Supporting research because it’s cool or because it’s useful

In a recent post, I wrote, “I study social science because it’s interesting and important, not because I think there are buttons we can push.”

Sean Manning adds this:

I think this touches on a basic division. A lot of us would be happy to do and popularize cheap research which gets public funds for the same general reason that arenas and golf clubs and parks get public funds: some people enjoy using them, and more people enjoy watching people using them. This faces direct opposition from neoliberals (people who think that all institutions should be modelled on for-profit corporations) who disagree that satisfying curiosity is a good, but indirect opposition from people who want lots of money for their research and make grandiose claims about how useful their research is. The more institutions become dependant upon funds obtained by promising results, the more they spend and the more expensive that cheap research looks. Lots of people with academic jobs give up applying for grants or refunds because the paperwork created to manage million-dollar grants is so time consuming on a thousand-dollar grant and the delay between applying and actually getting to do the work drains their energy.

One of Richard Feynman’s colleagues already felt ashamed in 1974 to say that he did research because knowing the answer would be cool. And there are books about how the American research university as we know it today grew out of research for the military during WW II.

It’s kind of political, no? Universities are disliked on the left for perpetuating inequality and disliked on the right for providing jobs to a bunch of left-wingers. On the other hand, scientific research is generally thought of as a good thing (with some exceptions such as research on offensive weapons).