Measuring federal science ROI….

Behind the pay-wall, but well worth it: from Paul Baskin, in the Chronicle, here.  Money quote:

And yet, after years of trying, the science community still cannot answer a simple question, one that has gained the growing attention of policy makers as the economy limps along: How much payback, in real dollars, does science spending actually provide?

Turns out the answer to this question is not exactly easy to get at. You can readily underestimate it by acting as if federal science R&D was just like building a highway (and that’s what NIH Director Francis Collins apparently does), but to get at the real value, you need to explore the provenance of just about every item made or sold–from iPhones to Boeing jets.

Is it worth doing? I think the answer is yes. Society needs to understand concretely what it’s buying in order to continue spending the big bucks (and yes, the US is still the giant when it comes to this kind of research investment).

So here’s a bleg: how might we turn this into a Fermi Problem?

Phase Shift on Fiscal Cliff

Maybe it’s something that’s been added to the drinking water, but the signals coming out of the GOP over the last 48 hrs, make me still more optimistic that the fiscal cliff can be avoided. The key driver is the element of last year’s Budget Control Act that automates disaster (i.e. the cliff) without positive action on the part of Congress and the President. Specifically, the Bush tax cuts will go away (all of them) on January 1, 2013 without agreement. So the President can effectively do nothing and the House GOP automatically loses what they care about most. That’s a powerful driver.

The outlines of an agreement prior to January 1 look like this: the GOP agrees to a Bush tax sunset for the very rich, the President agrees to continue the Bush tax cuts for the middle class. Sequestration goes away in favor of targeted cuts to discretionary spending. Debt ceiling increase agreed to. And a commitment to do major tax reform in the new Congress with an effective enforcement mechanism.

It’s really that simple.

The long term challenge will be to get tax reform right, and to figure out real ways to bend the health care curve down, even with Obamacare.

That’s not simple.

Stay tuned….

A Chess Master and a Silicon Valley Giant…

From today’s FT, Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel weigh in on the grand challenges of our times here.

Money quote:


Our culture has not caught up with the reality of stagnation. Our institutions are addicted to incrementalism. The only huge leap proposed is a leap backward: to slow down for the environment’s sake. But the only means for humanity to consume fewer resources is through new technology.


Seems that there are two huge elephants in the room here: geoengineering as a response to climate change and private-development of space travel as an alternative to NASA-like approaches. Why? Because these are examples of individuals funding and supporting radically new technology as an alternative to current incremental approaches.

Status quo…my predictions as regards science policy

President Obama has been re-elected for another four year term. The Democrats retained control of the Senate. The GOP retained control of the House. On the surface, one might think this would be a prescription for another four years of political paralysis…

One might think. But my sense is that two things have fundamentally changed: first, Obama doesn’t have to run for re-election again. The second is that the Affordable Care Act (more colloquially known as Obamacare ) will become a stable piece of the American social contract–it’s here to stay I think.

This is a President who has been reasonably friendly to science. He appointed scientists to high positions in his first administration, he has supported the two US flagship science agencies (the NSF and NIH), and he speaks to policy issues with the measured tones that scientists tend to be comfortable with.

With the political “room to run” of a second term, and the prospect of Obamacare becoming a legacy, there’s every reason to believe that the President will push hard to support science so that it can be leveraged to make health care more affordable. But to do this, he’ll need a long-term budget deal. Not only does that mean avoiding the fiscal cliff (and the recession it would bring), it also means coming to some agreement with the House GOP on taxes and fiscal policy. I’m beginning to think this may be more likely.

So with that preamble, my predictions:

–NSF and NIH will survive and even thrive.

–“Race to the Top”, as a model, will be expanded beyond education into science R&D arenas.

–Convergent, team-based science and technology investments will expand, even as the old single PI model perhaps contracts–this may start to change the character of American science.

–US National Labs will accelerate a process of reinvention (that I think may have already begun) so that they may better positioned to play a central role

–More US medical schools, but with a diversity of different models.

Overall, I’m optimistic.

Election Day 2012…

It’s upon us here in the States. I haven’t a clue how it’ll come out, but I have to say…the campaign went on too long and it was entirely too negative. We can do better.

On the other hand, standing in line this morning at my precinct polling place, I was reminded of the essential element of democracy here that Alexis de Toqueville wrote about back in the 19th century–it’s still somehow very much alive. I could see it in the smiles, easy civility and patience of my neighbors, even as they are deeply divided on who should be running this nation.

I expect American science will continue to survive and somehow even thrive in any case. If there’s a clear cut winner by tomorrow, we’ll consider the probabilities for what comes next in science policy in the next blog entry.

Sit back and enjoy the show this evening….and remember, we’re all pundits now.

Future of Higher Education Conference

I’ve been attending the past few days….it’s here at George Mason. Of course the theme has been systemic change in the way we deliver content to undergraduate learners. In spite of all the talk of MOOCs and learning management systems, I’m struck by two things that aren’t changing: first that in science, the theoretical framework (Professor Jim Trefil mentioned this yesterday) stands apart from the mass of regular course content, waiting to be “discovered” by students enabling them to make sense of so much that must otherwise be memorized (think finally understanding enough quantum mechanics to make sense of organic chemistry). Second, that also in science, today’s factual content is tomorrow’s unreplicated result, religated to the wastebin of history–experiments and the scientific method go on 24/7 and theories (and even the framework!) are on a constantly evolving trajectory.

Technology can help teach science–I use it a lot in my own hybrid cellular neuroscience course for undergraduate majors here at Mason–but it doesn’t solve the problem of getting to the aha! moment when the learner sees a glimpse of the underlying framework that makes sense of all that, otherwise, scattered content.

The Moon Shot Shortage…

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, here’s Jason Pontin’s somewhat poignant piece in MIT Technology Review. Money quote:

I remember sitting in my family’s living room in Berkeley, California, watching the liftoff of Apollo 17 I was five; my mother admonished me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of the Saturn 5 rocket. I vaguely knew that this was the last of the moon missions—but I was absolutely certain that there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. What happened?

That indeed is the question. Pontin thinks that it’s a combination of political and institutional failure combined with the fact that some of our biggest problems really aren’t technological in nature (he uses Malaria as an example and asserts that it’s really a poverty problem).

For myself, I worry that it’s something deeper. Our human brains are evolved, not engineered and they are far from infinitely capable (for details see here).  It may well be that the current global challenges are just too complex for our collective human “mind” to handle–as Pontin points out, if famines are really a result of political failure, then a new Green Revolution isn’t going to solve the problem.

There are a slew of such “human brain limit” problems facing our global society right now–having just ridden out Hurricane Sandy, climate change comes immediately to mind–it may well be that truly understanding our own brains may well be the ultimate example of such a problem (I have a former graduate student working diligently on the theoretical aspects of that issue).

Taken from the standpoint of a human brain limit, a Moon Shot might be viewed as relatively…simple.