Comment by mike_hearn
10 hours ago
The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics.
Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.
Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.
It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night.
In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.
Yeah, that's not really how I view central planning. To me, central planning is when decisions go through a central authority. The only thing centralized here is the money pot. The decision making about what gets funded is mostly distributed though. Yes the Trump administration is wielding influence but the way they are doing it is by exerting control over the purse strings, which is decidedly not constitutional. Indeed, the fact this has never happened before despite successive party changes shows that what Trump is doing is extraordinary.
> In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources
Okay but we are not talking about allocating private dollars for profit, we're talking about allocating public dollars for science. People are still free to allocate their private dollars as they see fit. Notably, given the freedom to do so, most people do not allocate their private dollars for public science, making public science funding all the more necessary.
The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.