{"id":3331,"date":"2015-05-06T17:41:48","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T22:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=3331"},"modified":"2015-05-06T17:45:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T22:45:01","slug":"research-on-a-potato-chip-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2015\/05\/06\/research-on-a-potato-chip-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"Research on a Potato Chip Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, our former university president Mark Yudof quipped that &#8220;Americans spend more on potato chips than research &#8211; maybe they like the flavor better.&#8221; We haven&#8217;t checked Mr. Yudof&#8217;s math, but his points are well-taken. First, research budgets have been\u00a0lean,\u00a0<em>particularly\u00a0<\/em>in the social sciences. Second, our research sometimes unearths truths that our leaders and citizens may find distasteful, <em>particularly\u00a0<\/em>in the social sciences.<\/p>\n<p>The Society Pages is built\u00a0on the belief that social scientific information, analysis, and perspective is vital and necessary for policy makers, the general public, and the continued health and betterment of society. Yet producing\u00a0this knowledge and insight requires some degree of resources and support. Today, one of the key U.S. sources of financial support for that work \u2014the National Science Foundation\u2014is currently under scrutiny and attack.<\/p>\n<p>On April 15, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith introduced the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2015 (H.R. 1806), the authorization bill for the National Science Foundation (NSF). This bill, a variation of which was floated last year as well, would impose a devastating\u00a045% cut on the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate&#8211;effectively eliminating grant funding for sociology and the other social sciences.\u00a0NSF review panels have generally done a terrific job identifying important research ideas to fund. Unfortunately, they must often reject a great number of equally important research ideas for lack of funds. A 45 percent cut would indeed be devastating.<\/p>\n<p>Apart from our capacity to fund needed research, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lawandsociety.org\/docs\/LSA_Competes_Act_Statement_5-4-15.pdf\">Law &amp; Society Association<\/a>\u00a0explains how the proposed bill could diminish the\u00a0role of scientific experts and increase the role of political actors in setting scientific priorities.\u00a0If you are a member of the American Sociological Association or another social science association, you probably already received\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/speak4sociology.org\/2015\/05\/06\/from-the-asa-president-take-action-on-nsf-sbe-funding\/\">a message<\/a> encouraging you to contact your local Congressperson (and university officials) to reiterate the harm that this bill would do to core social scientific research and analysis. And if you just want to know more about the details of these proposed cuts, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cossa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/House-COMPETES-Analysis-April-2015-2.pdf\">Consortium of Social Science Association\u2019s analysis<\/a> is a good place to start<strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you like what we do on The Society Pages, please consider acting on behalf of social science research more generally. Having a potato-chip budget has been tough enough.\u00a0We shouldn&#8217;t leave social science researchers\u00a0with\u00a0the crumbs in the bottom of the bag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, our former university president Mark Yudof quipped that &#8220;Americans spend more on potato chips than research &#8211; maybe they like the flavor better.&#8221; We haven&#8217;t checked Mr. Yudof&#8217;s math, but his points are well-taken. First, research budgets have been\u00a0lean,\u00a0particularly\u00a0in the social sciences. Second, our research sometimes unearths truths that our leaders and citizens [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3331"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3334,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions\/3334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}