Comment by mike_hearn
17 hours ago
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.
>>>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.
No. They have not. They haven't earned anything. If they did, they would have had a connection to a company and thru their technical expertise, chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake.
You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book. Say, risk management. Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds.
One has battle scars. The other is soft. Soft people don't get to make decisions on how to allocate anything. No cowards for leaders, since time immemorial.
This kind of marginal risk thinking has never made sense to me because of the declining marginal value of money.
If you have $0 you can't accept any risk and can't make any decisions correctly. But if you have like $4 million you also have no reason to make any decisions correctly because risk no longer matters to you. So it relies on them having expensive tastes such that they can't just retire?
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> chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake.
We are talking about fundamental research here. Most investors are not interested in funding fundamental science, evidenced by the fact they have all the power to currently fund such work, but they choose not to.
> You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book
They don't, they do it by doing science and building a reputation in their field for doing good work. People who work at the NSF and NIH are vouched for by others in their field.
> Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds.
The interests of private equity and hedge fund managers are well represented. They have plenty of say on public policy and how resources are allocated. It's good to give other people with different perspectives a say as well. Again, the total amount of money allocated for public research is very tiny compared to the rest of the federal budget, private research dollars, total hedge fund wealth, etc.