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"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...." This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processe

"Academic funding is all controlled by government bureaucrats and corporate executives...." This is not really true in the US. For example, NSF review processes are basically determined by peers, panels of PhDs who are experts in the field. While their expertise may vary, they generally do a reasonable and fair and scientifically meaningful review. To claim this is all "controlled by government burearcrats" is lazy and mostly wrong.

filoleg 4y ago
> This is not really true in the US. Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding. The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil. Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers. 0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ 1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
- rsfern 4y ago
  The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs). That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention
Haga 4y ago
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filoleg 4y ago

> This is not really true in the US. Maybe not in the most technical sense, but what funds most of the research projects? Government (with NIH being the largest funder of biomedical research in the world), private companies, and non-profits[0]. US government dumps absolutely enormous amounts of money on research funding. The difference in numbers can be pretty stark. I don't have data on hand for the exact breakdown for all research funding in general, but I have numbers for health research specifically (and I expect the trend overall to stay the same regarding research funding overall). Top 3 funders in the world are NIH ($26.1bn), European Commission ($3.7bn), and UK Medical Research Council ($1.3bn). For comparison, the largest non-profit contribution comes from Welcome Trust and is sitting only at $909.1mil, with WHO coming in third at $135mil. Here is a published paper[1] from 2016 containing all these numbers. 0. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ https://undsci.berkeley.edu/who-pays-for-science/ 1. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12961-015-0074-z https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

rsfern 4y ago
The point isn’t that the government doesn’t fund the research or set the big picture priorities, it’s that funding decisions aren’t really made by some random bureaucrat in isolation. In my experience NSF/DOE/DOD program managers are pretty sharp, often moving into that line of work after doing scientific research of their own, and they’re really good at eliciting and synthesizing technical feedback from reviewers (mostly academics and researchers from the national labs). That’s not to say that there are no problems with the funding model, but I think it’s more that it’s difficult to get funding for new high risk ideas either already having funding and attention

Haga 4y ago

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