Science and the State
So Georgia is picking off top Alabama scientists. Georgia leaders are touting a high "return on investment" in the form of government research contracts. Naturally, AL legislators say this means that the state of Alabama has to spend more on basic science.
To say nothing of the "broken window" problems associated with this line of reasoning, it isn't altogether clear that Alabama's path to prosperity is by investing in high-tech science.
First, Alabama's higher education system is mind-bogglingly inefficient. Replication of services abounds: there are 16 4-year state universities, each with their own administration, each one fighting the others for room at the government trough. There are 3 public universities in Montgomery, a city of about 250,000. There are two in Huntsville, and there are four total on the one-hour stretch of highway 72 between Florence and Huntsville. The state is dotted with community colleges. And so on. It's unlikely that the state will relinquish control of the university system. Until they do, though, some consolidation may be in order: putting Auburn-Montgomery, Troy State-Montgomery, and Alabama State under the same umbrella would economize on state resources, and creating a two- or three-tiered system along the lines of the California system would save even more money.
Also, it is hardly clear that spending state money on science is the way to go. Terence Kealey's brilliant The Economic Laws of Scientific Resarch shows that state funding of basic science doesn't generate all the rewards we usually think it does.
Comments (3)
What it really amounts to is what James O'Connor (Fiscal Crisis of the State) called "social investment." The state underwrites the operating costs of big business (especially technical training, research, and other factors centrally important to high-tech industry). Since business acts collectively through the state to obtain these benefits, the consumption of them is effectively cartelized: it is not an issue of cost competition between firms. And unlike private cartels, there is no danger of defection. And as with all subsidies, it promotes irrationality by distorting price feedback. The firm consuming subsidized factors uses them beyond Pareto optimal levels, so that the economy as a whole relies more intensively on (for example) R&D, and adopts more capital-intensive production methods, than it ordinarily would. As a result, the state promotes technological unemployment.
Published: April 7, 2004 10:57 AM
Alabama isn't alone, of course. I live in the Albany, NY area and there's two "public-private" research centers being built in the area currently. Both are surely crowding out better investments made elsewhere, but that's what passes for economic development in upstate NY these days. Then again, these two new centers will be a drop in the bucket compared to the towering Jehovahs of waste capital to be found in Albany.
Published: April 8, 2004 10:14 AM
The Emory University AIDS boondoggle strikes me as emblematic of the sort of research this funding encourages.
I'm reminded of the film "Topsy-Turvy," a fictionalized account of the making of The Mikado, which received a British Arts Council grant. I've speculated that's why the film contains the superflous swipes at colonialism, and the superflous, politically correct mentions of abortion and heroin addiction.
As an aside, the Lottery-funded HOPE scholarship program mentioned in the article is already bankrupt.
Published: April 12, 2004 5:28 PM