As Marxist despots and tribal socialists from Cuba to Greece have discovered to their huge disappointment, governments can neither create wealth nor effectively redistribute it. They can only expropriate and watch it dissipate. George Gilder
George Rebane
My considered opinion is NO. Economics nobelists Gary Becker and James Heckman argue YES in their 10aug12 piece ‘Why the Dismal Science Deserves Federal Funding’.
The authors point out that “basic economic and social research … are public goods that are difficult to appropriate privately.” And they make a good point about the paucity of basic research coming out of the private sector because of its cost and riskiness. Some of the successes they cite about federally funded research are little off the mark, such as the DNA sequencing of the human genome competition ‘won’ by Celera Corporation.
Government research has often been carried out by private enterprises receiving federal monies, and retaining some proprietary rights upon success. And research performed in government facilities has benefitted from the competition of parallel/similar efforts in the private sector. But all this is not the reason for my NO.
Pure and applied science projects like genome sequencing are ideologically antiseptic. However, research that has to do with individual and aggregate behaviors is very much colored by ideologies of preferred social orders, and what kind of individuals best fit into such orders.
Government funding is no more unbiased than corporate funding of research that is later used to found or substantiate a ‘truth’ that winds up reflected in public policy. Only liberal naifs and agenda-driven progressives argue that monies from idealogically tainted bureaucracies are ideologically neutral. Conservatives have long focused their gimlet eye on such funding, and have cited volumes of evidence to support their apprehension.
The current academic environment is preponderantly and persistently leftwing because of the rotating door with academics cycling between campus and capitol. A poster child of this is the funding for climate research over the last twenty years – the correct answer is already established, and your successful research proposal should do everything to abet that answer.
Economics is a social science, no matter how many equations the new generation of economists throws at the public and politicians to paint themselves more akin to physics and engineering. Economists belong to the weekly reported cohort of professionals who are constantly ‘surprised’ at reports of realworld economic numbers. They can no more predict the detailed behavior of a complex economic system than can the climate scientists reliably predict (or even interpret) the behavior of earth’s climate.
Yet their published output and testimonies to government bodies are used as the basis for public policies reflected in our laws and regulations. And such public policies are the desiderata of the dominant ideology in government. It does not take a genius to conclude what kind of economic research will most likely receive federal funding in such an environment – the template for it is long established and working in other funded arenas.
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