The Avalanche of Useless Academic Research
Michael Glenwood for The Chronicle
In this Chronicle article, Mark Bauerlein, Mohamad Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey and Stanley Trimble discuss the vast outpouring of academic research that is mostly redundant and wasteful.
No surprise there. We heavily subsidize academic research and as any good economist will tell you, when you subsidize anything, you get too much of it and much of the output will be of low quality.
I recall seeing a 60 Minutes segment many years ago on the effects of art subsidies in The Netherlands — the government had warehouses filled with paintings no one would buy. Instead of warehouses filled with bad paintings, we have journals filled with research no one would pay for. Academic research is no more intrinsically good than is art and if you sever the connection between production and voluntary financial support, you wind up wasting resources.
I’m not certain anyone would read much of the research available even if they didn’t have to pay for it.
I just published my first research article, so I have been particularly interested in this post and the article (in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that prompted it.
The claim of a “vast outpouring of academic research that is mostly redundant and wasteful” is based on a study that claims that half or more of academic science publications are not cited within 5 years. By this criterion, I guess the patent system is a waste — after all, most patents are never implemented. The market economy is also a failure — half of all businesses fail within 5 years.
George Leef appears to be a libertarian — no government sponsored science for him! A young scientist with his attitude would be unemployable at a research university — assuming you could somehow get an interview with none of those publications to your name — try selling the search committee with that point of view!
It’s no wonder that conservatives/libertarians are so underrepresented on university faculties.
Jonathan’s snide comment calls for a response.
I’ll gladly own up to my libertarian philosophy, which calls for government to do nothing other than those few functions necessary for maintaining order. Once it begins using its coercive power to support some activities and penalize others, society begins a process of decay, moving away from peaceful cooperation and towards political manipulation.
Jonathan apparently regards scientific research (which is a small subset of all the academic research that’s published) as a public good that would be unfunded (or at least under-funded) if the state didn’t step on to subsidize it. I think that position is mistaken and refer him to Terence Kealey’s book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
While I’m on the subject of things the state supposedly needs to do but actually does not, Jonathan’s quip about the patent system is similarly mistaken. There’s a strong case to be made that the patent system does more harm than good. See Levine and Boldrin’s recent book Against Intellectual Monopoly.
The fact that many businesses fail — don’t create sufficient value to cover their costs — is a good argument in favor of severing the connection between government and research (of any kind). If government provided the funding for business (as was the case under communism and increasingly under our system of crony capitalism), we’d never find out which ones were wasting resources. Years ago, Milton Friedman put his finger on the problem with political funding of anything, saying, “No one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.”
I suppose Mr. Leef refers to my last two paragraphs. I hadn’t intended them to be “snide”, but as simple statements of fact. I’ll stand by that.
It’s illuminating to learn that Mr. Leef also stands against the patent system. I suppose in arguing against a “connection between government and research (of any kind)”, he would also regard the Manhattan Project, the NASA moon program, the Hubble Space Telescope, and federally funded medical research as mistakes.
I will stick with the system that has been in place at least since World War II, if not since Lincoln, under presidents of every stripe from Roosevelt to Reagan.
What I find illuminating is that a purported scholar, when faced with references to two scholarly works that challenge his preconceptions, just declares that he likes the status quo.
Here’s the problem he misses. Government funding of research (and other things) has both seen and unseen consequences. As Frederic Bastiat observed long ago, it’s a mistake to consider only the former and overlook the latter. What if the government stopped wasting money on research that people would not voluntarily support? What worthwhile things would be done instead? It’s not that no good ever comes from anything that politicians choose to support, but that the waste that occurs when they spend other people’s money outweighs the good. That’s why I favor limiting government just to a “night watchman” role.