There are many reasons to avoid taking the King's shilling if you can. Chief among them is that politicians are extremely fickle taskmasters. This makes it risky to do any business with the government that requires substantial up-front investment, like a new factory or the next eight years of your life. This is a problem with corporations too, obviously--indeed, the requirement for co-specialized assets is one of the few times when a merger definitely makes good economic sense. But companies don't routinely turn over their management every two-to-four years.
This has recently become a problem for healthcare research, thanks to a funding boom and bust, and the government's poor system for fund allocation:
let's go back in time to the golden era between fiscal years 1998 and 2003, when a bipartisan effort succeeded in nearly doubling the NIH budget. Paylines loosened up, and the spigot of money government money and its associated indirect costs seemed never-ending. Truly, times were good for a brief time. Unfortunately, two problems in addition to the flat NIH budget from 2004 (courtesy of the Bush administration and the war) on set the stage for our present crisis. The first was that there appeared to be little planning for how to cover the "out year" commitments of all these new grants being awarded. What many don't realize is that a five year R01 grant is in reality five one-year grants. The money isn't in a bank to cover the five years, each "out" year of the grant is covered from the NIH budget of each fiscal year the grant encompasses. If a grant is awarded in fiscal year 2008, for example, then it will in reality be five grants in FY 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. Even before the five year doubling was well under way, there was concern about preventing a "hard landing" in FY 2004, the first year after the doubling of the budget occurred and all those extra grants funded in the heady days between FY 1998 and 2003 were still on the books and had to be funded all the way through FY 2008. The concern, as experience shows, was justified. When the budget went flat and, adjusted for inflation, even started to decrease slightly, the result was predictable: The out year commitments from grants funded during the doubling started to squeeze out funds for new grants. Moreover, the NIH couldn't save any of this windfall for a rainy day; by statute it has to spend its budget each year, as described in Science and Inside Higher Ed. The NIH did a number of things to try to keep the percentage of success from falling too far (cutting 23% off of the budget of my grant and those of many others right off the top and then cutting 2-3% per year), but that only kept the situation from becoming even more dire than it is now.The second issue is the universities themselves. The doubling of the NIH budget led to a recruitment and building boom at research institutions all over the U.S., as universities sought to capitalize on the increase in the NIH budget.
A steady, slow increase, he says, would have been better than a doubling followed by a flatline; now the old grants are crowding out new research, and possibly crippling the careers of young researchers who can't get onto a project. This suggests that the public should have a preference for politicians with modest promises, rather than radical new plans. But in the case of things like scientific research, this is emphatically not the case.
R&D funding via NIH, NSF, DoD, DoE, etc. have a pretty good track record in getting money to good research, but have had the problem of being swept by fads. For example, while I was in college Pres. Nixon and Congress "declared war" on Cancer, so everyone (including non-biological sciences) was ginning up connections for their research to cancer so as to jump on the gravy train. In theoretical physics, string theory crowded out other approaches, though now that they haven't been able to find a way to test it, other approaches are being looked at. When NASA's budget started to decline a year or so before the Apollo 11 mission, pure research was the first area cut.
As each fad sweeps a field, it crowds out other research and the scientists have to adapt. In addition, the life sciences can't complain too much, the got their money doubled in a few years. If I had been in the White House, I might have flatlined them for a few years and done some reallocation.
As an aside, it was reported on Instapundit: In the fall of 2004, 50.6 of professional full-time employees in higher education (excluding medical schools) were faculty members. In the fall of 2006, for which data were released Tuesday, 48.6 percent of professional, full-time jobs in higher education were held by faculty members.
I'm sure a part of this was to hire more staff to grub for NIH money.
"A steady, slow increase, he says, would have been better than a doubling followed by a flatline; now the old grants are crowding out new research,"
That's true to some extent, but the case is overstated. Anyone who has been in the business long enough to have a position that controls budgets has experienced booms and busts. During booms, you invest in capital equipment. That equipment is used for years on research that had nothing to do with the original grant.
There is also the propensity of researchers to work on whatever they want once they have grant money. Then, they publish something with a tenuous connection to that for which they were given a grant.
Gee, noone remembers the history of the 'March of Dimes'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes
note: those Silver dimes are now worth ~U$D1.30
Simply, if those 'researchers' want funding, let them appeal, directly, to the citizenry..
Just a couple of complications I'd like to point out. It's easy to say "these are just booms and busts, get used to it." But if you enter the professoriate at the beginning of a period of flat funding growth that lasts 3 or 4 years, you're going to be halfway or more to your tenure review before you've gotten a good chance at getting your work funded. And since young researchers are usually the first ones crowded out, it gets worse.
Secondly, getting a grant isn't that similar to investing in capital equipment, because a lot of the money is going to salaries. I don't think many businesses thrive by telling their employees "times are tough but we paid you during the boom, so keep working until the next one comes down the pipe." You can't keep living off last year's grants.
And as to appealing directly to the citizenry, I agree it sounds nice, but most researchers are already spending a huge chuck of their (presumably valuable) time just organizing their funding. And that's with only two or three funding bodies to keep track of. You'll probably need whole new administrative organs if you try to run a grassroots research funding system.
There was really no other outcome possible. A doubling of funding within a short time frame was sure to be followed by a flatlining of funding. To fund additional research would have required another doubling of the research funding. Such dramatic rises in funding are not sustainable for mathematical reasons.
Kevin Drum has a comment on this; his commenters add some more good observations:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_03/013318.php
Megan: "There are many reasons to avoid taking the King's shilling if you can. Chief among them is that politicians are extremely fickle taskmasters. This makes it risky to do any business with the government that requires substantial up-front investment, like a new factory or the next eight years of your life."
Interesting words, considering that they were spoken during a real estate melt-down, and by somebody who had been a dot-commer.
"This makes it risky to do any business with the government that requires substantial up-front investment, like a new factory or the next eight years of your life"
Good thing F-16 fighter jets didn't need big, up-front capital investment, or fickle government funding would have have sunk the program.
"But companies don't routinely turn over their management every two-to-four years."
And government funded research medical research at places like NIH (and NSF science projects) allows long-term, basic research that doesn't require direct, demonstrable and expeditious avenues to ROI.
So I'm sure that empirical data exists comparing private vs. public funding trends in specific areas of research. Wonder what it says. I don't know. But it must be easier to be an ideologue.
Good thing you didn't pick other military plane examples like the B-2, F-117, and F-22, where the number of planes ordered was dramatically cut after nearly all the research and design was already done, making the cost per plane skyrocket to 3-4 times that if more had been ordered. Or, of course, the way that fickle government funding of massive defense spending increases at one point followed by decreases later causes huge contract awards that crowd out funding for the next few years, just like with the NSF.
Uhhh... isn't "taking the King's shilling" joining the army? Maybe there are other uses with which I'm unfamiliar, but that's what I always thought.
"And as to appealing directly to the citizenry, I agree it sounds nice, but most researchers are already spending a huge chuck of their (presumably valuable) time just organizing their funding. And that's with only two or three funding bodies to keep track of. You'll probably need whole new administrative organs if you try to run a grassroots research funding system."
Jared,
How many Researchers, do you suspect, are running the fund-raising for an org. like the Komen Foundation?
The idea that all 'funding' roads lead to D.C. is what needs to change..