solidly blue state 15yr ago we did this. There were meetings with no agenda where they'd verbally go over what the new boss's (appointed positions at top of department, not the governor himself) inclinations were on areas of policy relevant to the department and there would be discussion about how to align to that. And this wasn't people who reported to the boss, these were line level workers and middle managers. This wasn't coming from the top down. This was the bottom simply knowing what was good for it.
And just to be clear, just because it's always like this doesn't mean you shouldn't hate it and hate them for doing it.
You'll find worse quotes from the House interview [1] of Fauci's advisor David Morens. Ever since I watched a recording of his testimony I've been more willing to give incompetence "passes" to bad behavior in Republican admins.
Hey, I'm collecting money for my expedition to see what's beyond the ice wall. I hope this will be more successful than the last expedition I sent, this time I'm sending them with a starlink terminal.
> What possible justification could you have for this
The base wants to see spending cuts in exchange for the tax cuts the rich are getting, and thinks science (especially climate science!) is a blunt tool by which liberals berate and control them.
There is no market test for “fundamental” research. So when an avenue of research secures taxpayer funding it exists into perpetuity, and as papers are published and requests for additional funding are made, it tends to grow like a tumor over the decades, getting more PhDs to be matriculated in the labs that began the avenue and grow ever more forever. Very rarely is an avenue of research closed off once the trifecta of university research labs + journals, PhDs who are minted to continue the research, and grants secured and grown.
A lot of the hand wringing by academics themselves are unfocused but circling the root cause, which is this. I would prefer corporations fund research but directed through the university system. The patents and gains are then funneled through the corporations that funded it, rather than the academics and universities with zero return to the taxpayers other than abstract “society gains” pablum, when the academics and universities truly gain all the profit.
When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner, and alternatives to the current vogue will be funded quicker. You can see a real-life example (of failure) in Alzheimer’s research which was hamstrung by decades of political control of research labs and taxpayer grants that refused to fund alternatives to the “mainstream” theories which set back society and the disease.
> When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner...
It's hard to see how your suggestion would work for fundamental advances in technology. For example, backpropagation took decades to move from an idea to industrial use. [0] It was also "invented" multiple times.
I understood the value of crypto well before the vast majority of people and made a significant amount of money. While that isn’t an argument in favor of my opinions on other subjects, the pejorative of “crypto bro” is certainly inaccurate considering I noticed a massive profit opportunity well before most others, and instead should signal that I have heterodox opinions that might be accurate before the small-c conservatives (i.e. academics writ large) accept the truths
Whether proponents of government directed Science, agree or disagree, your comment presents a well reasoned argument. At the moment it is the most substantive comment on the page. Moreover, it is a direct, good faith response to the parent commenter's question. Yet for all of this, I see that the comment has been downvoted into grey. At the time of posting, no substantive rebuttals have been offered.
This typifies the quality of discourse around defunding of "The Science" at HN.
it's a shit argument. Fundamental research funded by the government led to the Googles and OpenAIs of today. If industry funds research, the profits stay in the hands of the same people. When government funds research, new billionaires are minted down the line. if you like billionaires (I don't), you'd fund government research, not hope that the existing billionaires think it's in their interest. We wouldn't know about CFCs and the ozone if CFCs companies funded the research - we'd be burned to a crisp.
You have a lack of imagination. The research lead to Google and OpenAI, but you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding. Furthermore there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding, other than esoteric “America benefits when the research happens in America”
> you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding
In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.
This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.
It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.
> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding
The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.
Until somewhat recently America had an advantage in commercialising the basic research. But now increasingly we fund some basic research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars only to see it commercialised overseas (often by China but by others too), often when technical know how is exfiltrated and patents ignored. This reduces the expected benefit of funding the research.
Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).
The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?
> it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might
We ascended remarkably similarly to how China is. Stealing IP from the old powers, giving it room and state support to scale and then staying out of nonsense wars.
Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?
If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.
However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
People who support public funding for research are usually strongly opposed to central planning in the allocation of the funds. They don't want to have uninformed politicians, administrators, and citizens deciding what research is worth funding. They want to have the decisions done in the field, by people who understand the topic.
Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.
There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.
In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.
> Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources?
Plenty, of course.
> If so, why is state directed research a special case?
Because there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than government funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be inefficiencies from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.
Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative industries), we don't.
In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.
Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer dollars perhaps made sense in a pre-internet age where central planning of research was potentially more efficient when capital moved slowly and wasn’t large enough to fund such endeavors. I truly think that time passed decades ago.
I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.
Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.
Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.
I can understand disagreeing but it is funny that someone asked for a justification and then downvoted someone providing one, without even knowing if the person actually even endorses that line of thought. Liberalism truly is dead.
Someone ELI5: Why is the Trump administration defunding scientific research? Is there a bigger picture we're not seeing, or is it 8D chess he's playing ?
This administration and its influencers have some strong opinions about significantly shrinking the size and role of government, and eliminating activities they don’t believe the government should be engaged in.
Now that he's president, here come the reprisals. Zero out NSF's funding, shut down NPR, end the COVID era break on student loan enforcement, withdraw grants from Harvard.
> it’s funny because while I probably agree with you,
What do you agree with?
> FWIW, I think it is intellectually immature to talk about politicians like you know them. What else does Donald perceive? What was he like when you spent time with him?
I think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that OP was talking about anything other than the Nature Magazine. And to know what Donald perceives, you could ask Jeffery Epstein. Oh wait.. you can't.
This reads like you have a serious point to make about there being two different Nature magazines, but there aren't and there is absolutely no ambiguity that could lead you toward the concept of "nature" since he linked to the magazine that you are referring to. Not funny.
If your research is funded by taxpayer dollars, you're a public servant and you should welcome public accountability. You should accept that explaining the public benefit of what you do is part of your job, and accept the possibility that the public won't see eye-to-eye with regard to that benefit.
The fundamental problem is that scientists stopped thinking of themselves as public servants, and started thinking of themselves as lecturers whose job it is to scold the public. They stopped working to follow the evidence wherever it lead, and switched to promoting trendy ideologies. Remember during COVID how we were all supposed to isolate, until the Floyd protests started and suddenly the need for isolation disappeared?
"Three-in-four liberal faculty support mandatory diversity statements while 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests."
...
"For decades, college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal), a skew that has become more pronounced over the past three decades.[40] For instance, in the Higher Education Research Institute’s 1990 faculty survey, 6% identified as “far left,” 16% identified as “conservative,” and 0.4% identified as “far right.” In 2020 these percentages were 12%, 10%, and 0.2%, respectively.[41] College students are also predominantly left-leaning, though the rate is closer to 2:1 left vs. right, compared to 6:1 among faculty.[42]"
..."significant portions of faculty say that they would discriminate against colleagues with different ideological views in professional settings (e.g., during anonymous peer-review) or during day-to-day social interactions.[43]"
Academics successfully hacked away the branch that they themselves were standing on. Large fractions of the US electorate no longer believe that the research these academics do is a good-faith attempt to advance their interests as voters and taxpayers. And so they're not interested in funding it. Fair play if you ask me. If academia wants funding, it should do deep reforms in order to re-earn the trust of voters.
You are not automatically a public servant if you are funded by taxes. In my definition that only happens when you start making decision that affect other people. E.g. handle who gets a tax cut, go to jail, or other things that we need to out source to people that serve our interests in powerful ways. It is important to differentiate them from people that just do a thing for money.
Further more saying things like "It is your fault that you are in front of my fist" is not productive. Being antiscience is the problem here not being antileft.
Yes because he’s throwing the baby out with the bath water, being completely myopic about the value add to society and what it takes to make America competitive.
Of course he’ll be dead before the real multi-generational consequences take effect.
https://archive.is/2025.07.29-011650/https://www.science.org...
As a scientist (physics, not polar ice), scientists alone are too few to advocate for science alone -- we literally cannot do it.
If you want scientific research as you know it to persist in the United States, please take a moment to help support for science in Congress go viral in your community.
Empirical science is non-partisan. It is good and helpful to know what's true.
If your friends are devout readers of the bible, point 'em toward Philippians 4:8. While I'm not religious, that passage has resonated for me my entire life.
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
> NSF has been opaque about these plans—intentionally so, Wellner believes. “They are purposely not putting anything in writing,” she says. And the planned cancellation is leaving in limbo the scientists who have cruises planned for the Palmer this Antarctic summer, which begins in December.
Incompetence (we didn't think about this out loud), or malice (we didn't want to leave a paper trail)?
https://www.propublica.org/article/video-project-2025-presid...
Consider the video "Staffing an Office" where Jeff Small, a former advisor in the Department of the Interior says “When you work for the federal government everything you put in an email, text, or note is FOIAable and releasable to the American people. At interior, we had a ton of in person meetings which allowed us to speak a little more freely about the topics of the day.”
Or the video "Advancing the President’s Agenda" where former OPM director Donald Devine says "You need to keep your agenda pretty close. You got to be careful who you tell it to because if you run it through a normal process…it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow..."
It's pretty clear that the architects of our current executive branch want to keep their objectives out of the public record and out of the press. So let's go with malice.
And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
>And also keeping plausible deniability for the people at the top. They never told anyone to do anything, they decided to do this themselves. The third reich was full of this as well.
Dude, every single government ever in the history of humanity works this way. The appointed administrators of ancient rome were scheming up ways to serve their benefactors without leaving a tablet trail that their benefactors opponents could complain about. When I worked for a podunk state department of a well run solidly blue state 15yr ago we did this. There were meetings with no agenda where they'd verbally go over what the new boss's (appointed positions at top of department, not the governor himself) inclinations were on areas of policy relevant to the department and there would be discussion about how to align to that. And this wasn't people who reported to the boss, these were line level workers and middle managers. This wasn't coming from the top down. This was the bottom simply knowing what was good for it.
And just to be clear, just because it's always like this doesn't mean you shouldn't hate it and hate them for doing it.
You'll find worse quotes from the House interview [1] of Fauci's advisor David Morens. Ever since I watched a recording of his testimony I've been more willing to give incompetence "passes" to bad behavior in Republican admins.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/house-panel-takes-fa...
Why? Assign malice where there's malice. Don't give someone a pass because someone else might have done something worse.
And yet they know everything about each one of us (without admitting that they do).
Source: Snowden. It only got worse from there.
It's going to take 100 years to recover from this spiteful, pointless destruction
Who would ever work again for any research in any science that relies on government cooperation in the US?
Only all of Congress should be able to do these things, we do not have Kings and we don't tolerate Tyrants
The beings beyond the ice wall told the NSF to go away
Ah we have a Linda Moulton Howe fan here I see =)
Hey, I'm collecting money for my expedition to see what's beyond the ice wall. I hope this will be more successful than the last expedition I sent, this time I'm sending them with a starlink terminal.
What’s your best source link for the NSF researchers alleged to have disappeared there for two weeks back in the 1990s?
The descent into scientific ignorance continues. What possible justification could you have for this?
A lot of excellent climate research is done in the polar regions.
> What possible justification could you have for this
The base wants to see spending cuts in exchange for the tax cuts the rich are getting, and thinks science (especially climate science!) is a blunt tool by which liberals berate and control them.
The base doesn't care about this, I doubt they even know this boat exists, this is being done for the sake of destroying science because they hate it.
The base cares about spending being alleged to have been cut
The base are the rich who get the tax cuts.
Looking at the US is looking at making Cyberpunk real. If you're not rich your vote doesn't matter you are just a useful idiot.
There is no market test for “fundamental” research. So when an avenue of research secures taxpayer funding it exists into perpetuity, and as papers are published and requests for additional funding are made, it tends to grow like a tumor over the decades, getting more PhDs to be matriculated in the labs that began the avenue and grow ever more forever. Very rarely is an avenue of research closed off once the trifecta of university research labs + journals, PhDs who are minted to continue the research, and grants secured and grown.
A lot of the hand wringing by academics themselves are unfocused but circling the root cause, which is this. I would prefer corporations fund research but directed through the university system. The patents and gains are then funneled through the corporations that funded it, rather than the academics and universities with zero return to the taxpayers other than abstract “society gains” pablum, when the academics and universities truly gain all the profit.
When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner, and alternatives to the current vogue will be funded quicker. You can see a real-life example (of failure) in Alzheimer’s research which was hamstrung by decades of political control of research labs and taxpayer grants that refused to fund alternatives to the “mainstream” theories which set back society and the disease.
You asked for the justification and I provided it
> When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner...
It's hard to see how your suggestion would work for fundamental advances in technology. For example, backpropagation took decades to move from an idea to industrial use. [0] It was also "invented" multiple times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation#History
Explaining the value of fundamental research and long term societal investment to some crypto bro is an utter waste of time. Polar opposite mindset.
I understood the value of crypto well before the vast majority of people and made a significant amount of money. While that isn’t an argument in favor of my opinions on other subjects, the pejorative of “crypto bro” is certainly inaccurate considering I noticed a massive profit opportunity well before most others, and instead should signal that I have heterodox opinions that might be accurate before the small-c conservatives (i.e. academics writ large) accept the truths
Exhibit A. Exactly what I’m taking about.
Under your system what is the corporate incentive to study health effects of smoking?
A pharmaceutical company interested in curing millions of people dying of smoking would fund it
...and when China leapfrogs ahead of America's science, these people will blame the nebulous American globalist elites for "letting it happen."
So much for the invisible hand of the market.
Whether proponents of government directed Science, agree or disagree, your comment presents a well reasoned argument. At the moment it is the most substantive comment on the page. Moreover, it is a direct, good faith response to the parent commenter's question. Yet for all of this, I see that the comment has been downvoted into grey. At the time of posting, no substantive rebuttals have been offered.
This typifies the quality of discourse around defunding of "The Science" at HN.
You're clearly not familiar with Brandolini's law.
it's a shit argument. Fundamental research funded by the government led to the Googles and OpenAIs of today. If industry funds research, the profits stay in the hands of the same people. When government funds research, new billionaires are minted down the line. if you like billionaires (I don't), you'd fund government research, not hope that the existing billionaires think it's in their interest. We wouldn't know about CFCs and the ozone if CFCs companies funded the research - we'd be burned to a crisp.
You have a lack of imagination. The research lead to Google and OpenAI, but you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding. Furthermore there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding, other than esoteric “America benefits when the research happens in America”
> you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding
In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.
This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.
It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.
> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding
The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.
Until somewhat recently America had an advantage in commercialising the basic research. But now increasingly we fund some basic research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars only to see it commercialised overseas (often by China but by others too), often when technical know how is exfiltrated and patents ignored. This reduces the expected benefit of funding the research.
Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).
The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?
> it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might
We ascended remarkably similarly to how China is. Stealing IP from the old powers, giving it room and state support to scale and then staying out of nonsense wars.
Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?
If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.
However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
People who support public funding for research are usually strongly opposed to central planning in the allocation of the funds. They don't want to have uninformed politicians, administrators, and citizens deciding what research is worth funding. They want to have the decisions done in the field, by people who understand the topic.
Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.
There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.
In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.
> Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources?
Plenty, of course.
> If so, why is state directed research a special case?
Because there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than government funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be inefficiencies from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.
Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative industries), we don't.
In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.
Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer dollars perhaps made sense in a pre-internet age where central planning of research was potentially more efficient when capital moved slowly and wasn’t large enough to fund such endeavors. I truly think that time passed decades ago.
I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.
Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer money is how China caught up.
Look I get it those with good incomes in America want to pay less taxes because they can take care of themselves.
> You have a lack of imagination.
Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.
Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.
I can understand disagreeing but it is funny that someone asked for a justification and then downvoted someone providing one, without even knowing if the person actually even endorses that line of thought. Liberalism truly is dead.
Someone ELI5: Why is the Trump administration defunding scientific research? Is there a bigger picture we're not seeing, or is it 8D chess he's playing ?
Reproducible and empirical fact is anathema to any administration that wants the "truth" to be the talking-point of the day.
This administration and its influencers have some strong opinions about significantly shrinking the size and role of government, and eliminating activities they don’t believe the government should be engaged in.
It's not subtle. Donald perceives colleges as bastions of wokeness. Nature literally endorsed Joe Biden: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x
Now that he's president, here come the reprisals. Zero out NSF's funding, shut down NPR, end the COVID era break on student loan enforcement, withdraw grants from Harvard.
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> it’s funny because while I probably agree with you,
What do you agree with?
> FWIW, I think it is intellectually immature to talk about politicians like you know them. What else does Donald perceive? What was he like when you spent time with him?
I think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that OP was talking about anything other than the Nature Magazine. And to know what Donald perceives, you could ask Jeffery Epstein. Oh wait.. you can't.
This reads like you have a serious point to make about there being two different Nature magazines, but there aren't and there is absolutely no ambiguity that could lead you toward the concept of "nature" since he linked to the magazine that you are referring to. Not funny.
If your research is funded by taxpayer dollars, you're a public servant and you should welcome public accountability. You should accept that explaining the public benefit of what you do is part of your job, and accept the possibility that the public won't see eye-to-eye with regard to that benefit.
The fundamental problem is that scientists stopped thinking of themselves as public servants, and started thinking of themselves as lecturers whose job it is to scold the public. They stopped working to follow the evidence wherever it lead, and switched to promoting trendy ideologies. Remember during COVID how we were all supposed to isolate, until the Floyd protests started and suddenly the need for isolation disappeared?
"Three-in-four liberal faculty support mandatory diversity statements while 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests."
...
"For decades, college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal), a skew that has become more pronounced over the past three decades.[40] For instance, in the Higher Education Research Institute’s 1990 faculty survey, 6% identified as “far left,” 16% identified as “conservative,” and 0.4% identified as “far right.” In 2020 these percentages were 12%, 10%, and 0.2%, respectively.[41] College students are also predominantly left-leaning, though the rate is closer to 2:1 left vs. right, compared to 6:1 among faculty.[42]"
..."significant portions of faculty say that they would discriminate against colleagues with different ideological views in professional settings (e.g., during anonymous peer-review) or during day-to-day social interactions.[43]"
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/academic-mind-2022-wh...
Now consider that self-described "conservatives" significantly outnumber self-described "liberals" in the US electorate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...
Academics successfully hacked away the branch that they themselves were standing on. Large fractions of the US electorate no longer believe that the research these academics do is a good-faith attempt to advance their interests as voters and taxpayers. And so they're not interested in funding it. Fair play if you ask me. If academia wants funding, it should do deep reforms in order to re-earn the trust of voters.
You are not automatically a public servant if you are funded by taxes. In my definition that only happens when you start making decision that affect other people. E.g. handle who gets a tax cut, go to jail, or other things that we need to out source to people that serve our interests in powerful ways. It is important to differentiate them from people that just do a thing for money.
Further more saying things like "It is your fault that you are in front of my fist" is not productive. Being antiscience is the problem here not being antileft.
> Donald perceives colleges as bastions of wokeness.
Is he wrong?
Yes because he’s throwing the baby out with the bath water, being completely myopic about the value add to society and what it takes to make America competitive.
Of course he’ll be dead before the real multi-generational consequences take effect.
Yeah, specially in STEM.
Despite posturing by some academic administrators, most folks have no social agenda for a country they recently immigrated to.
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