During a discussion about whether government funding of academic science was a good idea, I argued that it was a net negative—a prominent physicist once told me that there was no particle physics before World War II. I remember thinking to myself: “Who’s going to tell him? No particle physics? Maxwell? Planck? Rutherford? Einstein?”

My interlocutor reflected a widespread assumption that science would be impossible without the $100 billion annual stream of research funding currently flowing into universities, most of it from the federal fisc. The James Webb Telescope is often trotted out as the killing example—a few years ago, it was the Hubble Telescope. Who would fund that, except for governments? Another oft-ridden hobbyhorse is the need to keep science uncorrupted by vested private interests. Who can ensure science’s objectivity if businesses are footing the bill? Yet, businesses provide less than six percent of the total revenues for academic research, hardly a danger. All feed into a cheap rhetorical trick: if you argue against government funding of science, you’re “anti-science.” Or part of the Republican “war on science.” Or—why not, in for a penny, in for a pound—the “ultra-MAGA Republican war on science?”

One can hardly blame them, though, because they don’t know any other way. Eighty years ago, the government funded only a minuscule portion of university research, largely because Congress was unclear on what public interest would be served. Academic scientists, for their part, were suspicious of government funds, largely because of the very heavy strings attached.

World War II changed all that, and we all know why—Oppenheimer. In the aftermath of the war, the federal government embarked on a hopeful experiment to harness academic science to secure peace and promote national prosperity.[1] To carry out the experiment, there has since been an exponentially rising stream of public money flowing into academic research, constituting about 60 percent of total expenditures on academic research. We are now three generations—five, depending upon how you count them—into that Big Rock Candy Mountains world so that there remains little, if any, institutional memory of it being any other way.

And what’s wrong with that?

By some measures, academic research appears to be thriving. In 2022, American scientists published over 455,000 papers—out of 3.3 million worldwide—landing in more than 46,000 scientific journals. Amazing productivity, right? It’s only impressive if you think that publications are a reliable indicator of scientific discovery. A recent analysis suggests that is looking unlikely: since the beginning of the exponential rise in government funding of academic science, the incidence of so-called “disruptive” publications—publications that have changed the direction of a field—has declined in an almost mirror image of exponential decline.[2] Add to this the fulminating crisis of untrustworthiness of the scientific literature, and the hopeful experiment begun in 1950 appears to be circling the drain.

Can we pull science back?

My urgent hope is that it can be. To do so, however, the illness must be diagnosed correctly, and the Big Rock Candy Mountains illusion is a major impediment to getting the diagnosis right. For example, academic scientists are said to be publishing too many papers, leading to “information overload”, but this is chalked up to the problem of “publish or perish.” Poor things, the reasoning seems to be, careers depend upon publishing many papers, so no wonder some succumb to publishing meaningless papers that serve no purpose but to puff up a CV. And there is no shortage of bogus journals to accommodate whatever dreck is sent their way. Root out “publish or perish”, and all will come right.

It won’t come right, though, because this diagnosis fails to see why the “publish or perish” syndrome exists in the first place. In fact, “publish or perish,” along with a host of other ills, is incentivized by the government funding model established in 1950. Far from being a boon to science, funding has grown to the point where it undercuts the very thing it was supposed to promote, namely curiosity-driven research in universities. It has done so by destroying the culture of basic science that had existed before World War II—the “small science ecosystem,” as I have called it—and built in its stead the Big Science Cartel, an interwoven network of the financial and political interests of institutions—universities, government, publishing houses, activist groups.

In the Big Science Cartel, academic scientists have been reduced to being the turnkeys for the government revenue streams that prop up the Cartel. “Publish or perish” is the mechanism by which the Cartel enforces its interests.

The rescue plan for academic science should now be clear. If we want to restore a vigorous culture of scientific discovery in this country—and it’s my fervent wish that we should—we need urgently to rescue science from the grips of the Big Science Cartel.

At the recent Heterodox Academy Conference held in Chicago, we organized a symposium on Rescuing Science.[3] The speakers included Prof Terence Kealey, who offered a critical look at the economic assumptions behind public funding of science—and has found them wanting—; Dr Seaver Wang of The Breakthrough Institute, who offered his experience of being a scientist outside the grip of the Big Science Cartel. I outlined some of the ideas we’ve been working on to restore scientists’ intellectual freedom and autonomy.

You can see a video of my presentation, Rescuing Science, here, which includes a number of policy reforms we have been working on here at the NAS that just could do the trick. One of them we have already crafted into model legislation—the Indirect Costs Reduction Act—that would help guide legislators to enact the necessary reforms. We have more ideas, so have a look!

[1] Bush, V. (1945). Science. The Endless Frontier. A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945 Washington, D.C.

[2] Park, M., E. Leahey, et al. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature 613(7942): 138-144.
But see also: Macher, J. T., C. Rutzer, et al. (2024). Is there a secular decline in disruptive patents? Correcting for measurement bias. Research Policy 53(5): 104992.

[3] The full conference program may be seen here.

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