[[{“value”:”From the Institute for Progress, here is the link, the participants were Caleb Watney, Dylan Matthews, Alexander Berger, and myself. Excerpt: Tyler Cowen: I would stress just how decentralized science funding is in the United States. The public universities are run at the state level. We have tax incentives for donations where you have to give
The post Science and politics podcast appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]]
From the Institute for Progress, here is the link, the participants were Caleb Watney, Dylan Matthews, Alexander Berger, and myself. Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: I would stress just how decentralized science funding is in the United States. The public universities are run at the state level. We have tax incentives for donations where you have to give to a nonprofit, but there’s otherwise very little control over what counts as a viable nonprofit.
One specific issue that I think has become quite large is how much we run our universities through an overhead system. On federal grants and many other kinds of grants, an overhead is charged. The overhead rates are very high, and well above what the actual marginal overhead costs.
You might think that’s a crazy system, and in some ways it is crazy. It means there’s intense pressure on professors to bring in contracts, regardless of the quality of the work. That’s clearly a major negative. Everyone complains about this.
But the hidden upside is that when universities fund themselves through overhead, there’s a kind of indirect free speech privilege because they can spend the overhead how they want. Now, I actually think they are violating the implicit social contract right now by spending the overhead poorly. But for a long while, this was why our system worked well. You had very indirect federal appropriations: some parts of which went to science, other parts of which went to education. It was done on a free speech basis.
But like many good systems, it doesn’t last forever. It gets abused. If we try to clean up the mess — which now in my view clearly is a mess — well, I’m afraid we’ll get a system where Congress or someone else is trying to dictate all the time how the funds actually should be allocated.
That’s a question I’ve thought through a good amount: how or whether we should fix the overhead system? I feel we’ve somehow painted ourselves into a corner where there is no good political way out in any direction. But I think you’ll find case by case that the specifics are really going to matter.
Dylan Matthews: Let’s get into some of the specifics. Do you have an example of the overhead system breaking down that is motivating for you here?
Tyler Cowen: Well, universities are spending more and more of their surplus on staff and facilities — on ends that even if you think they’re defensible in some deep sense like “Oh, we need this building,” it’s about the university. It’s about what leads to long run donations, but it’s seen as a violation of public trust.
The money is neither being spent on possibly useful research, nor educating students. The backlash against universities is huge, most of all in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina. It seems to me that where we are at isn’t stable. How we fund science through universities is, in some ways, collapsing in bad ways. The complaints are often justified, but odds are that we’ll end up with something worse.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
The post Science and politics podcast appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Education, Political Science, Science, Uncategorized
Leave a Reply