A while back I wrote about Vannever Bush’s distinction between institutions based on confidence and ones based on fear and related this distinction to institutional patent policies. In a rather different context, Richard Lindzen of MIT takes up other problems that come about when research is predicated on fear, rather than, as he puts it, “gratitude.” The latter part of the paper concerns the problems in the debasement of climate science by political interests. The first part of the paper is what I am more interested in–the account of the incentives for research funding that arise from these two modes of public discourse about science. Lindzen describes the post-World War 2 science funding as based on the gratitude of a nation that recognized what science had done to aid the war effort–not just with bombs, but with medical breakthroughs as well. But in the 1960s, he argues, something changed (my emphasis):
It is my impression that by the end of the 60’s scientists, themselves, came to feel that the real basis for support was not gratitude (and the associated trust that support would bring further benefit) but fear: fear of the Soviet Union, fear of cancer, etc. Many will conclude that this was merely an awakening of a naive scientific community to reality, and they may well be right. However, between the perceptions of gratitude and fear as the basis for support lies a world of difference in incentive structure. If one thinks the basis is gratitude, then one obviously will respond by contributions that will elicit more gratitude. The perpetuation of fear, on the other hand, militates against solving problems. This change in perception proceeded largely without comment. However, the end of the cold war, by eliminating a large part of the fear-base forced a reassessment of the situation. Most thinking has been devoted to the emphasis of other sources of fear: competitiveness, health, resource depletion and the environment.
The argument is, fear brings in more funding than gratitude. A nation “at risk” for losing its competitive advantage (some might say its trade domination), will provide more funding than a nation with confidence in the work of university faculty, or feeling gratitude for what scientists have done. From a money point of view, fear sells more government research than confidence, or apparently that’s what folks believe. Of course, there is still rhetoric about “value creation” and “economic development”; so it’s not all fear-mongering. However, the fear rhetoric takes a variety of forms: things being “at risk” is just the bloodless abstract version of “we are all going to be poor, or die, or savaged.” The basic research means economic development often takes this form–we are “at risk” (meaning, you should be afraid) of losing out to other countries, or to other states, in an imagined competition on a winner-take-all approach to wealth creation. For basic research, this seems to be nonsense. The University of Washington, a leader in obtaining funds for basic research, just announced that it has licensed a nanopore technology to a firm in California. Well, so much for the “what gets funded here stays here” mindset. The jobs, if there ever are any, will be in California, or perhaps mostly in Singapore, where the company does its manufacturing. The jobs won’t be in Washington state. The “fear” of being left behind doesn’t translate, apparently, into licensing deals that stay in the state, or create jobs in the state.
The “fear” rhetoric serves to justify federal research funding and the inevitable state subsidies for such research (since research generally loses money beyond what the government pays)–it apparently doesn’t matter what the research is, or who might benefit commercially. This is “research as an organizationally self-interested industry”–the university exists to get funding, not to care what happens after that. At least that’s how the university administration appears to take it. They want the rhetoric that gets them the money, but they don’t care much after that what happens. Getting more money is easier than being engaged with the outcomes.
This is, of course, where the university technology licensing office comes in. But it is more like the tail gunner in a lost B-17–exposed, limited, with not a lot of help if anything goes wrong. The technology licensing office, so the story goes, will make up for the indifference of administration, the lack of connection between problems to study and regional interests, and the skewing of government funding. Somehow, the technology licensing office will file patents on inventions and find someone, anyone, who will commit to commercial development. Otherwise, the inventions will “just sit on the shelf”–another thing, I suppose, to fear, or at least regret. Somehow, this near-impossible task will be made better if a university creates a policy that requires all the inventions, half-inventions, software, and ideas from, say, $400m of research in a given year to all be owned by the university and forced to the technology licensing office for disposition. Not possible. The tail gunner can’t do it. It will be the first thing taken out by any criticism of the overall system. The rest of the administrative B-17 doesn’t care, really, so long as the plane keeps flying and people believe that the technology licensing office can bring in big money–someday, probably in thirty years, but oh, maybe tomorrow.
Lindzen doesn’t worry this stuff. He lays out a more concerning problem: that research premised on fear leads to folks asking questions and doing research that tend to support the problem rather than resolve it. There is something to that. The money position in pharma is not the cure or prevention but the maintenance of chronic conditions–such conditions keep paying and paying. University administrators of course argue that clinical trials for such compounds are a public service, and there’s no doubt that something that alleviates suffering (3 times a day) is a decent thing. But as Lindzen worries, the research being done at the university to discover such compounds is asking the wrong, or at least a lesser question. Rather than seeking cures or prevention, the university focuses on the money position–maintenance of the chronic, and all the industries that depend on the chronic persisting.
Health problems are reasonable analogues for social problems, for scientific problems. It’s better to dramatize the fear and pain and potential for “risk” than it is to get at cure, or prevention, or to obsolesce the problem entirely. One might think that by “risk” in these settings what folks mean is “the uncertainty of our not knowing much about the topic” but what they want others to understand is “if we are not funded to do research, bad things will certainly happen.” If “risk” meant only “our uncertainty” no one would care at all. The “risk” of climate change would then just be that scientists don’t know much at all about it, and that is not a particularly compelling reason to throw another billion dollars at the “science.” Lindzen argues, for climate science, that the pattern of rhetoric and the incentives for funding are skewed toward perpetuating the problem rather than seeking to understand the science. That is, the research seeks the confirmation bias of the premise of the problem, and orients itself to be used by those that have political control of the funding.
Paul Feyerabend in Against Method argued that separation of government and science was more important than separation of government and religion. Of course, in a number of countries, the idea of a theocracy sounds pretty good–but one wonders if either government or religion controlling science is a good thing for science, or for those who have hopes for science. In the United States, the concern over the intrusion by government into university research was a fuss in the 1960s, and by the 1970s most everyone had decided that the money was better than independence, and careers bent around the need to obtain government funding, rather than to study what was worth studying. Oh, what was worth studying was what the government funded. This has gone so far that merely getting industry research grants just doesn’t cut it for getting tenure. One has to have success in getting grants in areas approved by the government. It’s about as strange as the idea that a university making money from its patent licensing *is* the public good arising from research. In both cases, the money becomes more important to the administration of research than the health of the research enterprise, or the health of the lonely tail gunner in the university B-17.
After discussing some of the politics behind climate science that appears to be pushing science to find what the politics wants to find, in the final section “Dangers to Science and Society,” Lindzen proposes a couple of alternatives: 1) change the incentive structure for science so that there’s a reward for solving problems rather than for perpetuating problems; 2) “carefully reduce” the overall funding to academic science, in exchange for giving scientists greater “freedom and stability.” It’s a proposition worth considering, though I can imagine only a few university administrators who might openly be willing to consider such a thing.