“Give Me Money!”

25 May 2012 at 9:53 am Peter G. Klein

| Peter Klein |

I’ve received quite a few emails from various academic organizations asking me to help defeat the Flake Amendment, which would eliminate National Science Foundation funding for political science research. The American Political Science Association is all over this, even publishing a virtual special issue of APSR highlighting NSF-funded research results.

Ironically, none of the arguments I’ve seen for preserving public funding of social science research makes an argument consistent with, well, social-science research. All take the form: “Government funding has supported the following important research findings, which have had the following social benefits.” This argument receives three Fs for research design. First, there is no counterfactual. The point isn’t whether government-funded research result X is good, but whether it’s better than Y, the research result that would have obtained in the absence of government funding. Government funding doesn’t simply increase the quantity of research, it shapes the direction of research. How do we know NSF-funded work isn’t crowding out even more valuable work?

Second, there is no attempt at causal identification. Where are the natural experiments, the randomized controlled trials, the valid instruments? We already know that a main effect of government funding of hard science is to increase the wages of scientists, not the quality or quantity of research. Even if NSF funds good political science research, how do we know the funding is the cause, not the consequence, of the research?

Third, there is no cost-benefit analysis. The lobbying statements simply list purported benefits. Well, sure, the government could give me hundreds of millions of dollars and I’d do some good with it too. Would those benefits exceed the costs? “Political science research has wide-spread effects beyond specific projects,” say the APSA’s talking points. Maybe so, but what about the effects of those goods and services that would have been produced with the taxpayer dollars that went to NSF? Has nobody at the Monkey Cage read Bastiat?

Put differently, I’m certain the APSR would desk-reject an empirical paper with the logical structure of this argument for funding!

My advice to social scientists seeking government funding is to start by acting like social scientists, not K Streeters.

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Entry filed under: - Klein -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science, Myths and Realities, Public Policy / Political Economy.