Potentially tough luck for the NSF (amongst others)
So, according to MSNBC, the future of the ’stimulus package’ in the Senate is predicated on the success of the Collins-Nelson amendment. Earlier on today, I was sent an email relating to the presence, in that amendment, of a complete cut of the proposed dough to be sent to the NSF.
The argument that NSF funding is a Good Thing at times like this is that scientific innovation is good for the economy. The NSF fund the earlier research, though, the stuff that generally isn’t commercially attractive because it’s too speculative or too far removed from commercially viable implentation, so I am not sure how fast the benefits are supposed to end up in the economy. It’s somewhat interested that it’d be targeted by Collins — other than in a few areas, Republicans are generally fairly friendly to funding science research (a fact that, in my opinion, does somewhat stick in the craw of many progressive University scientists who are nevertheless dependent on NSF funding) — but NASA will keep half it’s dough, which is probably because NASA could to some order to be considered as a vehicle for sending money from the taxpayer to the likes of Lockheed Martin and other contractors.
Anyhow, following 2007’s late gutting of the proposed NSF funding increase (a gutting that occurred at the hands of a Democrat-controlled Congress), there may be a future debate about the extent to which the US funds fundamental research, through NSF and through other organisations (DoE, NASA, NIH, NOAA, etc). Additionally, with endowments tanking and the collapse in the housing market limiting the ability of Universities to raise tuition fees, the overhead taken from Federal research dollars are the third revenue stream for many US Universities; the current hiring freezes and layoffs at those Universities might just be the start of pain to come*. That debate will, like many other important debates, probably have to sit in the background for some years while the economy continues to struggle.
*By the by and unconnected with this bill and the proposed modifications, outside of the research universities, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fair few liberal arts colleges go broke in the next couple of years as their two main revenue streams — tuition and endowments — are both suffering significantly.
Yeah. As you know, I wrote an article for a science journal about the 2007 cuts and the hope for 2008 and then NSF funding under the Obama administration.
The truth is that, in terms of seeding a product, pure research funding is not very economically sensible, in that there is no X investment = Y revenue equation you can plug money into. If you look at it with a very budget cutting mentality, there’s not much of a case that there’s any kind of great return on the investment, although it is the case that it’s a bit like playing the lottery, in that you’re not particularly likely to hit a decent return, but if you do, it could be huge. But not everything is going to net you a Tang. Most of the money is going to net you a research paper in a journal read only by other people getting NSF funding, which only glacially moves science (and civilization) forward.
But that misses the point twofold. The first is, as I know you’re big on, there is an inherent value to pure research that is not necessarily economic but scientific (though in the longview, that is of course economic, but that can often be the very long view). Human progress really DOES tend to move pretty glacially (although, again, when it does really hit, it can create a chain reaction that pushes us forward by leaps and bounds. Think math and physics in the 20s or computer science in the 50s). You can place a value on things that supercedes to some extent the economic value (although needless to say, that scientific value will eventually return economically).
But MORE than that, your last paragraph nails the real economic benefit of funding pure research. What NSF funding specifically (and research funding like it) does is provide huge support to higher education in America (or wherever), and just as importantly, it’s probably America’s most successful and certainly most pervasive job training program for highly skilled jobs (engineering, physics, chemistry, high end math and computer science, etc.).
On the former, as you say, for a university like Carnegie Mellon (which doesn’t have a very big endowment relative to other universities), the revenue stream of research funding is one of the three legs of the stool on which its viability rests. And that benefits, of course, not just those people studying quantum physics or whale fucking (or whatever John McCain’s favored “example of ridiculous pork spending of the week” is), but every student, decreasing tuition costs, allowing a university to expand, supporting the staffs (and of course faculties) needed (which are often very big employers in any given area), etc. etc.
But on the second, which I’m a big advocate of, I think people often bitch about how America is getting surpassed in math and science and the like, and losing its competitive edge in that regard to countries like China and India and Pakistan, but they don’t quite realize the nearly 1 to 1 ration of that and research funding. Where do they imagine our next generation of highly skilled specialists are coming from? They come, of course, from universities. And it’s not just people that wind up spending their lives as Post Docs studying Hadron data, but guys that end up in Boeing, or Monsanto, or GM, or as city planners, etc. NSF funding is, in a very real sense, a farm system for scientists and technologists. I think it sounds good for a congressman to cut research funding, because it can be hard to sell to constituents and a ripe target, but I don’t think many people have it very well thought through. Sure you’re planting a million seeds, but even if that only returns 10,000 to 1 to harvest, the more seeds, the better the crop.
I’m a pretty libertarian guy in terms of funding stuff, but if there is to be ANY funding of higher education, or any place for the American government to make an investment in keeping our competitive and scientific edge, pure research funding is actually a pretty damn good investment.
Comment by Brad — 2/6/2009 @ 6:40 pm
I guess that what I’d say is that people shouldn’t fool themselves that this research will happen without Federal Government funding at close to the rate at which it happens now. I personally think that there is a benefit to the amount of that research that is currently being done, but I am not sure that there’s a right or wrong answer; society can decide how much it values pure scientific research. However, it really does have to decide, even if only by not deciding, which is a vote for much less of that research; if it decides it wants to fund less of it, as we both know and have explained, that’ll also hurt Universities a lot (as well as other institutions such as Fermilab, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, etc, etc), because many of them rely on the overhead from the research dollars to operate at the levels at which they currently do.
Comment by Adam — 2/6/2009 @ 7:38 pm
It might be that this financing is justified on its own merits. But a bill producing next-generation benefits certainly oughtn’t be remoraed on to a bill the explicit purpose of which is to create short-term growth.
Comment by Rojas — 2/6/2009 @ 10:10 pm
I guess they could have pointed out that it’ll help keep the higher education sector strong, or directed it toward infrastructure projects (because NSF is currently running years behind on building stuff because of cost overruns on the previous stuff; the question of how NSF and NASA deal with tendering and budget overruns is an interesting one in itself…). As I said, the research stuff doesn’t have large short-term economic impact other than through the overhead deductions, which support research universities.
Comment by Adam — 2/7/2009 @ 8:06 am