This was an interesting read. You might be interested to see my own writing on this topic, recently posted as part of the ongoing decadal survey of particle physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00122 (Section 7). I also consider researcher-directed funding as one possibility worth trying.
The problem with your "true" proposal of "focused research organizations" is that it won't work. You note early in the essay that grants require "changing your research agenda to fit the state’s goals". This is nominally true, and yet it only partially recognizes the real problem. Scientists are very smart and dedicated to their research goals. More often, they change how they *present* their original goals to fit into whatever hot topic is currently getting more funding from the federal government. That means the government virtually never realizes the intended purpose of targeted funding for specific topics, while also forcing scientists to go through more contortions to keep their labs going.
Also, a correction: you state "most of the other half goes through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)." In fact, the Department of Energy Office of Science has a budget similar in size to the NSF. See https://www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-budget-tracker. It's quite harmful to physical science research that the DOE is frequently left out of popular conversations about science funding.
This was very informative, thank you. I took a different approach myself, largely based on the lottery approach you mention. I would love your thoughts on this assay of mine:
Only someone who has zero familiarity with the current academic research environment would suggest that the problem is *too much* external oversight of research directions and *not enough* researcher choice of research direction. The real problems are (1) Far too much mediocre research, coupled with a bean-counting approach to research output, driving even talented researchers to produce incremental "LPUs" as fast as they can, at the expense of quality; (2) an incestuous academic-political environment in which credit and funding is granted based on political power and mutual log-rolling, with skilled politicians and self-publicists being able to generate prestige (and funds) for their own and each other's worthless make-work research while starving rivals; and (3) the fox-guarding-the-chicken-coop approach of funding agencies "renting" researchers to judge their colleagues' worthiness on a rotating basis, ensuring that no external oversight of large research fields is possible.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that because research is inherently speculative, it's difficult to measure the relative (or absolute) value of a given research agenda, so various proxy measures are substituted, all of them woefully inadequate and easily corrupted. An alternative approach would be to reward results rather than fund research directly--i.e., award prizes to researchers (or their employers) based on the impact of their work. Research labs could then fund researchers whose potential they believe in as investments, hoping to profit as a result. Among the benefits: funders would have a stake in funding (only) promising research with a real chance of success; researchers would be encouraged to make higher-risk, higher-reward bets--something that faces massive disincentives under the current system; and the influence of petty politics among research communities would be overshadowed by the effects of concrete achievements.
Speaking as a physical scientist who has been an active researcher at R1 universities in the US and Europe for two decades, I think the story is more complicated than the numbers suggest. The Chinese model was and mostly continues to be to send promising, smart scientists to the US and Europe through well-funded scholarship programs where they learn how to do top-tier science. Many of them stay there. But there are strong (financial) incentives to return to China that are tied to the "impact" of the publications they generated abroad. (Chinese postdocs will plead for co-corresponding author, first-author or whatever other metric is currently fashionable for landing tenure-track positions back in China.) And so many also return, standing up (well-funded) labs that focus almost exclusively on publishing papers in top-tier journals.
The problem is that China throws so many resources at science that they have distorted the entire scientific publishing ecosystem. Because Chinese funding (and often direct compensation) is tied to publication metrics, their labs specialize in generating publication metrics. That, in turn, has led top-tier journals to start rewarding metrics-driven science; for example, many Nature sub-journals now publish "record figures of merit" because they know that (in particular, Chinese) researchers will cite those papers relentlessly in review articles and as background in the introductions to papers in the field. That is a massive paradigm shift for a publisher (now Springer-Nature) that used to pride itself on publishing big ideas and breakthroughs with "long tails" rather than a glut of citations that tapers off when the next record figure of merit is published.
Generally speaking, Chinese researchers are very good at implementing, but the research culture discourages high-risk, high-reward and creative research because the the payoff—if it ever comes—takes decades to realize. They are actively trying to change that culture by playing around with compensation models, creating Chinese publishers, partnering with Western publishers to create Chinese journals, etc. But it is an uphill battle because American and European researchers don't go to China to earn PhDs or do prestigious postdoctoral fellowships and because of the momentum behind the current system, which is the one in which the most influential Chinese professors got where they are.
This essay correctly diagnoses a core problem with US funding, which is that it has become too outcome-driven and funds the same ideas over and over by forcing scientists to adjust their research to meet prescribed goals. (And there is too little money, which puts acceptance into "random number generator" territory.) European funding has its own problems, but Germany and Canada both implement very similar programs to the 60/40 model model outlined in the essay, where researchers are more-or-less entitled to some fixed funding to pursue whatever ideas they are interested in. And it works insofar as it generates more esoteric papers, but they get buried by the sheer volume of papers and the aforementioned metrics-driven publications. The Netherlands and Denmark also apportion money to universities directly, creating "first-stream" funding that is close to the researcher-based model. Some US states also have fairly generous funding schemes that are similar to first-stream funding. But I would most definitely not look to China as a model for any aspect of scientific research beyond spending a higher percentage of GDP on research.
Last month, Russia and China announced, separately, their withdrawal from the dominant international tertiary education body.
Both plan to re-think the idea of a university on the grounds that they prefer more culturally compatible ways of approaching tertiary education and research.
As long as they're outspending us 2:1 and their researchers have a 10-point average IQ advantage, they'll continue pulling away from us.
Are you referring the higher education zone(s) that create uniform standards for curricula, grades, etc? When you see American and European talent competing for PhD programs and postdoctoral fellowships in China, you will know that they have surpassed us. Until then, their academy remains dependent on ours, just as our supply chains depend on their cheap labor. Withdrawing from international bodies is not a great way to get to that point.
Science is a highly collaborative endeavor that relies on openness and cooperation, neither of which are served by the withdraw into some sort of Sino-Russian academy. Sadly, competitive research is also a dead-weight loss (because it duplicates efforts), so if they do manage to stand up their own parallel ecosystem of universities, publishers, etc. we'll all lose.
I'm skeptical that transformative scientific research is even compatible with totalitarian-authoritarianism in the first place. Science (and the Academy) rely on total freedom of thought and freedom to explore ideas that is antithetical to the uniform, rote systems of education that underpin Chinese Communism. Again, China is really good at implementation and even better at pursing success-metrics, so I suspect they will out-perform us on technological advancements in areas like AI. But fundamental research requires a different mentality and set of skills that are demonstrably compatible with liberalism.
I doubt anything I wrote would be seen as controversial among my colleagues and peers—these are the sort of conversations we have around the proverbial water cooler. And we are all keenly aware of the failings of the current American funding model. But our system has shown a capacity to adjust to modernity, so long as it continues to listen to us. We will see how well the Chinese system adapts.
Anecdotally, the Chinese academics I've spoken with are also keenly aware of the shortcomings of their (very demanding) system and want to change it. I'm curious how well that system listens to internal criticism, given the general intolerance of dissent.
"Are you referring the higher education zone(s) that create uniform standards for curricula, grades, etc?" No. Senior intellectuals in and outside government in both Russia and China are reconsidering the moral foundations, nature, and role of tertiary education in their societies.
"When you see American and European talent competing for PhD programs and postdoctoral fellowships in China, you will know that they have surpassed us”. China has 300,000 people with an IQ of 160 or above. America and Europe have 20,000 between them.
"Until then, their academy remains dependent on ours, just as our supply chains depend on their cheap labor. Withdrawing from international bodies is not a great way to get to that point”. Until recently, they invented everything. Then we invaded them and wrecked them. Now they're getting rid of the last vestiges of our invasions and reasserting their primacy in every field.
This is an excellent proposal. It mirrors school choice driven policy - fund the student, not the school. I don't think the research university vs teaching university dichotomy need be the weakness you suggest; in many ways, that distinction is artificially created by the current research funding system. Instead, simply fund everyone who has a PhD in a given field, with the 60/40 stipulation in funding allocation, and let them go where they please. One's prize for obtaining a PhD would then be lifetime funding.
That opens its own gaming strategy of course - there would need to be a considerable degree of policing to prevent fake doctorates from parasitically crowding the system. But, that could be dealt with by allocating funding by dividing the pot by the number of PhDs. The disciplines would then be strongly motivated to limit the number of entrants.
One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention, in terms of rent-seeking that drains resources towards unproductive activities, is F&A. Overheads are a huge unnecessary cost, which additionally drive much of the administrative bloat that is in turn largely responsible for the totalitarian climate of the modern campus. Eliminating overheads would be a massive win in itself. Your proposal naturally leans in that direction: if a given researcher's funding is capped, and he can go where he pleases, organizations would compete to offer the lowest overheads possible.
This was an interesting read. You might be interested to see my own writing on this topic, recently posted as part of the ongoing decadal survey of particle physics: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00122 (Section 7). I also consider researcher-directed funding as one possibility worth trying.
The problem with your "true" proposal of "focused research organizations" is that it won't work. You note early in the essay that grants require "changing your research agenda to fit the state’s goals". This is nominally true, and yet it only partially recognizes the real problem. Scientists are very smart and dedicated to their research goals. More often, they change how they *present* their original goals to fit into whatever hot topic is currently getting more funding from the federal government. That means the government virtually never realizes the intended purpose of targeted funding for specific topics, while also forcing scientists to go through more contortions to keep their labs going.
Also, a correction: you state "most of the other half goes through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF)." In fact, the Department of Energy Office of Science has a budget similar in size to the NSF. See https://www.aip.org/fyi/federal-science-budget-tracker. It's quite harmful to physical science research that the DOE is frequently left out of popular conversations about science funding.
This was very informative, thank you. I took a different approach myself, largely based on the lottery approach you mention. I would love your thoughts on this assay of mine:
https://sebastianquezada.substack.com/p/on-the-value-of-investment-in-science
Only someone who has zero familiarity with the current academic research environment would suggest that the problem is *too much* external oversight of research directions and *not enough* researcher choice of research direction. The real problems are (1) Far too much mediocre research, coupled with a bean-counting approach to research output, driving even talented researchers to produce incremental "LPUs" as fast as they can, at the expense of quality; (2) an incestuous academic-political environment in which credit and funding is granted based on political power and mutual log-rolling, with skilled politicians and self-publicists being able to generate prestige (and funds) for their own and each other's worthless make-work research while starving rivals; and (3) the fox-guarding-the-chicken-coop approach of funding agencies "renting" researchers to judge their colleagues' worthiness on a rotating basis, ensuring that no external oversight of large research fields is possible.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that because research is inherently speculative, it's difficult to measure the relative (or absolute) value of a given research agenda, so various proxy measures are substituted, all of them woefully inadequate and easily corrupted. An alternative approach would be to reward results rather than fund research directly--i.e., award prizes to researchers (or their employers) based on the impact of their work. Research labs could then fund researchers whose potential they believe in as investments, hoping to profit as a result. Among the benefits: funders would have a stake in funding (only) promising research with a real chance of success; researchers would be encouraged to make higher-risk, higher-reward bets--something that faces massive disincentives under the current system; and the influence of petty politics among research communities would be overshadowed by the effects of concrete achievements.
Would funding research at the state level reduce the costs of competition for funding, and possibly change incentives around vetomanship?
China invests 2.5% of its $25 Tn economy in STEM research.
We invest half that.
China has 300,000 people with 160 IQs.
We have 10,000.
Before we do anything with our science funding, we should study China.
Chinese research ranked as high as or higher than U.S. work in the top 1% of scientific studies in 2019. This work is considered the most notable published science. https://news.osu.edu/analysis-suggests-china-has-passed-us-on-one-research-measure/
And in quantity and breadth, it's no contest.
Speaking as a physical scientist who has been an active researcher at R1 universities in the US and Europe for two decades, I think the story is more complicated than the numbers suggest. The Chinese model was and mostly continues to be to send promising, smart scientists to the US and Europe through well-funded scholarship programs where they learn how to do top-tier science. Many of them stay there. But there are strong (financial) incentives to return to China that are tied to the "impact" of the publications they generated abroad. (Chinese postdocs will plead for co-corresponding author, first-author or whatever other metric is currently fashionable for landing tenure-track positions back in China.) And so many also return, standing up (well-funded) labs that focus almost exclusively on publishing papers in top-tier journals.
The problem is that China throws so many resources at science that they have distorted the entire scientific publishing ecosystem. Because Chinese funding (and often direct compensation) is tied to publication metrics, their labs specialize in generating publication metrics. That, in turn, has led top-tier journals to start rewarding metrics-driven science; for example, many Nature sub-journals now publish "record figures of merit" because they know that (in particular, Chinese) researchers will cite those papers relentlessly in review articles and as background in the introductions to papers in the field. That is a massive paradigm shift for a publisher (now Springer-Nature) that used to pride itself on publishing big ideas and breakthroughs with "long tails" rather than a glut of citations that tapers off when the next record figure of merit is published.
Generally speaking, Chinese researchers are very good at implementing, but the research culture discourages high-risk, high-reward and creative research because the the payoff—if it ever comes—takes decades to realize. They are actively trying to change that culture by playing around with compensation models, creating Chinese publishers, partnering with Western publishers to create Chinese journals, etc. But it is an uphill battle because American and European researchers don't go to China to earn PhDs or do prestigious postdoctoral fellowships and because of the momentum behind the current system, which is the one in which the most influential Chinese professors got where they are.
This essay correctly diagnoses a core problem with US funding, which is that it has become too outcome-driven and funds the same ideas over and over by forcing scientists to adjust their research to meet prescribed goals. (And there is too little money, which puts acceptance into "random number generator" territory.) European funding has its own problems, but Germany and Canada both implement very similar programs to the 60/40 model model outlined in the essay, where researchers are more-or-less entitled to some fixed funding to pursue whatever ideas they are interested in. And it works insofar as it generates more esoteric papers, but they get buried by the sheer volume of papers and the aforementioned metrics-driven publications. The Netherlands and Denmark also apportion money to universities directly, creating "first-stream" funding that is close to the researcher-based model. Some US states also have fairly generous funding schemes that are similar to first-stream funding. But I would most definitely not look to China as a model for any aspect of scientific research beyond spending a higher percentage of GDP on research.
Last month, Russia and China announced, separately, their withdrawal from the dominant international tertiary education body.
Both plan to re-think the idea of a university on the grounds that they prefer more culturally compatible ways of approaching tertiary education and research.
As long as they're outspending us 2:1 and their researchers have a 10-point average IQ advantage, they'll continue pulling away from us.
Are you referring the higher education zone(s) that create uniform standards for curricula, grades, etc? When you see American and European talent competing for PhD programs and postdoctoral fellowships in China, you will know that they have surpassed us. Until then, their academy remains dependent on ours, just as our supply chains depend on their cheap labor. Withdrawing from international bodies is not a great way to get to that point.
Science is a highly collaborative endeavor that relies on openness and cooperation, neither of which are served by the withdraw into some sort of Sino-Russian academy. Sadly, competitive research is also a dead-weight loss (because it duplicates efforts), so if they do manage to stand up their own parallel ecosystem of universities, publishers, etc. we'll all lose.
I'm skeptical that transformative scientific research is even compatible with totalitarian-authoritarianism in the first place. Science (and the Academy) rely on total freedom of thought and freedom to explore ideas that is antithetical to the uniform, rote systems of education that underpin Chinese Communism. Again, China is really good at implementation and even better at pursing success-metrics, so I suspect they will out-perform us on technological advancements in areas like AI. But fundamental research requires a different mentality and set of skills that are demonstrably compatible with liberalism.
I doubt anything I wrote would be seen as controversial among my colleagues and peers—these are the sort of conversations we have around the proverbial water cooler. And we are all keenly aware of the failings of the current American funding model. But our system has shown a capacity to adjust to modernity, so long as it continues to listen to us. We will see how well the Chinese system adapts.
Anecdotally, the Chinese academics I've spoken with are also keenly aware of the shortcomings of their (very demanding) system and want to change it. I'm curious how well that system listens to internal criticism, given the general intolerance of dissent.
"Are you referring the higher education zone(s) that create uniform standards for curricula, grades, etc?" No. Senior intellectuals in and outside government in both Russia and China are reconsidering the moral foundations, nature, and role of tertiary education in their societies.
"When you see American and European talent competing for PhD programs and postdoctoral fellowships in China, you will know that they have surpassed us”. China has 300,000 people with an IQ of 160 or above. America and Europe have 20,000 between them.
"Until then, their academy remains dependent on ours, just as our supply chains depend on their cheap labor. Withdrawing from international bodies is not a great way to get to that point”. Until recently, they invented everything. Then we invaded them and wrecked them. Now they're getting rid of the last vestiges of our invasions and reasserting their primacy in every field.
This is an excellent proposal. It mirrors school choice driven policy - fund the student, not the school. I don't think the research university vs teaching university dichotomy need be the weakness you suggest; in many ways, that distinction is artificially created by the current research funding system. Instead, simply fund everyone who has a PhD in a given field, with the 60/40 stipulation in funding allocation, and let them go where they please. One's prize for obtaining a PhD would then be lifetime funding.
That opens its own gaming strategy of course - there would need to be a considerable degree of policing to prevent fake doctorates from parasitically crowding the system. But, that could be dealt with by allocating funding by dividing the pot by the number of PhDs. The disciplines would then be strongly motivated to limit the number of entrants.
One thing I'm surprised you didn't mention, in terms of rent-seeking that drains resources towards unproductive activities, is F&A. Overheads are a huge unnecessary cost, which additionally drive much of the administrative bloat that is in turn largely responsible for the totalitarian climate of the modern campus. Eliminating overheads would be a massive win in itself. Your proposal naturally leans in that direction: if a given researcher's funding is capped, and he can go where he pleases, organizations would compete to offer the lowest overheads possible.