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The unrelenting expansion in the scale and scope of government involvement in
science receives too little attention. Today in the United States and around the world,
government funding and direction of science are presumed to be essential, if not
constitutional, prerogatives of the state. The rise of state-run science did not commence
in earnest in the United States until World War II and its aftermath, although
a substantial amount of the bureaucratic groundwork was put in place by Franklin D.
Roosevelt before the war. During the 1930s, Great Britain barely escaped full central
planning of science; it was pulled back from that precipice in large part because of the
heroic efforts of Michael Polanyi, John Baker, and their Society for Freedom in
Science. In the Soviet Union, in contrast, the central planning of science exacted
an enormous human cost, with Stalin’s embrace of Lysenkoism and the resulting
destruction of the country’s agricultural sector and its suppression of Western
genetics and biological sciences. Today, although central planning in science is rarely
mentioned, the United States is at a tipping point: an alliance of government, business,
and academia threatens the autonomy and knowledge-generating capacity of
science. Only a fiscal constraint seems to hold this revolution in science at bay.
This situation is a relatively modern development. At one time, science was
thought to be an undertaking that should be principally financed by private sources
and largely removed from the government’s oversight and its political aims, which
most often involved using science for military purposes. That government’s insinuation
into science parallels the growth of the modern interventionist state is not a
coincidence.
James T. Bennett’s most recent book, The Doomsday Lobby, is an excellent
antidote to the thinking that has promoted science as an arm of the government
during the past seventy-five years. The explanation of how the present situation
developed is a complex, intertwined story of the growth of government itself, on the
one hand, and political opportunism by government and its clients—scientists, business,
and academic institutions—on the other. Bennett wisely carves out a single
theme in this story by concentrating on the U.S. space program’s development. The
bulk of the book concentrates on the U.S. response to the USSR’s orbiting of Sputnik
in 1957, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s ensuing programs for
moon landings and planetary exploration, and the more recent speculations about
life-ending doomsday asteroids. Bennett’s narrative lays bare, often in overwhelming
detail, the crass political exploitation of fears manufactured by government and the
scientific establishment to justify enormous expenditures for projects of dubious value
ostensibly to protect against highly unlikely catastrophes from outer space. Bennett’s
main conclusion is that the science establishment has frittered away its independence
to a power-hungry government, with government funding of science serving as the
enabling juice. Whatever public benefits might be ascribed to such endeavors, the
argument of The Doomsday Lobby is that this game is rigged and entails substantial
costs to taxpayers.
Several notable studies that have examined the actual process of government
funding of science have reached similar conclusions: for example, Joseph P. Martino’s
Science Funding (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992); James D. Savage’s
Funding Science in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and
Michael Grough’s Politicizing Science (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 2003).
Bennett, however, also performs a singularly important service by demonstrating that
basic scientific research can do fine in the absence of government funding. His case in
point is the emergence and rise to world-class prominence of astronomical research
and observatories in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century,
all financed privately by benefactors, donations, and scientists themselves. This
case study is important because simply highlighting the inefficiencies of government
funding of science, the politicization of science, and the purposes to which such
science is put are not sufficient to seal the case against government funding of science.
Bennett stakes out this position in the book’s first sentence: “Federal patronage of
science was never contemplated by the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution” (p. 1).
Thus reorienting the terms of the debate, he demonstrates that private science not
only occurred but also outperformed government science.
Bennett’s approach is not geared to technical economics. Readers will certainly
acquire a deep appreciation of the historical narrative he presents, but they are not
presented with a critical analysis of the economic arguments commonly used to
justify government funding of science. These arguments, dating from the 1950s,
claim that privately funded basic science would suffer persistent underfunding
because of the nonappropriability of scientific knowledge and the “free riding” that
would ensue. The resulting market failure, it is argued, implies that securing the
optimal “quantity” of such knowledge requires government subsidization. One
might plausibly argue that such matters are really fodder for another book, yet this
market-failure claim remains as a kind of “presence” left hanging for the reader.
Although the absence of discussion of this issue does not diminish the force of
Bennett’s overall argument, tackling the issue probably would have made that argument
more persuasive.
Implicit throughout the book, Bennett’s argument against government funding
of science surfaces again in the final chapter as being “grounded on a healthy skepticism
of state power,” power geared to redistributing wealth “to the most politically
potent actors” (p. 187), among whom academic institutions and scientists figure
prominently. Whether those actors are motivated by visions of human habitation of
Mars, as discussed in chapter 5, or anthropogenic global warming (pp. 189–92),
Bennett correctly hones in on government funding as the key ingredient in the
politicization of science and the concomitant government control of science. Government
policy generally precedes the science underpinning it, giving rise to increased
funding for the “right” science and dissuading funding for “critics,” as amply illustrated
in recent funding of climatological science. The problem, however, is not that
government policymakers and bureaucrats have their own biases; instead, the problem
is that because government by a wide margin is the Big Player in science funding
relative to private sources, it has the capacity to dominate the kind of research that
is funded and then to implement policy based on that science. That the government
alone can tax private citizens to fund such science gives it an advantage that no
private entity can match. These conditions give us reason to suspect that with increasing
government funding of science, policymaking will increasingly reflect
government science. This tendency, of course, presents difficulties because dislodging
incorrect science will become more challenging. Government policies that are partially
defended on scientific grounds (for example, carbon taxation) will become
increasingly self-referential.
Economists have tried with little effect to design incentive schemes to reform the
politicization of science and the kind of cronyism that appears to permeate the
funding agencies. Even Michael Polanyi, who argued so eloquently and persuasively
for scientists’ autonomy to pursue their inquiries free of political pressures, favored
government funding of science. In contrast, Bennett expresses deep skepticism of
government funding of science, maintaining that “piecemeal reforms of the system
are bound to fail” (p. 188) and “seem truly quixotic” (p. 194). To his credit, he
advocates a return to a funding system based on the pursuit of knowledge “under
private, corporate, philanthropic, and cooperative patronage” (p. 194) and urges that
it is time “for another look at the virtues of private science” (p. 194).
Bennett’s book will appeal to a large swath of readers with a bent toward the
history of science and who are concerned about the increasing role science has come
to play in justifying the government’s policy choices. His account of the government’s
takeover of the space program is both a compelling and an unsettling story because of
the ease with which this takeover was accomplished. Once past the book’s catchy title,
the reader will see that it is a thoughtful, serious (though disarmingly witty), and
well-researched work.
Buy The Doomsday Lobby: Hype and Panic from Sputniks, Martians, and Marauding Meteors at Amazon.com for $24.95 (Paperback)
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Volume 16 Number 2
Fall 2011
Independent Review Articles on Related Subjects
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