Trump is not killing science and not even killing social psychology (though he did propose eliminating NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economics Science Directorate).
There is plenty of stuff I think social scientists SHOULD be studying. But they do not do it. I have made suggestions here before but everyone ignored them. I had more to make in essays I posted here but the editors made me remove them, since "everyone knows" that social sciences are "crap".
I think they are not necessarily nonsense. However, the people in these fields are incompetent for the most part. But, the problems they could study are not necessarily bad problems. They are important problems. It is just that the social scientists do not study important problems in general and they are not interested in studying important problems, so they study garbage instead. They have zero respect from the rest of STEM, which is probably appropriate under the circumstances.
It does not HAVE to be this way. But it is what it is.
There is another reason for Congress being generous that is virtually never talked about. It is based on what the only Federal politician in history to say it out loud pointed to --- that the USA can never go broke. Donald Trump said that. Most everyone in Congress knows this, including the grandstanders who get votes by crying the sky is falling over the national debt. Why is this? Because the Federal government owns our central bank. The Federal Reserve bank was the second such central bank in history, which partly explains its name. It was created to replace reserves that were gold and silver (and thus were limited by the arbitrary physical abundance of those elements) with a bank that could create loans out of the "full faith and credit" of the USA.
The first bank to start to figure this out was the Bank of England, around the time of the runup to the American Revolution. JP Morgan helped formalize it around the turn of the 20th century. Note that since then, every other central bank calls themselves a central bank, like t he ECB.
How does this work? There is an accounting identity between credit money (spending) and debt (loan activity). The national debt is, therefore, the foundation money supply that the nation operates on. In the real world, the US usable money supply is less, about 2/3rds of our national debt because of trade imbalance. About 1/3rd of our money is over in Europe supporting those nations which do NOT run deficits commensurate with their economic activity. Check "Eurodollars" to see that number. Yes, we pay the interest on that debt that the rest of the world is using and not paying interest on (at least not directly).
So, what most of Congress knows is that the effect of cutting Federal spending, and the effect of trying to "balance the budget" is to cut the money supply, force an economic contraction (which we call recession or depression) and harm the nation. Most of Congress knows that spending on science is a positive ROI activity for which roughly 2-3 dollars of economic activity are generated for each dollar of spending. Historically, the highest ROI on federal spending was the national highway system (mostly freeways) at about 12X. Defense spending (oops, war spending) is generally a return of 1 or so in peacetime. (But there is contention on that.)
Unfortunately many very intelligent business leaders (cue Elon) develop a "magic money" narrow view because they are like cells in a body relating to blood. Their activity allows them to grab more and more "blood" (meaning money in this metaphor) and this tunnel vision blinds them to what is going on at the system level. By "magic money" what I mean here is that they do not understand, nor try to answer the basic question: Where does money come from? How does money appear in the world? To these industrialist business people their unconsidered answer (if they even ask it) is the equivalent of, "It just IS man! It just IS."
Anyway, the bottom line here is that science, particularly physics, medicine, and agricultural sciences are quite positive return on spending.
How does spending $1 "return" more than $1 of economic activity? By anchoring and generating private sector loan activity. All those mortgages, car loans, credit card debt spending, margin loan lending in the stock market, commercial lending and lines of credit --- all that generates more money in the system. One should also add stock valuations here, because stocks represent shares in the actual economic engine that accomplishes the things that the real (utility) economy consists of. As long as stock holders are not forced to sell, valuations can stay far higher than the money supply would allow if all had to be sold tomorrow. (There are predatory parties in the stock markets that seek and take advantage of conditions that force selling of stocks.)
But, as that private market of loans pays off the principal of each loan, the privately created money supply goes down. So, the way we have evolved (and a little designed) our monetary system to work, the Federal spending (and national debt) is the foundation. Shrink that foundation, the nation's economy contracts.
This is an excellent paper from Bank of England's research department.
Of course, there are players in the system that take advantage of contractions to make money by being "anti-cyclical" so there is a constituency for socking it to the economy from time to time to make them rich too. (At the expense of everyone else.)
1. The scientific community has more input into the funding process via peer review of budget proposals and "rotaters" who work for the federal science agencies than virtually any other profession. As such, the current excessive overhead rates directed to NON-science uses in universities and the massive malinvestment in DEI are entirely on the watch of the scientific community. Given how poorly the scientific community has performed its fiduciary duties in this matter, it really has little basis on which to complain when the administration is forced to step in an clean up the mess. As such, I fully support the massive cuts directed at university overhead and DEI related programs and the cuts to federal research agencies. Yes, innocent research will get caught up in the mix, but that is the price of decades of incompetence from the scientific community in these matters.
2. The current scientific system is overly reliant on graduate students and post docs who are taken advantage of and then cast aside when the jobs they trained for do not exist in the real economy. Massively reducing the funding to train graduate students and support post docs is the solution to reducing this oversupply even if it forces researchers o change how they run their labs.
3. The resistance to the Antarctic Ice Breaker demonstrates that the complaints from the scientific community here are based in partisan politics and NOT the best interests of science. NSF has long been criticized for under-funding its polar research abilities and the community has long needed this vessel. Now that it is President Trump agreeing to fund this vessel, the scientific community takes issues with its own long standing request! As with those members of the community who joined in the "March for Science" before President Trump even took office, the clear politicization of science here demonstrate that it is opposition to Trump, not the best interests of science, that is being acted on here. The American people are not fooled by this. Such conduct further undermines the public's belief in the integrity of the science and raises valid questions about whether the scientific community, and its preferred policies, should be supported or given credence at all.
One of the priorities is "building the STEM workforce". There be DEI dragons there.
This is a very important and enlightening review of what actually goes on with federal funding, that is, the back and forth between the White House and Congress. I'm always amused by the panic that ensues when the White House proposes something (and this happens under every president) because what actually ends up happening is not much, rendering all that panic unnecessary.
This essay also identified the real problem with reform: Congress. It doesn't like to reform things, even those things that badly need reforming.
Yeah, like that. Before, it was "building a diverse STEM workforce". All that's changed is the language, but in any case, that's not science. I argued in my essay that NSF started going off the rails when it started funding science education research. Not that the research was necessarily bad, but that it sure didn't improve science education. All the $B spent there and in the Department of Education, and education has gotten worse; meanwhile, some of the science programs floundered. If NSF is going to focus on doing science, how is "building" the STEM workforce doing science? In fact, what does that even mean, operationally? Obviously, on the surface, it means increasing the number of people who are competent to do science, but how?
If the DEI angle is removed, I assume that "building a STEM workforce" means using a large portion of the federal grant money to train PhDs. This is probably already the case. Most of these trainees in fact end up working for the private sector eventually. In this way, federal funding pre-trains highly technical people to work in industry.
The racial disparities in medical research are real. Part of this is that white people sign up to be research subjects in higher numbers. Non-whites often distrust medical researchers due to history and Hollywood. The reality is that the IRB system came about because of evil research like the Tuskegee experiments. But even in the latter 20th century deliberate withholding of treatment from non-whites happened again.
Then there are lying entertainments like the movie "Constant Gardner" that depict pharmaceutical companies doing terrible things. The real story that Constant Gardener was based on, the results of the experimental drug were better than the standard in use. Pharma has not abused people the way that academic researchers have, except in some cut-rate contract research organizations in the third world. And that third-world abuse was not at the direction of the pharma companies that contracted with them. The abuse was due to fraud intended to extract as much money as possible from the pharma firm.
So, there is less known about problems specific to racial groups. The most simple of these is dermatology. White skin it's easier to see dermatological conditions. But there are other major areas that are under-researched. We know that native Americans have higher rates of death from flue and coronaviruses, from the whole cocktail of the Eurasian disease pool. That Eurasian disease pool is why North America's temperate zone is now peopled by everyone else. In the highlands of he Andes where high ultraviolet and low humidity air prevail the people survived. In the lowland 90%+ humidity jungles conditions were also bad for the respiratory enveloped viruses that killed so thoroughly in North America. LIkewise, in the hot, dry, deserts, those viruses did not spread well. Everywhere else, native Americans, due to their tens of thousands of years isolation, depend on vaccinations to survive well.
But that's not what I was talking about. What you're talking about is how people are evaluated during scientific research and, yes, there are problems there. That has nothing to do with "building the workforce", which is the priority I was talking about.
When I see that the absolutely least useful part of the space program (manned expeditions) is not just preserved but PRIORITIZED, I truly wonder about the acumen of the people making these decisions.
I can only hope that the spirit of Bob Park comes thundering down from the Heavens above to give these people a hard shake and a screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???"
Nonsense. Human colonization of space and the solar system is the whole point of space travel. Opening up new worlds and new ways of living.
And you can rest easy. There is a pittance allocated by the Federal Government to humans on the Moon or Mars. The vast majority of funding for it is private.
In a democracy the public needs to be inspired to pay the taxes to support research. Manned space flight serves that purpose. You ignore maintaining the connection to the public at your own peril.
There's a massive assumption in there: that tax money (on the Federal level) should support non-defense research. The root cause of politicization of science is the presence of political government in science.
One could argue that there is little need for a space program without human space flight. The scientific community needs to be disabused of the notion that they have a right to have taxpayers fund their research.
The latter is indeed a valid argument, but if arguendo non-defense space exploration is a proper use of the public fisc, let's at least use the mulcted tax dollars efficiently.
Indeed, crewed space programs have only two modest goals: geopolitical prestige and the human impulse to explore. Neither is designed to accomplish scientific discovery nor to improve the quality of life for humanity. Specifically, NASA's current push to put astronauts on the Moon - and eventually a colony - is not defended by any science driver. Inexpensive rovers and robotic sample-return missions can perform any research for 1/50 the cost.
I'd refer you to the voluminous writing on the topic by the late great Bob Park, a far more articulate person than I ever have been. And since the time he wrote about it, it has only gotten worse with respect to the demands versus payoff for manned versus unmanned space exploration.
Super helpful overview. My own grant at NIH--I'm a clinical psychologist--has been funded without pause. In fact, my request for a no-cost extension was just approved.
After 40 years of working in pure physics and astrophysics, much of it supported by federal funding, I long believed that maintaining current levels of government support was obviously in the best interests of both the United States and scientific progress more broadly.
Reading Danit Finkelstein’s recent piece changed my mind. Using clear quantitative arguments about our society’s actual opportunities, constraints, and competing needs, she presented a compelling case for rethinking the scale and priorities of public science funding.
I now see that academic research in physics and astrophysics is only loosely connected to prospects for beautiful insights and to future technological applications. Worse, it is increasingly burdened by institutional goals rooted in misplaced guilt over past victimhood rather than in the pursuit of truth and discovery. Thank you, Ms. Finkelstein for your analysis.
I meant to say, "Thank you, Ms Sarah, for your analysis". My apologies. Please continue your important work on extremism, hidden assumptions, and both tribal and victimhood predispositions.
There is plenty of stuff I think social scientists SHOULD be studying. But they do not do it. I have made suggestions here before but everyone ignored them. I had more to make in essays I posted here but the editors made me remove them, since "everyone knows" that social sciences are "crap".
I think they are not necessarily nonsense. However, the people in these fields are incompetent for the most part. But, the problems they could study are not necessarily bad problems. They are important problems. It is just that the social scientists do not study important problems in general and they are not interested in studying important problems, so they study garbage instead. They have zero respect from the rest of STEM, which is probably appropriate under the circumstances.
It does not HAVE to be this way. But it is what it is.
Wow reading this essay I was pretty appalled.
If all that happened to the people involved was some trimming of their research dollars, they should consider themselves incredibly lucky.
What a farce.
There is another reason for Congress being generous that is virtually never talked about. It is based on what the only Federal politician in history to say it out loud pointed to --- that the USA can never go broke. Donald Trump said that. Most everyone in Congress knows this, including the grandstanders who get votes by crying the sky is falling over the national debt. Why is this? Because the Federal government owns our central bank. The Federal Reserve bank was the second such central bank in history, which partly explains its name. It was created to replace reserves that were gold and silver (and thus were limited by the arbitrary physical abundance of those elements) with a bank that could create loans out of the "full faith and credit" of the USA.
The first bank to start to figure this out was the Bank of England, around the time of the runup to the American Revolution. JP Morgan helped formalize it around the turn of the 20th century. Note that since then, every other central bank calls themselves a central bank, like t he ECB.
How does this work? There is an accounting identity between credit money (spending) and debt (loan activity). The national debt is, therefore, the foundation money supply that the nation operates on. In the real world, the US usable money supply is less, about 2/3rds of our national debt because of trade imbalance. About 1/3rd of our money is over in Europe supporting those nations which do NOT run deficits commensurate with their economic activity. Check "Eurodollars" to see that number. Yes, we pay the interest on that debt that the rest of the world is using and not paying interest on (at least not directly).
So, what most of Congress knows is that the effect of cutting Federal spending, and the effect of trying to "balance the budget" is to cut the money supply, force an economic contraction (which we call recession or depression) and harm the nation. Most of Congress knows that spending on science is a positive ROI activity for which roughly 2-3 dollars of economic activity are generated for each dollar of spending. Historically, the highest ROI on federal spending was the national highway system (mostly freeways) at about 12X. Defense spending (oops, war spending) is generally a return of 1 or so in peacetime. (But there is contention on that.)
Unfortunately many very intelligent business leaders (cue Elon) develop a "magic money" narrow view because they are like cells in a body relating to blood. Their activity allows them to grab more and more "blood" (meaning money in this metaphor) and this tunnel vision blinds them to what is going on at the system level. By "magic money" what I mean here is that they do not understand, nor try to answer the basic question: Where does money come from? How does money appear in the world? To these industrialist business people their unconsidered answer (if they even ask it) is the equivalent of, "It just IS man! It just IS."
Anyway, the bottom line here is that science, particularly physics, medicine, and agricultural sciences are quite positive return on spending.
How does spending $1 "return" more than $1 of economic activity? By anchoring and generating private sector loan activity. All those mortgages, car loans, credit card debt spending, margin loan lending in the stock market, commercial lending and lines of credit --- all that generates more money in the system. One should also add stock valuations here, because stocks represent shares in the actual economic engine that accomplishes the things that the real (utility) economy consists of. As long as stock holders are not forced to sell, valuations can stay far higher than the money supply would allow if all had to be sold tomorrow. (There are predatory parties in the stock markets that seek and take advantage of conditions that force selling of stocks.)
But, as that private market of loans pays off the principal of each loan, the privately created money supply goes down. So, the way we have evolved (and a little designed) our monetary system to work, the Federal spending (and national debt) is the foundation. Shrink that foundation, the nation's economy contracts.
This is an excellent paper from Bank of England's research department.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy
Of course, there are players in the system that take advantage of contractions to make money by being "anti-cyclical" so there is a constituency for socking it to the economy from time to time to make them rich too. (At the expense of everyone else.)
A few quick thoughts:
1. The scientific community has more input into the funding process via peer review of budget proposals and "rotaters" who work for the federal science agencies than virtually any other profession. As such, the current excessive overhead rates directed to NON-science uses in universities and the massive malinvestment in DEI are entirely on the watch of the scientific community. Given how poorly the scientific community has performed its fiduciary duties in this matter, it really has little basis on which to complain when the administration is forced to step in an clean up the mess. As such, I fully support the massive cuts directed at university overhead and DEI related programs and the cuts to federal research agencies. Yes, innocent research will get caught up in the mix, but that is the price of decades of incompetence from the scientific community in these matters.
2. The current scientific system is overly reliant on graduate students and post docs who are taken advantage of and then cast aside when the jobs they trained for do not exist in the real economy. Massively reducing the funding to train graduate students and support post docs is the solution to reducing this oversupply even if it forces researchers o change how they run their labs.
3. The resistance to the Antarctic Ice Breaker demonstrates that the complaints from the scientific community here are based in partisan politics and NOT the best interests of science. NSF has long been criticized for under-funding its polar research abilities and the community has long needed this vessel. Now that it is President Trump agreeing to fund this vessel, the scientific community takes issues with its own long standing request! As with those members of the community who joined in the "March for Science" before President Trump even took office, the clear politicization of science here demonstrate that it is opposition to Trump, not the best interests of science, that is being acted on here. The American people are not fooled by this. Such conduct further undermines the public's belief in the integrity of the science and raises valid questions about whether the scientific community, and its preferred policies, should be supported or given credence at all.
One of the priorities is "building the STEM workforce". There be DEI dragons there.
This is a very important and enlightening review of what actually goes on with federal funding, that is, the back and forth between the White House and Congress. I'm always amused by the panic that ensues when the White House proposes something (and this happens under every president) because what actually ends up happening is not much, rendering all that panic unnecessary.
This essay also identified the real problem with reform: Congress. It doesn't like to reform things, even those things that badly need reforming.
Do you mean like DEI affirmative action related to race or gender ?
Yeah, like that. Before, it was "building a diverse STEM workforce". All that's changed is the language, but in any case, that's not science. I argued in my essay that NSF started going off the rails when it started funding science education research. Not that the research was necessarily bad, but that it sure didn't improve science education. All the $B spent there and in the Department of Education, and education has gotten worse; meanwhile, some of the science programs floundered. If NSF is going to focus on doing science, how is "building" the STEM workforce doing science? In fact, what does that even mean, operationally? Obviously, on the surface, it means increasing the number of people who are competent to do science, but how?
If the DEI angle is removed, I assume that "building a STEM workforce" means using a large portion of the federal grant money to train PhDs. This is probably already the case. Most of these trainees in fact end up working for the private sector eventually. In this way, federal funding pre-trains highly technical people to work in industry.
The racial disparities in medical research are real. Part of this is that white people sign up to be research subjects in higher numbers. Non-whites often distrust medical researchers due to history and Hollywood. The reality is that the IRB system came about because of evil research like the Tuskegee experiments. But even in the latter 20th century deliberate withholding of treatment from non-whites happened again.
Then there are lying entertainments like the movie "Constant Gardner" that depict pharmaceutical companies doing terrible things. The real story that Constant Gardener was based on, the results of the experimental drug were better than the standard in use. Pharma has not abused people the way that academic researchers have, except in some cut-rate contract research organizations in the third world. And that third-world abuse was not at the direction of the pharma companies that contracted with them. The abuse was due to fraud intended to extract as much money as possible from the pharma firm.
So, there is less known about problems specific to racial groups. The most simple of these is dermatology. White skin it's easier to see dermatological conditions. But there are other major areas that are under-researched. We know that native Americans have higher rates of death from flue and coronaviruses, from the whole cocktail of the Eurasian disease pool. That Eurasian disease pool is why North America's temperate zone is now peopled by everyone else. In the highlands of he Andes where high ultraviolet and low humidity air prevail the people survived. In the lowland 90%+ humidity jungles conditions were also bad for the respiratory enveloped viruses that killed so thoroughly in North America. LIkewise, in the hot, dry, deserts, those viruses did not spread well. Everywhere else, native Americans, due to their tens of thousands of years isolation, depend on vaccinations to survive well.
But that's not what I was talking about. What you're talking about is how people are evaluated during scientific research and, yes, there are problems there. That has nothing to do with "building the workforce", which is the priority I was talking about.
When I see that the absolutely least useful part of the space program (manned expeditions) is not just preserved but PRIORITIZED, I truly wonder about the acumen of the people making these decisions.
I can only hope that the spirit of Bob Park comes thundering down from the Heavens above to give these people a hard shake and a screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???"
Nonsense. Human colonization of space and the solar system is the whole point of space travel. Opening up new worlds and new ways of living.
And you can rest easy. There is a pittance allocated by the Federal Government to humans on the Moon or Mars. The vast majority of funding for it is private.
In a democracy the public needs to be inspired to pay the taxes to support research. Manned space flight serves that purpose. You ignore maintaining the connection to the public at your own peril.
There's a massive assumption in there: that tax money (on the Federal level) should support non-defense research. The root cause of politicization of science is the presence of political government in science.
One could argue that there is little need for a space program without human space flight. The scientific community needs to be disabused of the notion that they have a right to have taxpayers fund their research.
The latter is indeed a valid argument, but if arguendo non-defense space exploration is a proper use of the public fisc, let's at least use the mulcted tax dollars efficiently.
Indeed, crewed space programs have only two modest goals: geopolitical prestige and the human impulse to explore. Neither is designed to accomplish scientific discovery nor to improve the quality of life for humanity. Specifically, NASA's current push to put astronauts on the Moon - and eventually a colony - is not defended by any science driver. Inexpensive rovers and robotic sample-return missions can perform any research for 1/50 the cost.
Your comment left me with more questions. Can you give us more?
I'd refer you to the voluminous writing on the topic by the late great Bob Park, a far more articulate person than I ever have been. And since the time he wrote about it, it has only gotten worse with respect to the demands versus payoff for manned versus unmanned space exploration.
Here he is, 20 years ahead of his time:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/opinion/the-dark-side-of-the-moon.html
I intensely dislike Trump, but at the same time cannot say that in some ways Social Psychology has brought it upon itself.
Would we miss the 30% of Social Psych that is deemed replicable?
Will the cut in funding mean focus on what is truly important and useful?
Who knows. Probably not.
Super helpful overview. My own grant at NIH--I'm a clinical psychologist--has been funded without pause. In fact, my request for a no-cost extension was just approved.
After 40 years of working in pure physics and astrophysics, much of it supported by federal funding, I long believed that maintaining current levels of government support was obviously in the best interests of both the United States and scientific progress more broadly.
Reading Danit Finkelstein’s recent piece changed my mind. Using clear quantitative arguments about our society’s actual opportunities, constraints, and competing needs, she presented a compelling case for rethinking the scale and priorities of public science funding.
I now see that academic research in physics and astrophysics is only loosely connected to prospects for beautiful insights and to future technological applications. Worse, it is increasingly burdened by institutional goals rooted in misplaced guilt over past victimhood rather than in the pursuit of truth and discovery. Thank you, Ms. Finkelstein for your analysis.
I meant to say, "Thank you, Ms Sarah, for your analysis". My apologies. Please continue your important work on extremism, hidden assumptions, and both tribal and victimhood predispositions.