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Fix science, don’t just fund it

#1
C C Offline
More funding won’t solve issues of concentration, bureaucratization, and replication in science.
https://innovationfrontier.org/fix-scien...t-fund-it/

INTRO: The era of constrained federal science budgets is over. With Congress poised to boost public spending on research and development (R&D),1 the long-standing assumption that federal science agencies must aspire to incremental growth now appears unjustified. Indeed, depending on the outcome of current legislative debates, science agencies may be preparing for an infusion of federal dollars on a grand scale — and in a compressed timeframe — that has the potential to transform the institutions of science and technology.2 Such an increase of federal R&D has not been seen at least since the doubling of the budget of the National Institutes of Health some 20 years ago.

As a matter of fact, U.S. R&D spending has been on the rise in recent years. In 2021, overall spending surpassed 3% of GDP for the first time in history. Yet, such growth is almost entirely attributable to the private sector. By contrast, federal R&D spending as a share of GDP (what is known as “R&D intensity”) has waxed and waned from year to year. But it has never again come anywhere near its high point during the mid 1960s, when federal R&D intensity reached nearly 2%.3 Today, it is not the government but private industry that is by far and away the biggest funder of R&D — a fact that has long been lamented by advocates pushing for increased public investments.4

Now, with a political dynamic shaped by a global pandemic and mounting fears about climate change and competition with China,5 Washington is finally paying heed. Both the Biden administration and bipartisan lawmakers in Congress appear to have reached a consensus — in principle, if not on many important details — that the federal government must reassert its role in American science and technology. Indeed, current proposals, including the infrastructure package and various pieces of legislation now before the Congress, would increase R&D funding by anywhere from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars, with particular increases set aside for the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

With some notable exceptions, current proposals to stimulate American science and innovation focus almost exclusively on the need for more federal money. Yet, there are several other problems that beset the U.S. R&D system besides inadequate federal funding. Foremost among them are the unequal distribution of federal science funding; mounting concerns about the integrity of scientific research, and the increasing bureaucratization of the scientific enterprise. Increasing federal funding will not solve these problems, and could even make them worse. But if left unresolved, these problems could undermine the express purpose of calls to increase federal R&D funding.

It has long been the case that federal R&D funding is highly concentrated, being clustered around a handful of geographic regions and their prominent institutions, such as Harvard University, Duke University, and Johns Hopkins University on the East Coast and Stanford University, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Washington on the West Coast.6 Meanwhile, worries about scientific integrity have been growing over the past decade in light of the so-called “replication crisis,” exacerbated by high-profile incidents of scientific misconduct. As for bureaucratization: Scientists have been complaining for years about an increasing number of federal rules and regulations that hamper research productivity, requiring scientists to spend nearly as much time on paperwork as they do research. Unfortunately, current proposals to increase R&D spending do little, if anything, to address these problems.

To be sure, the problems of geographic concentration and research integrity, at least, have featured prominently in policy discussions on the Hill. Yet, as we shall see, these discussions have focused narrowly on particular aspects of these two problems, while largely ignoring the issue of bureaucratization. This is unfortunate: The bipartisanship that characterizes today’s push for increased R&D spending offers a unique opportunity in our polarized political environment to implement reforms that could strengthen America’s research establishment — and thus help our country maintain its competitive advantage in science and technology.

This paper will provide a brief overview of the problems relating to concentration, bureaucratization, and replication and consider their interrelated sources. It will also show why current policy proposals are inadequate and go on to offer some alternative prescriptions. Rather than discrete problems that admit of simple policy solutions, we shall see that these problems are complex and interlinking expressions of a deeper crisis facing the scientific enterprise—a crisis that will require a lot more than funding to resolve.... (MORE)
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