"But it wasn't until the late 19th century when Johns Hopkins University was founded as the Nation's first research university.... But around World War II is when the universities and the federal government really got to work with each other.... The idea was that the universities would get this research funding, it would fuel their labs, it would fuel the scientist,
and then that research would flow into corporate America. It would flow into other parts of the government, other parts of academia. And the result was the country got new pharmaceutical drugs, new technology, Nobel Prize winners come out of university labs.... Now it's tens of billions of dollars a year that flow from the federal government down to the universities.... You know, you've got the University of Georgia, which for example, was getting federal funding for a lab that focused on peanuts. You know, Illinois, they get money for insulin research.... When you start talking about cutting research funding, the trickle down effect is enormous.... It's cutting off potentially state universities near you...."
Says NYT reporter Alan Blinder, in today's episode of "The Daily" podcast,
"Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education" (Podscribe link).
How did Georgia get all that money for peanut research? Are we supposed to think that's not super-elite, that shows the money is widely distributed and flows freely and equally — to the state universities as well as the Ivies — and the federal government is supporting research on practical things that benefit the general populace?
Or do we start wondering if there's something corrupt? I pursued my suspicion on Grok — you can read it
here. I'll just quote one snappy sentence: "Georgia’s political muscle, peanut-centric identity, and strategic storytelling might give it an unfair leg up, leaving other universities and crops to wonder if the game’s rigged."
Posts
62 comments:
Gimme a break. Way too much wasted on research. When are they going to figure out how to restore sight to the blind?
When are they going to figure out how to restore sight to the blind?
Musk is working on that, I believe on his own dime.
No pun intended, "Alan Blinder" is also the name of a Princeton economist and former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve.
The infrastructure to support all this research has become unwieldly and cumbersome. That is the problem.
The Georgia money is just peanuts.
They would have been restoring sight to the blind by now, had saint ronald not cut off stem cell research in the early 80s for the sake of a few fringe votes.
Are law professors jealous of the big bucks that go to science?
As a JHU grad i can tell that the admin overhead is pretty ridiculous. When trump started making noise about this I checked overhead rates for NIH grants versus March of Dimes (which is a significant funder at Hopkins): night and day.
Missing from this discussion is the massive overhead (70%) charged to the research funding, which is stripped out by the universities and used for whatever purpose they choose.
When it was suggested overhead be limited to 15% of the research funds, the universities went "nuts".
So it began to invest in research real things that are built or grown. How much is still going to that, as opposed to bureaucratic administrators or unserious arts and soft "sciences"?
No wondering here. The whole system is corrupted.
Alan Blinder just scroll on by
Grok: "leaving other universities and crops to wonder if the game’s rigged [in favor of peanuts]"
I mean, come on - that Mr Peanut, with his top hat, monocle, and spats, just screams oligarch!
JSM
jim said...
“They would have been restoring sight to the blind by now, had saint ronald not cut off stem cell research in the early 80s for the sake of a few fringe votes.”
That’s not new technology. A Jewish guy was doing that 2,000 years ago.
Peanuts is a good example of the utility of public research funding. Peanuts are an important crop in Georgia, but peanut farmers do not have the resources on their own to fund research into better methods of peanut farming, curing various peanut plant diseases, etc. I guess you could argue there should be a giant Big Peanut corporation that might do such things, but that has its own problems. Instead, the public funds research into peanut agriculture, which benefits the broader economy.
Likewise, we fund research into many other things, some of which may appear impractical, but that form the basis for future inventions. The US economy dominates the world because of our continuous technological innovation. It's hard to imagine anyone would want to compromise that.
People here complain about the overhead rates as if it's a waste of money - I don't think that's true. If that's a concern, change the law so that recipients should itemize those overhead costs. Currently, they are not allowed to itemize them because they are included in the overhead so they should not be double counted. Those costs are, however, audited by the government and negotiated annually.
Everyone asks about the funding for cancer research, that something is fishy with the trillions of funds thrown at it. But they don't realize how specialized cancer research is and how many types of cancer there are. Its a complicated process, but if cancer could be cured with one pill, how many ancillary products would be wiped out and how many jobs lost because of it? And how much would the drug companies charge for that one pill?
they have billion dollar endowments what are they using them for,
He conflates research with knowledge, and, more importantly, with skill and development. The goal is to mitigate progress and restore university charters and productivity. The goal is to make education affordable and available without price sharing/shifting and forward-looking debt in redistributive change schemes.
Sputnik and the space race were in there somewhere, weren't they -- and before that the race to the A-bomb and H-bomb? The goal wasn't to benefit corporations or consumers but to win the war and then beat the Russians to the moon. The point now isn't to cut off the research funding, but to cut out all the administrative overhead.
Straw man fallacies abound. The objective of DOGE is to reduce government, not eliminate it. The objectives for funding research institutions is no different. Should we be funding junk research? That's the question, not whether Trump's 'escalating' criticism is a valid war declaration or not.
Are tornadoes gay? Are peanuts gender normative? Is climate Change affecting transgender tendencies as they relate to body piercings? Should there be stricter funding protocols when getting these kinds of research proposals? This is all largely an anile pearl-clutching session at the NYT kabuki theater.
"Georgia's peanut-centric identity." Damn you Jimmy Carter, even from the grave you torment us.
So far as agricultural and food science research are concerned, state colleges and universities were doing that before the federal government began giving grants. Ask Mr. LaFollette about that.
And so far as the humanities are involved, has the shift from college to research university been wholly positive? Is it sustainable? Could we have reached the point when we should be paying professors to not publish?
In the eighties, I was stationed at the Naval Dental Research Institute. Our overhead was at best 5%, due to the nature of the Navy’s regulations. Our defining moment was breeding a rat that could suffer periodontal disease. This breed is still currently in use around the globe. All for less than $400K.
Never fails - a potentially good and reasonable relationship between government and any other enterprise that involves the government paying for the enterprise thing winds up enticing many grifters to insert themselves in the chain of procurement. The government has to pay more and more and the other enterprise gets a smaller and smaller percentage of the cash outlay. The grifters amass and greedily feed on the initial relationship until it's completely unsustainable, and thus destroy themselves in a ginormous gastronomic explosion. They never know when to stop.
How Much of "Georgia's Peanut Research" money went to a small farmer in Plains Georgia?
The higher education INDUSTRY is always playing the game of "Wow, we give drugs that cure cancer and scientificy stuff you l love" thereby ignoring all the graft, corruption, fraud, waste and abuse going on. Trust me, we the people can live quite nicely if the higher education INDUSTRY gets its outlays cut by 10 percent.
"The idea was that the universities would get this research funding..."
Was the idea that that government would borrow that money in order to give it away?
Steven reminds us, that (according to Him), not just Every Dollar, but EVERY SINGLE CENT, "benefits the broader economy", because The Government is PERFECT (in Each and EVERY Form)
There are .."other things, some of which may appear impractical, but that form the basis for future inventions."
The US economy dominates the world because of Government Spending..
Stop providing research MILLIONS for creating Gay Peanuts?
Better start learning RUSSIAN!!!
You heard it from Steven! and He KNOWS What He is Talking About!
The ONLY way to get this under control is cut like a maniac and then reinstate what is needed. Many have asked for zero based budgeting for decades. This is it with a chainsaw.
That bit of history sounds off to me. War time research was mainly concerned with producing militarily useful results and could better be described as engineering, from radar to penicillin. Even math got a look in for logistics and target tracking. The results drove manufacturing because wars require products, not just paper. Hence, the military/industrial complex. Universities managed some of those efforts, radar in particular, but it wasn't like they had huge research groups of their own. The NY Times snippet sounds more political than historical.
Academia has become a cabal of vile partisan political institutions running on US Treasury graft and corruption, high tuition from the productive economy and the generosity and quid pro quo of alumni and others what won economically. Use that money for your research…
"I mean, come on - that Mr Peanut, with his top hat, monocle, and spats, just screams oligarch!"
Mr. Peanut is one of my favorite mascots, but let's be clear about what his rich-guy get-up means. It's to contradict the perception that peanuts are lowly.
I would feel a great deal more sympathy if political science grants weren't included in the NSF program, if datasets were shared and there were consequences for results not being able to duplicated.
…because tradition! isn’t a compelling argument…
The University of Nebraska developed McRib. I don't know if it was state or federal funding.
And, of course, UNL has its tractor testing lab.
jim said...
“They would have been restoring sight to the blind by now, had saint ronald not cut off stem cell research in the early 80s for the sake of a few fringe votes.”
Fake history. Back then, the primary source of stem cells was from aborted fetuses. Abortion was and is not a fringe issue. In the end, fetal stem cell research continued but hasn’t produced much of value. Adult stem cells is another matter. It’s proven very useful for things like stem cell treatment for cancer.
Not all history is equal. Research in the hard sciences and medicine has paid off for the most part. Research in the “social sciences”, critical race theory, DEI, etc has produced junk, leading to “math is racist”, “physics is white superiority”, and the like. Junk research from junk people.
Too much research is not subjected to replication or rigorous examination. No one wants to pay for or perform replication, even in the hard sciences. This has led to a lot of error filled or outright fraudulent research getting published and even accepted. For 20 years, the NIH blocked research on anything but plaque causing Alzheimers Disease, only to learn that the original research was fraudulent. Billions were spent of research into a false cause for the horrible disease and 20 years were lost.
Anyone who wants to ensure the most productive use of research institution funds need only require that the researching institution have proverbial "skin" in its research game.
E.g., match each $1.00 in government funding with, say, each irrevocably committed $1.00 or $1.50 in institutional funding, each program to be audited and reviewed annually for measured progress toward defined objectives. Maybe include a 80-20 or 60-40 split of any remunerative commercialization of the research topic.
Each program to be voluntarily terminable by either party on 6 months notice, with any remaining funds* to be returned pro rata to the funding entity.
* monthly expenses during that terminating 6 month period being limited to the monthly average during the 12 months immediately preceding the notice of termination.
...or something like that.
Skin. In. The. Game.
Gilbar: "Stop providing research MILLIONS for creating Gay Peanuts?"
Well, Mr Peanut is a bit of a boulevardier, if you know what I mean and I think you do....
Prof: "Mr. Peanut['s]...rich-guy get-up [is] to contradict the perception that peanuts are lowly."
I did not know that! Makes sense - break them out of the beer hall and into polite society.
JSM
I read this in print and didn't catch the glaring mistake. Federal government has been supporting research in some ways since the founders. I write of agricultural research--the founders were into improving breeds of animals and plants. In the 19th century we started publicizing results. Meanwhile at the local and state levels we had agricultural societies devoted to the same cause.
By the late 19th century we were funding research. As for peanut research, George Washington Carver comes to mind.
See this https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/agricultural-research-service-history-innovation
The common thread is--an organized industry creates an lobby to get support for the industry, whether that's the March of Dimes for polio research, Ag research stations for peanuts..., or DARPA for the internet.
Forgot to point out--the '"state universities," many of them were and are land-grant colleges, funded by Lincoln initially and supported ever since. Every state has at least one.
When you own park place and boardwalk you can eat anything they damn well please.
This whole article is one we've seen before whenever anyone wants to rein in spending that the DNC-MSM likes. Give us a blank check or we cant (cure Cancer, defend the country, keep yosemite open, help Grandma, etc.).
And don't enforce the immigration laws or secure the border or poor Jose or magmabo will die in poverty or Mrs. Hussain will have to wear a hijib and get beaten by Mr. Hussain. Or crops will rot in the fields.
Universities are great places for research, they use slave graduate student labor. It works for hard science and engineering ( with lots of military applications) but not so much for medicine and psychology. Those have a reproducibility crisis.
The government can’t spend money only on research that will pay off, that would break everyone’s heart in humanities.
It is amazing how rich half of higher ed is. Lots of walnut paneling for the mighty while the undergrads sit in cinder block rooms.
Of course, the question is HOW MUCH research funding the Government should provide. Current levels might be too much or too little. Just saying that some research funding does some good proves nothing. It doesn't even prove the funding's benefits outweigh the cost of the funding. Perhaps the optimal level of funding is zero even if there is some benefit.
Steven said "Those costs are, however, audited by the government and negotiated annually" and which party has any incentive to minimize the overhead cost? Universities want as much as possible regardless of whether it's justified and the government bureaucracy just wants to maximize their budget and have grounds to ask for even more money in the next budget. Both sides of the table have zero incentive to care about and plenty of incentive to inflate the administration costs and it's evident they've done just that.
Ivory towers are falling down, falling down...
The problem is that they're just shoveling money at the universities for research without regard to the practicallity of the research. I like peanuts just as much an anyone, but we've been researching peanuts for over 100 years. It could be that we've learned all that we need to know about the peanut.
jim said...
"They would have been restoring sight to the blind by now, had saint ronald not cut off stem cell research in the early 80s for the sake of a few fringe votes."
There is no proof for that. Don't forget that there has been plenty of research into stem cells for decades now by entities other than the federal government and there's been no breakthrough regarding the restoration of sight.
Stem cells may have certian uses, but a lot of people were duped into thinking that it was some miracle technology that would cure everything.
This also raises another point: How much of this federally funded research is redundant because so many other entities are doing research along the same lines?
“ How did Georgia get all that money for peanut research?”
Yeah, Big Peach needs to upgrade its lobbying game.
Yes, there were land grant universities. That was a fairly hands-off form of government involvement. Offering a one-time grant and then letting institutions run themselves is more acceptable than continually having to feed the beast to an extent that benefits the beast more than the rest of society.
"When you start talking about cutting research funding, the trickle down effect is enormous.... It's cutting off potentially state universities near you...."
Nobody ever seems to wonder what's being cut off when that money is being taken for spending on research.
The American Voter is far too stupid to know what research is worthy of federal funding and what is not; the election of Donald Trump proves that. That's why we have the National Academy of Sciences, to make those decisions. The Academicians decide, the Taxpayers foot the bill, and both benefit.
"It's a win-win situation," says the NAS. "The fact that we win considerably harder than you do is just the icing on the cake."
You should watch this video Quaestor .. In it Sabin Hassenfelder relates the story of pushback she received for calling out published papers in physics that were simply nonsense. The letter writer asked her to keep it confidential, but told her that getting grants from the US govt to write these nonsense papers was the only way for some "scientists" to stay in the US, otherwise they would be sent back home to starve. Much of physics has turned into a giant, government funded cargo cult.
But you go ahead and cling to your pretty little notions of non corruptible scientists who are not at all influenced by access to easy and unaccountable cash.
Since we're discussing peanuts, Georgia, and Jimmy Carter, this seems relevant:
Five or ten years ago I realized I'd missed one of the best puns ever, thinking of it 30+ years too late. Carter was governor of Georgia before he was president, so you could say he "put the goober in goobernatorial". (With the goober/guber- mismatch, it works better spoken than written.) I Googled the phrase, and found that 17 people had beaten me to it, but none of them were writing about Carter, and most of their targets weren't even governors. Pathetic!
"But you go ahead and cling to your pretty little notions of non corruptible scientists who are not at all influenced by access to easy and unaccountable cash."
This is what I get for not engaging in constant sarcasm.
And thanks for the link to Sabine Hossenfelder's channel, though redundant. I've been a subscriber for well over a year.
We live in an age where parody is dead. You can never go over the top.
Run the program like DARPA. Only verifiable results get the prize.
Jaq,
You really do need to get your sarcasm detector recalibrating. With all due respect, there were a number of very modest things in there that should have tipped you off.
Fraud, waste, and abuse abound in the government money give-aways. $280 billion went missing from the covid "stimulus" that was thrown around like fairy dust. The research industry is no exception.
UGA's Ag Department has a good reputation, and peanuts are an inexpensive international agricultural crop to provide nutrition. This is not some humanities department playing with gender. The overhead admin should be limited, but our state tends to use its funding wisely when we have Republican governors.
There's a lot of good private research going on right now in the food industry, some of it fueled by interest in food shows. I think of Food Network as being the digital equivalent of the old-time harvest fairs, which featured fierce competition in activities such as pie baking and brought communities together. This is all good news.
Georgia is peanut-centric. A long time ago, it used to be rice-centric, then we traded dominance in rice for peaches with South Carolina. But peanuts were always an agricultural staple, and then pine tree crops that supply a great deal of domestic lumber and grow in terrible terrain. And they are crops, grown like any other crop. Want cheaper, faster-growing pine trees for homebuilding?
Developing such things is what state universities are supposed to do.
I still approve of auditing the whole system and directing research money to credible scientists.
Of course Tina. That's why I brought up DARPA. DARPA doesn't invent anything and it doesn't fund most of its research. It sees a problem it would like to address and offers prizes to competitors. Any where from tens of thousands to millions. The projects and prize amounts are on their website.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.