I mostly support the amendment taking some $ from the increased NSF to increase DoE R&D funding. My experience is that DoE programs in energy efficiency and advanced manufacturing are more engineering /application focused than NSF. I think that some of the big developments will need some patient money to cross the chasm to market-ready technologies. I think that some of the DoE programs are better set up than NSF to support those pre-commercial developments.
Just wandering in to agree with a lot of other commenters that for every single complaint about the current grant allocation system, the one and only solution is more money. There is no royal road to funding good projects. Research sucks, most of it doesn't work out, and you have no idea which projects or which scientists will or won't work out and you're delusional if you think you can do much better than what everyone is already trying their hardest to do. Hovering over some stingy bit of money and desperately trying to send it only to the "most deserving" scientists is just like hovering over a few college admissions spots and trying to admit only the most deserving students, or hovering over a few parcels of land and trying to allow only the optimal apartment buildings, or...we've been over this sort of thing a million times on this Substack. You want to fund more good projects, then fund many more projects, and eventually a few of them will be good. Stop looking for a cheat code.
On a more frivolous note, I would just like everyone to know that the NSF grant submission/administration website is the worst thing in the world. I do not understand how it can have been designed without intentional malice. Fixing that website would increase every American researcher's productivity by numerous hours a year even if you changed nothing else about the system.
That's not really true. Many projects begin with a high probability of success in that they are likely to answer the questions that have been posed. It's just that the answers are not known ahead of time.
I agree the ambitions shrinking is bad and more money for science is great! I think ARRA roughly doubled NSF funding for a year and they had no trouble finding worthy projects to fund. I however don’t think it’s a big issue that some of the money went to DOE labs, which I think are doing some of the same technical work anyways that the bill envisioned. Also, with regard to the total amount of funding, I think there is also the issue of where in the research/development chain the funding is going to. If the funding represents primarily an increase in basic research funding that is very good because that is the kind of research that is least likely to be funded by the private sector. If however the funding is split more evenly between research and development I think this is much less good. Also, just because Congress authorized a certain amount of research in this bill doesn’t mean Biden couldn’t get the federal bureaucracy to allocate some more money to research than it already does, or to set research priorities that are particularly worthwhile. He also has the power to tackle some of the science bureaucracy issues you point out, though paradigm change is hard. And I hope with the return of earmarks that Congress becomes less interested in individual spending decisions and more interested in the broader outcomes government achieves. There was a real move in the last half of the 20th century to small ball Congressional thinking, and generally much less ambitious legislating. A Senator should be criticized, not praised, for worrying about $84,000 in spending. Lastly, I’d like the government to do some more prizes where the reward is received once the discovery has been made. This could incentivize a broader set of folks to look into important problems, and it has the benefit of avoiding the grant bureaucracy you rightly criticize.
I found this post incredibly frustrating. Matt would make a point and I would ready my devastating response(*) in my head and then read the next paragraph and he has fully met my objection. This happened several times, to my irritation.
Thoughtful, well-reasoned posts are the bane of my existence.
A whole bunch of US science funding mechanisms were created either at the beginning of the Cold War (like NSF) or immediately after Sputnik appeared to show that the USSR was ahead in science and engineering (DARPA). It's not surprising that the China rivalry is also driving US science funding.
I'm interested in these "secret Congress" dynamics. I live in Washington State where we just wrapped up our state legislative session. By all accounts it was pretty big year for the legislature and a number of big, and contentious things got over the finish line: a cap and trade bill; a new capital gains tax; and several police reform measures.
The session was also conducted virtually and didn't allow for the normal level of lobbying and advocacy and general daylight being cast on the things working their way through the process. It definitely wasn't a "secret" legislative session, but the relative productivity of the legislature seems like a real violation of the idea that big stuff doesn't happen without pressure, lobbying, advocacy, and lots of visibility.
I'm curious if similar dynamics played out in other state legislatures? Did others do things 100% virtually? Did this lower the visibility of what was going on, and in turn yield surprisingly substantive outcomes? Is my hunch about this completely wrong?
On grants: besides the problems described here, the big problem imo with NSF (and other!) grant-making procedures is the amount of work that is spent applying for them. Academics spend a large portion of their time applying for grants, and that in turn reduces the amount of time they spend doing the research the grants were supposed to support. Since NSF grants tend to be very competitive, this means that every grant made induces a lot of science *not* to happen, as for each scientific project funded, many scientists have been incentivised to spend a large amount of time not doing science.
(This isn't just an NSF or just an American thing, of course, it's a product of the incentives and limited perspective of grant-making bodies. But the NSF is a really notable case.)
Thanks for taking on a topic close to my heart. The politics you detail reminds me of Bismark's comment about sausage making, and I try not to think about it. Speaking as a senior biomedical researcher wholly dependent on public support, I strongly disagree with those (including some you cite) who extoll ground-breaking paradigm-shifting "breakthroughs" over mundane incremental science. IMHO science IS incremental, and it is precisely for that reason that it has been so successful in advancing over the past 2 centuries.
From my own perspective, I have only two problems with NSF: first, that they don't have as much money as I would like, and second, that they are too heavily influenced by progressive shibboleths.
the one depressing aspect of the marked up Endless Frontiers Act that you didn’t hit on, but that gut punched me, was that Maria Cantwell (D-WA) went to bat for Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and added an amendment that prevented NASA from just awarding SpaceX the Lunar Lander contract for the SLS / Artemis program.
Whatever you think of Bezos or Musk, it’s hard to argue that SpaceX hasn’t wooped the entire private space industries butts when it comes to putting up or shutting up.
SpaceX formed about the same time as Blue Origin did, beat countless odds, and has put up many more times than it has been shut up…landing rockets on their tail end, reusing them up to 10x, sending humans to the space station on reusable rockets, etc. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has yet to even put a rocket in orbit.
SpaceX has taken 60% off the launch market by underbidding everyone else for launches by tens of millions of dollars. Even Boeing and Lockheed’s partnership (United Launch Alliance) has failed to compete…and now those companies are leveraging lobbying connections to basically get in on the action at the expense of NASA’s program timeline, etc.
A lot has been written about it, but the fundamental structure of companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Blue Origin is just not capable of competing with a company structured like SpaceX. And instead of restructuring themselves and learning the lessons that SpaceX has taught everyone, people like Jeff Bezos just keep hiring the same old people to run things exactly as Lockheed and Boeing did, and he’s getting the same result.
Isn't she going to bat for Boeing, not BO, given that Boeing is based out of WA?
In any case, while Old Space's profligacy is well-documented, SpaceX will have eradicated from the market anyone who's not conducting reusable launches within ~5-10 years, so I'm not too worried about it. Sooner or later the savings will win out.
well, Blue Origin is headquartered in WA and the amendment gives just enough money for NASA to accept the next lowest big (BOs) and basically mandates that they do so…
The worst part is it mandates all sorts of things that ultimately delay the project many years and cost even more millions of dollars to do things like more testing at Stennis Space Center in MS that NASA doesn’t even say it needs to do.
They can flush a few billion more down the tubes for the next decade or so, but it doesn't really matter in the long run IMO. Dread it, run from it, SpaceX still arrives, and the rest of the industry will have to adapt or die. Still, definitely frustrating.
well, it’s the needless delays in the projects that only make them more likely to be cancelled all together that’s the real tail risk. It really isn’t about SpaceX, other than SpaceX proving that it can be done at much much lower cost, and be done better, to boot…
As a practicing scientist, I always find complaints about true innovation being unfundable in the current system dramatically overstated. As Matt alludes to, we all know that while proposals need to be well grounded in preliminary data and existing ideas, they are not rigid contracts. Moreover, again as Matt realizes, for every brilliant underappreciated idea, there’s not just one, but more like five bad ideas that absolutely should not be funded. I probably have that many before lunch!
A "people, not projects” approach sounds great if you can accurately identify those people who will consistently produce great science and not go off on too many wasteful tangents. But you can already guess that all that will happen is one set of gatekeepers (other scientists serving on review committees) is replaced by another, more opaque one (unaccountable administrators). And before you know it, the “usual suspects” will be getting funded and entire groups of people will be locked out (however you want to define them).
The answer to scientists not getting great ideas funded is so incredibly simple: just fund more proposals, as Kevin also points out below. Typical funding rates are about 10-20%, but no one on a review panel will say that means 80-90% of the proposals were not worth funding. So we spend a lot of time generating ideas, refining them, cutting them up and repackaging them, and shopping them around to different agencies. And while some of that undoubtably makes the science better, a lot of it is wasted time.
One more point: I know some of the projects called out by the Golden Fleece awards. I’ll just say that while politicians getting involved at this level is indeed kind of silly, they aren’t completely wrong either.
And one can cite the Roentgen/Meitner et al cases, but doing science has gotten a *lot* more expensive. It's getting a lot harder to transform physics while working as a Swiss patent clerk.
I'm glad that CERN exists and we can make these breakthroughs in pure science, but am I sad that the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled here? I don't know. That was a pretty hefty price tag for addressing some pretty abstract questions about fundamental physics.
In the case of the LHC, it's pretty much a boondoggle though. Higgs was expected, yes, but nothing else of note has resulted. And there's no good reason to expect new physics from accelerators that can currently be built by humans now or in the future. It's not even just the waste of money though, but worse, the waste of smart people doing experiments that will very likely have no useful output and developing theories with no basis in reality. Sure, you never know until you try, but that's not enough to justify thousands of people-years and billions of dollars. More likely, people can do much better work if forced to go in different directions than just trying bigger and bigger accelerators. For example, I would place my bets on neutrino experiments producing novel results in the next century.
It would also be nice if science funding weren’t so feast or famine. When there’s a new batch of funding everything is fine but when the funding gets cut a bunch of people leave the field permanently.
This is what keeps me awake at night - how to keep paying my people if one of our grants doesn't get renewed/replaced with something else. And it typically takes 1-2 years to get even a really good idea funded.
I agree with these points but I can’t square that it’s all a funding approach. Sure, that’s the point of the political aspect that’s being reported on.
Yet, the rat race of tenure plays a role here too. Everyone has to chase funding/pubs via what the gatekeepers want. Grind out a few absolute garbage papers and commit a few pedagogical crimes graduating PhDs. By the time you get tenure you’re so ingrained into this system that real innovation is for all intents and purposes a distant dream
I just finished the Walter Isaacson book on the development of CRISPR. I dunno, but that development, along with that of inventing mRNA vaccines, the huge improvement in renewable energy economics etc etc make me wonder if we're not doing all that badly.
Maybe instead of the "Golden Fleece" we should be thinking about the "Golden Egg," as in be careful about killing geese.
It's always easy retrospectively to point to what should have gotten more support early on; I'm not sure that's an indictment of the whole system, nor am I even sure what you're proposing. If it's more money for a select few, well, I don't know how you decide who they are and how you can be sure the ones you're locking out don't have even better ideas if only given space to develop them.
Interestingly, she cites HHMI funding but nothing from NIH for that work, although I'm sure she had funding from them as well for other stuff. But even without her, it was going to happen. Feng Zhang was publishing on it around the same time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3795411/
He cites an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, showing that the usual funding sources also knew this was a good direction in which to go.
My point about rethinking how we fund scientific research is to acknowledge that we may not be doing too badly overall (without emphasizing any necessary NIH--> CRISPR link) and to be careful not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And just to dwell on CRISPR a moment more, I suspect that absent the overall supportive environment that NIH funding creates in the field, CRISPR development would have taken a lot longer.
Ah, sorry, I misread you! Yes, I agree that overall, it's working pretty well. I point to the mRNA vaccines as a good example of this, as it's been 2-3 decades of solid single-investigator work from many labs that allowed us to accumulate sufficient knowledge to make this almost trivially simple now.
"Overall, I do not think of myself as a “China hawk” or really much of a national security hawk at all. By that, I mean that I’m not really into bombs and aircraft carriers and spending $800 billion on a global military presence that we then turn around and call “defense.”"
So, the standard argument is that this is the reason that we're wealthy, though, right? Fiscal & military dominance have traditionally gone hand-in-hand for great powers throughout history- I don't think any country/empire ever had the largest economy without also having the pre-eminent military. The reason we're the reserve currency of the world and can run these massive deficits is all the aircraft carriers and keeping the sea lanes open and such.
If we weren't the reserve currency and couldn't run absolutely massive deficits, our social spending would have be to waaayyy cut back. Like, our military is just one of five, almost equally sized spokes of our federal budget, plus the sixth spoke is Social Security which is quite a bit larger https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-04/56324-CBO-2019-budget-infographic.pdf We spend roughly the same amount of money just on healthcare for the elderly as we do the world's most powerful military, a fun fact which I find almost no one knows.
I dunno, sorry for the side rant, I just think it's shortsighted when I see folks decrying the amount of money spent on the military, or the general idea of US dominance. There's a direct line between that and being super-wealthy!
"I don't think any country/empire ever had the largest economy without also having the pre-eminent military"
The USA had the largest economy in the world by no later than 1890, and plausibly a decade or more earlier than that.
Exactly when the US military became pre-eminent is a difficult question to answer, but certainly in the way that other countries respond to it, it's probably some point during WWII. It's certainly not before the end of WWI (you could make a case for it starting with the collapse of the German army in August-November 1918) and it had certainly happened by the end of the Cold War.
But there's at least 30 years of the US having the biggest economy in the world and a tiny and insignificant military - ie until the US entered WWI in March 1917.
Paul Kennedy's classic "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" makes exactly the opposite thesis from your "standard argument", that is that countries become rich first and militarily powerful secondly and that economic decline leads to military decline. I would certainly have thought that Kennedy is the standard position.
The US had a tiny standing military, but immense latent military capacity thanks to its size, wealth, and (most importantly) industrial base, so it's a little hard to say that the WWI/inter-war US truly was weak militarily.
Specifically though, reserve currency status is linked to being the world's pre-eminent military in every analysis I've ever read. We could be wealthy without the reserve currency, but to my understanding we probably couldn't run the absolutely massive deficits that we do now.
To wit, I believe we took over reserve status from the Brits post-WW2- when our military dominance was unquestioned. So you can see the clear connection. To what Matt was saying (and I see a lot of other people out there saying)- we wouldn't really be 'saving' money by lopping some of the military budget down, the loss of status would cause the markets to freak out about our (unprecedented) deficits, we'd have to pay vastly more to service our debt, we'd probably have to start cutting Social Security & Medicare pretty quickly. In other words- no, whatever you do, don't mess with pre-eminent military status thinking that you're going to save a buck in the budget, it's the opposite
>>>So, the standard argument is that this is the reason that we're wealthy, though, right? Fiscal & military dominance have traditionally gone hand-in-hand for great powers throughout history<<<
No, I don't think the "standard argument" is that the United States is wealthy because it's militarily dominant. I'm pretty sure the causation is the exact opposite: the country's powerful military is feasible only because the country is rich. Indeed the US became wealthy (and a large economy by world standards) before it became militarily powerful).
Most of your individual points made sense to me, but I'm not sure that I follow the overall argument. Are you basically saying our "wealth" gives us the ability to take care of the elderly and have a huge military, or is it the other way around, and those things make us wealthy? Or just that you'd always expect them to go hand in hand? If it's this last one, that might be true, but I don't see why it needs to be true in the future
I think if you're rich enough then you can spend $800 billion per year on the military without it becoming a huge flashpoint. DoD is currently around 3.3% of GDP. In 1967, it was 9.4%
I think one can argue we still spend too much on DoD, but historically, we're at pretty small parts of the GDP.
In my field, astronomy, I think it's rare that transformative research is blocked because of the review process for grants. And I think it's unlikely that tinkering with the review process will significantly reduce the chances of transformative work going unfunded.
In astronomy, breakthroughs are driven by technological advances in telescopes, and those advances are limited by funding. So if you want to increase the number of breakthroughs in astronomy, you should increase the funding levels for the research infrastructure (telescopes and the labs that build their instruments). Meanwhile, if you want to promote more good research in general and train more young scientists, you should increase the funding levels for the grant programs at the NSF, NASA, etc. There are plenty of good proposals that get rejected because of the limited funding available.
In the context of a world where uncontroversial bills can pass through regular order like this, I don't think a watering down of ambitions like you saw with Endless Frontier is necessarily the end of the world. It might actually be a good thing! Some parts of this bill will work and others won't. If you think you'll get a second crack at this once we've learned from our experience, the rest of the money can be more appropriately targeted. I don't personally think it's a good idea to just throw $100 billion dollars at the NSF as it stands IF you believe congress can return to this issue and finish the job.
I think it's a consequence of the omnibus/reconciliation world of legislating where every law feels the need to 'solve' whatever problem it is addressing in full and in perpetuity. You see that with the ARP, which objectively has a TON of wasted and misdirected money in it. But it is defended correctly on the grounds that it is 'better to do too much than too little.' Left unsaid here is the assumption that you only get one shot at it. Obviously it would actually be much better to do too little and then a month later to do the right amount while taking into account what worked and what didn't.
If the Chinese ambassador had carefully designed an amendment to utterly undermine the purpose of the act it would be the amendment that clipped out $5 billion to give to the National Labs--the are so far removed from the work of innovation and economic competitiveness they may as well be located on the moon.
I consider myself quite lucky have worked at Fermilab pre-CERN go live so when it was still the top accelerator. Also interested in your critique of the National Labs. Obviously I'm a fan.
BTW and just on the innovation side ... in what other commercial application does a permanent magnet rail accelerator get built - which necessitated superconductivity? Or a proton accelerator for cancer treatment since you need the Linac as a starting point? I'm sure the box super computer design would have emerged organically but on a later timeline. Same for www.fnal.gov.
Yeah. I remember loving Obama's "You didn't build that." speech for exactly these reasons. Bleeding edge R&D just can't close business cases. The probability of failure is too high for private capital hurdle rates.
I mostly support the amendment taking some $ from the increased NSF to increase DoE R&D funding. My experience is that DoE programs in energy efficiency and advanced manufacturing are more engineering /application focused than NSF. I think that some of the big developments will need some patient money to cross the chasm to market-ready technologies. I think that some of the DoE programs are better set up than NSF to support those pre-commercial developments.
Just wandering in to agree with a lot of other commenters that for every single complaint about the current grant allocation system, the one and only solution is more money. There is no royal road to funding good projects. Research sucks, most of it doesn't work out, and you have no idea which projects or which scientists will or won't work out and you're delusional if you think you can do much better than what everyone is already trying their hardest to do. Hovering over some stingy bit of money and desperately trying to send it only to the "most deserving" scientists is just like hovering over a few college admissions spots and trying to admit only the most deserving students, or hovering over a few parcels of land and trying to allow only the optimal apartment buildings, or...we've been over this sort of thing a million times on this Substack. You want to fund more good projects, then fund many more projects, and eventually a few of them will be good. Stop looking for a cheat code.
On a more frivolous note, I would just like everyone to know that the NSF grant submission/administration website is the worst thing in the world. I do not understand how it can have been designed without intentional malice. Fixing that website would increase every American researcher's productivity by numerous hours a year even if you changed nothing else about the system.
That's not really true. Many projects begin with a high probability of success in that they are likely to answer the questions that have been posed. It's just that the answers are not known ahead of time.
I agree the ambitions shrinking is bad and more money for science is great! I think ARRA roughly doubled NSF funding for a year and they had no trouble finding worthy projects to fund. I however don’t think it’s a big issue that some of the money went to DOE labs, which I think are doing some of the same technical work anyways that the bill envisioned. Also, with regard to the total amount of funding, I think there is also the issue of where in the research/development chain the funding is going to. If the funding represents primarily an increase in basic research funding that is very good because that is the kind of research that is least likely to be funded by the private sector. If however the funding is split more evenly between research and development I think this is much less good. Also, just because Congress authorized a certain amount of research in this bill doesn’t mean Biden couldn’t get the federal bureaucracy to allocate some more money to research than it already does, or to set research priorities that are particularly worthwhile. He also has the power to tackle some of the science bureaucracy issues you point out, though paradigm change is hard. And I hope with the return of earmarks that Congress becomes less interested in individual spending decisions and more interested in the broader outcomes government achieves. There was a real move in the last half of the 20th century to small ball Congressional thinking, and generally much less ambitious legislating. A Senator should be criticized, not praised, for worrying about $84,000 in spending. Lastly, I’d like the government to do some more prizes where the reward is received once the discovery has been made. This could incentivize a broader set of folks to look into important problems, and it has the benefit of avoiding the grant bureaucracy you rightly criticize.
I found this post incredibly frustrating. Matt would make a point and I would ready my devastating response(*) in my head and then read the next paragraph and he has fully met my objection. This happened several times, to my irritation.
Thoughtful, well-reasoned posts are the bane of my existence.
(*) Including googling "Golden Fleece Award."
A whole bunch of US science funding mechanisms were created either at the beginning of the Cold War (like NSF) or immediately after Sputnik appeared to show that the USSR was ahead in science and engineering (DARPA). It's not surprising that the China rivalry is also driving US science funding.
I'm interested in these "secret Congress" dynamics. I live in Washington State where we just wrapped up our state legislative session. By all accounts it was pretty big year for the legislature and a number of big, and contentious things got over the finish line: a cap and trade bill; a new capital gains tax; and several police reform measures.
The session was also conducted virtually and didn't allow for the normal level of lobbying and advocacy and general daylight being cast on the things working their way through the process. It definitely wasn't a "secret" legislative session, but the relative productivity of the legislature seems like a real violation of the idea that big stuff doesn't happen without pressure, lobbying, advocacy, and lots of visibility.
I'm curious if similar dynamics played out in other state legislatures? Did others do things 100% virtually? Did this lower the visibility of what was going on, and in turn yield surprisingly substantive outcomes? Is my hunch about this completely wrong?
On grants: besides the problems described here, the big problem imo with NSF (and other!) grant-making procedures is the amount of work that is spent applying for them. Academics spend a large portion of their time applying for grants, and that in turn reduces the amount of time they spend doing the research the grants were supposed to support. Since NSF grants tend to be very competitive, this means that every grant made induces a lot of science *not* to happen, as for each scientific project funded, many scientists have been incentivised to spend a large amount of time not doing science.
This would also be ameliorated by increasing the amount of money and hence decreasing the level of competitiveness!
(This isn't just an NSF or just an American thing, of course, it's a product of the incentives and limited perspective of grant-making bodies. But the NSF is a really notable case.)
Thanks for taking on a topic close to my heart. The politics you detail reminds me of Bismark's comment about sausage making, and I try not to think about it. Speaking as a senior biomedical researcher wholly dependent on public support, I strongly disagree with those (including some you cite) who extoll ground-breaking paradigm-shifting "breakthroughs" over mundane incremental science. IMHO science IS incremental, and it is precisely for that reason that it has been so successful in advancing over the past 2 centuries.
From my own perspective, I have only two problems with NSF: first, that they don't have as much money as I would like, and second, that they are too heavily influenced by progressive shibboleths.
the one depressing aspect of the marked up Endless Frontiers Act that you didn’t hit on, but that gut punched me, was that Maria Cantwell (D-WA) went to bat for Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and added an amendment that prevented NASA from just awarding SpaceX the Lunar Lander contract for the SLS / Artemis program.
Whatever you think of Bezos or Musk, it’s hard to argue that SpaceX hasn’t wooped the entire private space industries butts when it comes to putting up or shutting up.
SpaceX formed about the same time as Blue Origin did, beat countless odds, and has put up many more times than it has been shut up…landing rockets on their tail end, reusing them up to 10x, sending humans to the space station on reusable rockets, etc. Meanwhile, Blue Origin has yet to even put a rocket in orbit.
SpaceX has taken 60% off the launch market by underbidding everyone else for launches by tens of millions of dollars. Even Boeing and Lockheed’s partnership (United Launch Alliance) has failed to compete…and now those companies are leveraging lobbying connections to basically get in on the action at the expense of NASA’s program timeline, etc.
A lot has been written about it, but the fundamental structure of companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Blue Origin is just not capable of competing with a company structured like SpaceX. And instead of restructuring themselves and learning the lessons that SpaceX has taught everyone, people like Jeff Bezos just keep hiring the same old people to run things exactly as Lockheed and Boeing did, and he’s getting the same result.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/congress-fires-warning-shot-at-nasa-after-spacex-moon-lander-award/?amp=1
Isn't she going to bat for Boeing, not BO, given that Boeing is based out of WA?
In any case, while Old Space's profligacy is well-documented, SpaceX will have eradicated from the market anyone who's not conducting reusable launches within ~5-10 years, so I'm not too worried about it. Sooner or later the savings will win out.
well, Blue Origin is headquartered in WA and the amendment gives just enough money for NASA to accept the next lowest big (BOs) and basically mandates that they do so…
The worst part is it mandates all sorts of things that ultimately delay the project many years and cost even more millions of dollars to do things like more testing at Stennis Space Center in MS that NASA doesn’t even say it needs to do.
They can flush a few billion more down the tubes for the next decade or so, but it doesn't really matter in the long run IMO. Dread it, run from it, SpaceX still arrives, and the rest of the industry will have to adapt or die. Still, definitely frustrating.
well, it’s the needless delays in the projects that only make them more likely to be cancelled all together that’s the real tail risk. It really isn’t about SpaceX, other than SpaceX proving that it can be done at much much lower cost, and be done better, to boot…
Uh oh...did a congressman tack on a rider to the bill that includes $30 million of taxpayer funds for the perverted arts?
Penis sculpture doesn't make itself
As a practicing scientist, I always find complaints about true innovation being unfundable in the current system dramatically overstated. As Matt alludes to, we all know that while proposals need to be well grounded in preliminary data and existing ideas, they are not rigid contracts. Moreover, again as Matt realizes, for every brilliant underappreciated idea, there’s not just one, but more like five bad ideas that absolutely should not be funded. I probably have that many before lunch!
A "people, not projects” approach sounds great if you can accurately identify those people who will consistently produce great science and not go off on too many wasteful tangents. But you can already guess that all that will happen is one set of gatekeepers (other scientists serving on review committees) is replaced by another, more opaque one (unaccountable administrators). And before you know it, the “usual suspects” will be getting funded and entire groups of people will be locked out (however you want to define them).
The answer to scientists not getting great ideas funded is so incredibly simple: just fund more proposals, as Kevin also points out below. Typical funding rates are about 10-20%, but no one on a review panel will say that means 80-90% of the proposals were not worth funding. So we spend a lot of time generating ideas, refining them, cutting them up and repackaging them, and shopping them around to different agencies. And while some of that undoubtably makes the science better, a lot of it is wasted time.
One more point: I know some of the projects called out by the Golden Fleece awards. I’ll just say that while politicians getting involved at this level is indeed kind of silly, they aren’t completely wrong either.
And one can cite the Roentgen/Meitner et al cases, but doing science has gotten a *lot* more expensive. It's getting a lot harder to transform physics while working as a Swiss patent clerk.
I'm glad that CERN exists and we can make these breakthroughs in pure science, but am I sad that the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled here? I don't know. That was a pretty hefty price tag for addressing some pretty abstract questions about fundamental physics.
In the case of the LHC, it's pretty much a boondoggle though. Higgs was expected, yes, but nothing else of note has resulted. And there's no good reason to expect new physics from accelerators that can currently be built by humans now or in the future. It's not even just the waste of money though, but worse, the waste of smart people doing experiments that will very likely have no useful output and developing theories with no basis in reality. Sure, you never know until you try, but that's not enough to justify thousands of people-years and billions of dollars. More likely, people can do much better work if forced to go in different directions than just trying bigger and bigger accelerators. For example, I would place my bets on neutrino experiments producing novel results in the next century.
Sabine Hossenfelder has been on this beat for a while now: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your [science]. :)
It would also be nice if science funding weren’t so feast or famine. When there’s a new batch of funding everything is fine but when the funding gets cut a bunch of people leave the field permanently.
This is what keeps me awake at night - how to keep paying my people if one of our grants doesn't get renewed/replaced with something else. And it typically takes 1-2 years to get even a really good idea funded.
I agree with these points but I can’t square that it’s all a funding approach. Sure, that’s the point of the political aspect that’s being reported on.
Yet, the rat race of tenure plays a role here too. Everyone has to chase funding/pubs via what the gatekeepers want. Grind out a few absolute garbage papers and commit a few pedagogical crimes graduating PhDs. By the time you get tenure you’re so ingrained into this system that real innovation is for all intents and purposes a distant dream
All I can say is that while that may be true for some, that hasn't been my experience at all.
I just finished the Walter Isaacson book on the development of CRISPR. I dunno, but that development, along with that of inventing mRNA vaccines, the huge improvement in renewable energy economics etc etc make me wonder if we're not doing all that badly.
Maybe instead of the "Golden Fleece" we should be thinking about the "Golden Egg," as in be careful about killing geese.
It's always easy retrospectively to point to what should have gotten more support early on; I'm not sure that's an indictment of the whole system, nor am I even sure what you're proposing. If it's more money for a select few, well, I don't know how you decide who they are and how you can be sure the ones you're locking out don't have even better ideas if only given space to develop them.
I checked Doudna's 2012 Science paper on CRISPR: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6286148/
Interestingly, she cites HHMI funding but nothing from NIH for that work, although I'm sure she had funding from them as well for other stuff. But even without her, it was going to happen. Feng Zhang was publishing on it around the same time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3795411/
He cites an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, showing that the usual funding sources also knew this was a good direction in which to go.
My point about rethinking how we fund scientific research is to acknowledge that we may not be doing too badly overall (without emphasizing any necessary NIH--> CRISPR link) and to be careful not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And just to dwell on CRISPR a moment more, I suspect that absent the overall supportive environment that NIH funding creates in the field, CRISPR development would have taken a lot longer.
Ah, sorry, I misread you! Yes, I agree that overall, it's working pretty well. I point to the mRNA vaccines as a good example of this, as it's been 2-3 decades of solid single-investigator work from many labs that allowed us to accumulate sufficient knowledge to make this almost trivially simple now.
"Overall, I do not think of myself as a “China hawk” or really much of a national security hawk at all. By that, I mean that I’m not really into bombs and aircraft carriers and spending $800 billion on a global military presence that we then turn around and call “defense.”"
So, the standard argument is that this is the reason that we're wealthy, though, right? Fiscal & military dominance have traditionally gone hand-in-hand for great powers throughout history- I don't think any country/empire ever had the largest economy without also having the pre-eminent military. The reason we're the reserve currency of the world and can run these massive deficits is all the aircraft carriers and keeping the sea lanes open and such.
If we weren't the reserve currency and couldn't run absolutely massive deficits, our social spending would have be to waaayyy cut back. Like, our military is just one of five, almost equally sized spokes of our federal budget, plus the sixth spoke is Social Security which is quite a bit larger https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-04/56324-CBO-2019-budget-infographic.pdf We spend roughly the same amount of money just on healthcare for the elderly as we do the world's most powerful military, a fun fact which I find almost no one knows.
I dunno, sorry for the side rant, I just think it's shortsighted when I see folks decrying the amount of money spent on the military, or the general idea of US dominance. There's a direct line between that and being super-wealthy!
"I don't think any country/empire ever had the largest economy without also having the pre-eminent military"
The USA had the largest economy in the world by no later than 1890, and plausibly a decade or more earlier than that.
Exactly when the US military became pre-eminent is a difficult question to answer, but certainly in the way that other countries respond to it, it's probably some point during WWII. It's certainly not before the end of WWI (you could make a case for it starting with the collapse of the German army in August-November 1918) and it had certainly happened by the end of the Cold War.
But there's at least 30 years of the US having the biggest economy in the world and a tiny and insignificant military - ie until the US entered WWI in March 1917.
Paul Kennedy's classic "Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" makes exactly the opposite thesis from your "standard argument", that is that countries become rich first and militarily powerful secondly and that economic decline leads to military decline. I would certainly have thought that Kennedy is the standard position.
The US had a tiny standing military, but immense latent military capacity thanks to its size, wealth, and (most importantly) industrial base, so it's a little hard to say that the WWI/inter-war US truly was weak militarily.
Specifically though, reserve currency status is linked to being the world's pre-eminent military in every analysis I've ever read. We could be wealthy without the reserve currency, but to my understanding we probably couldn't run the absolutely massive deficits that we do now.
To wit, I believe we took over reserve status from the Brits post-WW2- when our military dominance was unquestioned. So you can see the clear connection. To what Matt was saying (and I see a lot of other people out there saying)- we wouldn't really be 'saving' money by lopping some of the military budget down, the loss of status would cause the markets to freak out about our (unprecedented) deficits, we'd have to pay vastly more to service our debt, we'd probably have to start cutting Social Security & Medicare pretty quickly. In other words- no, whatever you do, don't mess with pre-eminent military status thinking that you're going to save a buck in the budget, it's the opposite
>>>So, the standard argument is that this is the reason that we're wealthy, though, right? Fiscal & military dominance have traditionally gone hand-in-hand for great powers throughout history<<<
No, I don't think the "standard argument" is that the United States is wealthy because it's militarily dominant. I'm pretty sure the causation is the exact opposite: the country's powerful military is feasible only because the country is rich. Indeed the US became wealthy (and a large economy by world standards) before it became militarily powerful).
Most of your individual points made sense to me, but I'm not sure that I follow the overall argument. Are you basically saying our "wealth" gives us the ability to take care of the elderly and have a huge military, or is it the other way around, and those things make us wealthy? Or just that you'd always expect them to go hand in hand? If it's this last one, that might be true, but I don't see why it needs to be true in the future
I think if you're rich enough then you can spend $800 billion per year on the military without it becoming a huge flashpoint. DoD is currently around 3.3% of GDP. In 1967, it was 9.4%
I think one can argue we still spend too much on DoD, but historically, we're at pretty small parts of the GDP.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
In my field, astronomy, I think it's rare that transformative research is blocked because of the review process for grants. And I think it's unlikely that tinkering with the review process will significantly reduce the chances of transformative work going unfunded.
In astronomy, breakthroughs are driven by technological advances in telescopes, and those advances are limited by funding. So if you want to increase the number of breakthroughs in astronomy, you should increase the funding levels for the research infrastructure (telescopes and the labs that build their instruments). Meanwhile, if you want to promote more good research in general and train more young scientists, you should increase the funding levels for the grant programs at the NSF, NASA, etc. There are plenty of good proposals that get rejected because of the limited funding available.
This is more important to the USA than Israel Palestine or the Middle East.
In the context of a world where uncontroversial bills can pass through regular order like this, I don't think a watering down of ambitions like you saw with Endless Frontier is necessarily the end of the world. It might actually be a good thing! Some parts of this bill will work and others won't. If you think you'll get a second crack at this once we've learned from our experience, the rest of the money can be more appropriately targeted. I don't personally think it's a good idea to just throw $100 billion dollars at the NSF as it stands IF you believe congress can return to this issue and finish the job.
I think it's a consequence of the omnibus/reconciliation world of legislating where every law feels the need to 'solve' whatever problem it is addressing in full and in perpetuity. You see that with the ARP, which objectively has a TON of wasted and misdirected money in it. But it is defended correctly on the grounds that it is 'better to do too much than too little.' Left unsaid here is the assumption that you only get one shot at it. Obviously it would actually be much better to do too little and then a month later to do the right amount while taking into account what worked and what didn't.
If the Chinese ambassador had carefully designed an amendment to utterly undermine the purpose of the act it would be the amendment that clipped out $5 billion to give to the National Labs--the are so far removed from the work of innovation and economic competitiveness they may as well be located on the moon.
I consider myself quite lucky have worked at Fermilab pre-CERN go live so when it was still the top accelerator. Also interested in your critique of the National Labs. Obviously I'm a fan.
BTW and just on the innovation side ... in what other commercial application does a permanent magnet rail accelerator get built - which necessitated superconductivity? Or a proton accelerator for cancer treatment since you need the Linac as a starting point? I'm sure the box super computer design would have emerged organically but on a later timeline. Same for www.fnal.gov.
Yeah. I remember loving Obama's "You didn't build that." speech for exactly these reasons. Bleeding edge R&D just can't close business cases. The probability of failure is too high for private capital hurdle rates.
Yeah I'm also curious to hear more of your critique on the national labs Roland.
What do you have against the national labs? Their work is more mission-driven than NSF.