No Invitation to APSA for You Buddy!!!!
I’m often critical of my own discipline, but that’s ok because it’s cosa nostra! Fellow Political Science bloggers at The Monkey Cage are rightly peeved (and here) over an amendment offered by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn to prohibit NSF funding for Political Science research. Here’s Coburn gettin’ all Thomas Kuhn on us:
NSF spent $91.3 million over the last 10 years on political “science.” This amount could have been directed towards the study of biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. These are real fields of science in which new discoveries can yield real improvements in the lives of everyone.
Ouch! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Coburn was a levying a reasoned critique against a behavioralist approach to the study of social and political phenomena that perhaps tries to mirror the natural sciences too closely. It’s like he read David Easton’s 1969 address at the American Political Science Association where he calls on political scientists to ask more relevant questions and create a “new behavioral revolution” in political science. Maybe Coburn is a devotee of Bent Flyvbjerg and his book Making Social Science Matter where the Dutch Planner calls for a more phronetic rather than epistemological approach to social research. Maybe he’s read the vast literature on action research.… ok, back to reality. Here’s his big case.:
(political scientists) may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.
Wow! Say what you want about behavioralists, but Gary King is not John King standing in front of an interactive map. There is a place for advancing general knowledge about why people act the way they do with regard to politics. This last paragraph shows a disdain for voters. “Americans who have an interest in electoral politics”? Am I pollyanna or shouldn’t that be everyone?
Man, we Poly Sci types gotta’ get the word out! I’m glad I don’t teach at Oklahoma State!!!!
Comments 4
rkatclu — October 8, 2009
Justice Scalia raised some eyebrows recently when he said "I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise."
Senator Coburn seems to be making the same basic argument: it would be a net benefit to society if human capital was reallocated from 'unproductive' disciplines (i.e. social sciences) toward more 'productive' disciplines.
Re a "myriad of viewpoints": what could go wrong?
jose — October 8, 2009
Nice point Ryan...but should that apply to all of academia? Love the comic!
rkatclu — October 8, 2009
I think most people will agree that productivity is a good thing. The next, more difficult question becomes productivity as defined by whom?
Moving on, if some disciplines are assumed to be more "productive" than others, I think it's also reasonable to assume that within a discipline some researchers are also more "productive" than others. (This might be a good time to invoke the pseudoscientific "80-20 rule".) So in answer to your question - yes.
However, I think it's fairly evident that Senator Coburn is singling out Political Science for reasons other than utility. The litany of research projects Coburn objects to includes several politically sensitive topics such as American military conflicts, enemy combatants, why people vote Republican despite contrary economic incentives, and research by liberal economist Paul Krugman.
If Senator Coburn doesn't appreciate the value of a particular project, it does not necessarily follow that the project has no value...on the other hand Congress should exercise some control over how public funds are allocated. I think the criteria for NSF grants should be as follows:
(1) Broad probable value to the public equal to or greater than the the value of the grant
(2) Is unlikely to be funded without a government grant
I would assume that much of what Coburn would call "productive" research attracts private funding because it is potentially profitable.
Someone should also remind Senator Coburn that value is not always immediately apparent or quantifiable (particularly at the grant stage). There have been many accidental or innocuous discoveries which yielded valuable results later on.
rkatclu — October 10, 2009
Some further thoughts on the issue.
Senator Coburn lists several examples of what he considers "real" scientific progress. They are all what might be termed technological advances.
However, there is both a psychological and a technological aspect to improving human functions. As not all problems (or all solutions) are technological, a perspective which ignores one of these aspects is not particularly realistic or helpful.
Though I don't wish to imply an artificial dichotomy, analogies to conceptual distinctions between "hardware/software" and "user/tool" are useful here. Few people would consider it optimal for an aspiring musician to spend all their money on instruments and none on lessons...
In many ways our rate of technological improvement has outpaced our rate of self-improvement. This is evident in a number of situations such as automotive collisions, antibiotic treatments, safe computing and personal health where we have powerful technologies but bad practices.