In editing Contexts articles, one of the first phrases we often cut from conclusions is the line “more research on this topic is required.” We do this because it usually is so obvious and trite, and because we believe that our readers are generally more interested in what we social scientists actually know than what we don’t know. Yet, in an increasingly angry, anti-intellectual culture, we cannot take the need for more social research for granted.

The latest to make this point is one of our favorite public purveyors of social science, New York Times columnist David Brooks. It comes in the context of a column chastising Congress for considering a bill that would eliminate funding for the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

“Today,” Brooks writes, “we are in the middle of a golden age of behavioral research. Thousands of researchers are studying the way actual behavior differs from the way we assume people behave. They are coming up with more accurate theories of who we are, and scores of real world applications.” Brooks goes on to provide a couple of fascinating examples of this kind of work. But the most important point of the piece is the basic insight that such research isn’t particularly costly and typically leads to much cheaper, more effective social programs and public policy. “Cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits,” as Brooks puts it, “is exactly how budgets should not be balanced.”

His closing line on this point is a doozie, aimed, I think, at erstwhile patriots and their contradictory economic principles and nationalistic pride. “Cutting off financing for this sort of research now is like cutting off navigation financing just as Columbus hit the shoreline of the New World.”