A Stitch in Haste

Apparently it's the next big crisis:

Thomas Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at the University of California at Berkeley, proposed that the federal government provide prizes as an incentive to spur research. Kalil's idea originates from a contest in 1919, when a New York hotel owner, Raymond Orteig, offered a $25,000 purse to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.
...
Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants. Second, prizes can stimulate private investment by attracting entrepreneurs and corporate enthusiasts interested in capturing a trophy. Finally, there is nothing like a cash jackpot to stir public interest.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

In an episode of The West Wing, a politician about to face reporters for the first time is warned by a handler, "Never accept the premise of the question." Sage advice here. The notion that "prizes trump grants" presupposes that any federal underwriting of scientific research is ever "proper." That is a entirely faulty premise.

(Note also that even the example provided is an insolent non sequitur: If a hotelier or any other private philanthropist wants to offer a prize for cold fusion, or an AIDS vaccine, or for a motor that converts static electricity into kinetic energy*, then that's his business and more power to him. It does not follow, however, that taxpayers should be financially conscripted into similar beneficence.)

The only proper context for "government science" is military defense: If the Nazis are trying to unlock the power of the atom, then we better do it first. See also this chain.

Consider another way that the dire prediction about American science self-implodes:

Lawrence H. Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the former president of Harvard University, concisely summed up the day's concerns. The last century was the century of physics, and it was a century directed by America, he said. The 21st century will likely be defined by advances in the biomedical sciences. "The question is," he asked, "'Will the United States be the leader?'"

Here's the defining distinction between physics and the biomedical sciences: It is very difficult for capitalists to make money in the former; it is almost trivial to do so in the latter. Build a better vaccine, or analgesic, or artificial knee, or tongue depressor, and the world will beat a path to your door. Demand creates its own supply — and there's far more demand for new and better biomedical science than there is for "new and better" physics.

Which is precisely why we need even less government involvement in science in this century than the last. Pharmaceutical and biotechnological research certainly needs less of a "jump-start" than physics research. Government intervention, even if nominally benign, will only create distortions — precisely at the time, according to the doomsayers, when we can ill afford them.

One more thought: If I'm the one who actually needs a new and better artificial knee, then do I really care whether that knee was invented by an American rather than by a European or Asian? Or might I care more about whether I can afford it after being so heavily taxed by our "scientifically enlightened" government? Or, worse, whether government regulation keeps that artificial knee off the market altogether? Or, worse still, whether artificial knees are being rationed (by politicians and bureaucrats, not by doctors) under a single-payer health care regime (i.e. socialized medicine)?

So, if the intelligentsia are so concerned about "maintaining America's scientific lead" in this century, then the single best prescription is no prescription at all: Get out of the way. Let American innovators innovate — in the private sector where they can do it best.

And if the politicians desperately feel an urge to "do something," then strengthening patent law and cleaning up the strict liability swamp in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries would be a good start. Tax reform in the areas of charitable giving and "paying for college" might be appropriate agenda items as well.

But federal subsidies, whether via grants or prizes, only cause misallocations — those monies come from somewhere else in the economy, and are always subject to the Politics of Pull — is your memory really so fleeting?

(Via Slashdot.)

*A physicist who invents a motor that converts static electricity into kinetic energy? That would make a great novel...