From Richard Hanania, Government Science and the Prestige Economy.
Upon inspection, the premise of the article makes sense. There are areas of research in which the ROI is not so easy to quantify, if any at all. Or the benefits are farther down the road. I agree that knowledge is good in and of itself. But upon closer inspection, the article is conceived on a false equivalency between research and entitlement spending. Just because an argument sounds plausible or true, does not mean it is.
After a preamble, he gets to the meat of the argument for increasing funding:
Two considerations, however, push me over the edge towards the pro-funding side. First of all, as alluded to above, I see certain forms of knowledge as good in and of themselves. Genetic paleohistory, behavioral genetics, historical linguistics, particle physics, cosmology, and other sciences that are fundamental in telling us who we are and explain our place in the universe are valuable for their own sake. I don’t care if the average voter would rather have food stamps or more giveaways to the elderly, or even tax cuts.
A key detail he overlooks is that paying for research or the ‘attainment of knowledge’ does not mean only the research itself. You are also paying the researcher’s salary, presumably for a middle-class lifestyle. So the comparison between this and tax cuts or other programs does not really hold.
He’s conflating an entitlement spending program with a salaried researcher. Annual per-capita Social Security and food stamps payouts are tiny relative to a researcher’s salary for a HCOL area, where elite colleges are clustered (e.g. East and West coasts). SNAP benefits are only around $300/month. Tax cuts are also similarly very small for the average taxpayer. In the case of Social Security, the recipient already paid into the system. These programs are tiny and cannot compare to a salary.
Theoretical research, especially in math or physics, is very cheap to produce. When I was working on my most recent math paper, my only itemizable expense was $35 for a paywalled paper. This is very cheap if limited to the process of doing research and excluding living costs. It becomes expensive when paying a decent salary for thousands of these people. Such salaries are paid in the form of tuition and student loan debt, so it’s not free. Then the question of cost vs. benefit analysis is more relevant.
It’s like the author is advocating for a middle-class UBI for research and comparing it to other programs. Maybe a more suitable comparison would be food stamps vs. a stipend to do research. This can be a free pro subscription of Chat GPT, or something inexpensive like that. So the researcher must still pay his or her room and board and other expenses.
My experience tells me that a lot of academics and researchers are like this. Their utility function is simply too different from that of people who work in the private sector for there to be a complete crowding out effect from government-funded science. Does the guy who wakes up every day excited to explore string theory or the nature of the early cosmos put in the same hours to make an iPhone camera incrementally better? In some cases, maybe, but definitely not in others.
But they are being paid a salary. It’s not as if they are doing it only for the ‘pursuit of knowledge’ or different preference alignments, but it’s also a career. The utility function argument fails because the salaries are the same for the private sector employee vs. the researcher, according to data from the BLS. The researcher may also have tenure, which is a full-time paycheck for life. Would the guy who ‘works on string theory’ do it for $1,000/month instead of $100,000/year at a university, plus other benefits? Likely not.
America already spends considerably on research, either in the context of academia or private sector R&D, and it’s unlikely Trump’s cuts will put much of a dent in this. If anything, much more should be cut.
There are only a handful of exceptions of purely theoretical research salaries entirely paid for by the private sector, without taxpayer money or without any expectation of profit such as patents, those being Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study and possibly the Simon’s Foundation, which funds generous grants for theoretical research. Trying to scale this approach would be too costly.