The problem with science is scientists

But in Professor Weinberg’s world, this doesn’t matter: We can afford categorical expansion of the public sector because “dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts.” I should note that he does preface that with “I am not an economist.” In fact, it’s not known that “government spending” categorically stimulates the economy at all; it seems to matter rather a lot what government spends the money on, what sorts of institutions it acts through, economic conditions exogenous to policy, etc. Likewise, he argues that astronomy, like physics, “faces tasks beyond the resources of individuals,” but at the same time argues that the only valuable science associated with the International Space Station could have been done more easily and less expensively with an unmanned satellite — precisely the sort of thing that private firms now do. Most Big Science projects do not have obvious or immediate commercial applications, but then those applications are not always predictable: The World Wide Web was invented at CERN to help its scientists communicate with their colleagues around the world. (And it turned out that that technology was great for porn, gambling, and cat pictures, too.) A bigger public sector — especially one funded by higher taxes on investment — bleeds resources out of potentially productive sources of commercial funding for scientific research. There are a great many examples of the fruitful interaction of public and commercial development. Unless you have an ideological aversion to profit-oriented research, then you want to fire both barrels.

Alternatives to the historical model are of no obvious interest to Professor Weinberg. Reform of the NSF and other institutions? Not on his radar: Just turn on the money hose, because it also apparently has never occurred to him to reconsider entrusting the very institutions that made the wrong choices with the Super Collider and the International Space Station and so much more with more resources to make more decisions based on the same flawed decision-making processes and subject to the same perverse political incentives.