14 ms·

Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences

286 points by zdw 2y ago

ggm 2y ago
There's a famous quote usually attributed to Churchill, which like all famous quotes is probably apocryphal. It's about somebody saying much the same regarding drafting poets and artists for the war effort. His response was "what's the point of fighting?" And even as apocrypha I think it gets to a point: if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? Sure, NZ is financially fucked. I get it. Cut down all the forests, sell the water, sell the land, sell the bees. Sell the lifestyle to Peter Theil. I like New Zealand. It's not perfect. Cutting social science won't make it better any more than cutting te reo will. "The flogging will continue until morale improves" also comes to mind. Helping the economy by cutting wages and living conditions? Is that what they want people to study? NZ has been broke for decades. They survive on the smell of an oily rag. This is selling the oily rag. (An Ozzie btw)
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > social science (which isn’t a science) This is literally true in the sense that social science isn’t a science because it encompasses numerous sciences, but it is not true if the intent to say “social science (which isn’t science)”. (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a laboratory, but then those issues exist for some phyiscal and life sciences as well.
  - ggm 2y ago
    It's just memetic in many ways. The bar for statistical relevance is low across all fields hard and soft, it used to be you could parade Cyril Burt out but we're well beyond a point where he's different to any discipline, social or not. I should have resisted the temptation to repeat the slur. Demographics couldn't be more important in a world dominated by millions of refugees. Or, for example, we'll be arguing about vaccines forever and having people who study why that is, is important. I think social sciences should be funded properly. I think NZ will regret this, just like the UK lived to regret Thatcher de-funding Russian studies, only to fail to seize advantages in the end of the cold war: insufficient people with skills facing Russia. I'm a computer scientist (which isn't a science)
    - drunkenmagician 2y ago
      I'm a Kiwi, but living abroad now. I have mixed views on this announcement, I do agree with the basic sentiment that NZ is broke and has been for a long time. That means 'decisions' on public spending need to be in the national interest, for the current govt, that translates into 'fiscal interest'. That said, cutting "all" govt funding to social sciences is not the right call. I would have though that a smaller budget and stricter set of criteria for funding would have been a better approach. NZ has always had a 'fringe element' looking for funding for dubious research of limited value, but de-funding everything that is not of economic value feels like the wrong approach.
    - sgt101 2y ago
      I just can't find any reference to Thatcher cutting Russia studies, it's quite a strange thing to imagine given that she presided over the peak of the cold war. Could you help? I know that Blair closed great chunks of the foreign office and that has seriously impacted the UK's ability to represent its interested abroad, but that's not just Russia. I find it hard to imagine what the UK could have done in terms of taking advantage at the end of the cold war. I mean maybe if we had all moved to Germany then we would have been well placed to get the benefits that those folks got. On the other hand we did, eventually, get to shut down the British Army of the Rhine which saved a lot of money, and a bunch of skilled labour from eastern europe migrated to the UK as well. What potential benefits from a Russian engagment could the UK have realised?
      - ggm 2y ago
        Possibly this was a slur against her made at the time but I was told this as a young student at uni in 79-82 window.havw a read of https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-soviet-studies-at-lancaster https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-sov... for context. During the initial rapprochement years British banking was nothing like as present in the Russian denationalisation and the emergence of the oligarch kleptocracy. The decision of the Russian elites to invest in London came much much later.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a laboratory Social sciences have deeply problematic methodologies and the IRB is a cancer that's no longer about ethics but gatekeeping.
- namdnay 2y ago
  I guess this is itself a social science experiment, namely to see if there is a link between doing social science and having "a balanced, happy society" :)
  - jl6 2y ago
    I wonder how much funding will be needed to observe the results?
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  > if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? The implicit claim that you're making is that state funded academic studies of social science are important for a balanced, happy society. But where's the evidence that this is the case? Someone could argue (and at times have) that the state should fund religious institutions because they're necessary for a happy society. But some would counter that religion isn't necessary for a happy society, while others might counter that religion is important for a happy society but that it's unnecessary for the state to support it. If we're making the claim that these things should be funded by the state, and that they're important for a happy society, then those claims should be backed up by some fairly strong evidence.
  - demarq 2y ago
    So how do you get that evidence?
    - gonzobonzo 2y ago
      Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make the claim how to find evidence for it. Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.
      - ashwoods 2y ago
        I think you didn’t get the question. If we were to seek that evidence, who would turn to?
        amarcheschi 2y ago
        Economist! /s
- jl6 2y ago
  > what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? I’m usually supportive of fundamental research where there are no specific benefits known ahead of time, because the track record of fundamental research is pretty good in terms of eventual payoff - but some of the social sciences are definitely on the soft end of this, and the examples given in the article don’t seem to make a strong case for being something NZ needs, when considered alongside all the other things NZ needs.
  - CaptArmchair 2y ago
    I strongly disagree. One of the examples mentioned studies population changes during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research. Such research provides a better understanding of the history and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ society with respect to the economic and political plight of these groups. The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual level, as well as a community level. Our shared past, heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,... are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount within that never-ending debate. In a way, defunding research which studies particular indigenous communities within society is tantamount to effacing those communities from a larger national historical identity. However, doing so will never end that drive communities have to remember and to assert their own history and identity. That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical, cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is fundamental research. And an important one at that.
    - jl6 2y ago
      Do you want to get social sciences defunded? Because this is how you get social sciences defunded. The academic obsession with identity is completely toxic.
- seydor 2y ago
  We are at the age of engineering human behavior and societal engineering is in the realm of STEM. social science is like alchemy in an age where chemistry already exists
  - jyounker 2y ago
    Every time you interview a user or set up a survey to determine customer preferences, you're using techniques developed from social sciences.
    - morkalork 2y ago
      All the video games and online gambling trying to maximize micro transactions and revenue are too.
      - blitzar 2y ago
        Advertising ...
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      It is an interesting point. However, I can do these things without studying social science. Basically what you described is "talking to people" and "gathering information"
    - tomjen3 2y ago
      Mostly you are doing statistics, which is math. Social science (when it is the good thing) also uses statistics to get answers to questions.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    > We are at the age of engineering human behavior and societal engineering is in the realm of STEM. We are definitely not. I'm saying that as someone researching how to use computational methods to model human behavior. We know very little about human behavior/mind/brain or society at that level.
  - naijaboiler 2y ago
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  > what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? avail yourself of the thousands still at work in other allied societies the world has more people at work pursuing pure academics than ever, and they are sharing their work
- jajko 2y ago
  I don't get why NZ is 'fucked'. One of the richest people on the planet, with amazing nature, very, I mean absolutely terrific strategical location. Democracy. Big friends with US. I could go on for a long time. Is it 'fucked' in same way some folks from say Staten island or New Jersey say its fucked since they are not central Manhattan so everything else is subpar or wrong? I don't think rich people want to have their SHTF backup location in shithole, you have prettier cheaper places all over the world, yet folks want to go there. If you meant there are issues, sure they are everywhere, even in nordics or Switzerland. Not an interesting nor helpful position.
  - xyzzy123 2y ago
    "Senior" software engineer salary in NZ is maybe $120k NZD (about $70k USD), median house in Auckland or Wellington (which is where you need to be to earn even that much) is about a million NZD. Cost of living is very high. Maybe f*cked is hyperbole but if you don't already own property it is quite difficult to sustain a reasonable standard of living (let alone "get ahead") as a wage earner. I love NZ but it didn't make economic sense to stay.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      Sounds about the same as the UK ... but that is a median 1 bed flat in London.
    - tjpnz 2y ago
      A million NZD plus however much you spend on fixing it up so it doesn't make you sick or kill you in an earthquake. And after that you're stuck working in a country which outside of a few very niche areas is a complete dead end where tech's concerned. I miss my family, but couldn't bear the thought of continuing my career there.
  - pixelesque 2y ago
    What on earth do you mean by: "One of the richest people on the planet"? National have started an "austerity" programme, tens of thousands of civil servants have been laid off, housing is disgustingly expensive (and the quality of it is awful as well), the price of goods and food is pretty expensive (even dairy products that are produced here are often more expensive than in Europe). The location's only great strategically if you ignore the (huge) future earthquake potential. Cities like Wellington have also had a chronic lack of infrastructure investment, so there are HUGE issues with water / sewage leaks - pretty much every week there's a new water main leaking somewhere in the city. (Have lived here for 10 years, and am looking to return to Europe - things are going downhill pretty fast here IMO).
- naasking 2y ago
  > if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? Do social scientists actually produce the knowledge required to create a balanced, happy society?
- globalnode 2y ago
  is that like saying: if we get rid of all the artists to fight a war is the country really worth saving?
  - ggm 2y ago
    That's the apocryphal Churchill quote.
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  Get right-wingers in, this is what happens to a country. Right wing politics is bad socially, and economically, unless you are already stinkin-rich
throwaway69123 2y ago
[flagged]
- ashton928 2y ago
  That's a big loss indeed... Speaking of which, what have social scientists done recently?
  - dijit 2y ago
    They’re a support framework for macro decision making. All those economics papers you read, all those studies on lifestyle and integration and the effects of migration etc; all come from social sciences. Economics is a social science.
    - kurayashi 2y ago
      Just to add a few from a very quick Wikipedia search: > In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science.[1] [1]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science
    - apocadam 2y ago
      I'm not entirely sure that for the purposes of funding it is. Typically it exists in the Business school/faculty as opposed to arts in NZ.
    - curtisblaine 2y ago
      It's not going really well, is it? It looks like that every political election in the West is a gigantic plea to end or reduce illegal immigration, yet pretty much every study I see about the correlation between illegal immigrants and crime says that yes, illegal immigrants are overrepresented in crime statistics (mainly an effect of them being younger, male and poorer / less educated in average), but somehow crime rates are unaffected by illegal immigration, and never try to explain the "somehow" (the answer is probably that more crimes go unreported and illegal immigrants are not enough yet to tip the global crime scale). The impression is that investigating these topics in too much detail is frown upon (as in: not good for your career) in academia, and it's always more politically prudent to gloss over them. (see for example: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.1.181 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.1.181)
openrisk 2y ago
Last time I checked economics is also a social science... If you have a headache cutting your head is not the optimal remedy.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  No. But cutting the tumour probably is a remedy. The question is are social sciences tumour or the head?
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  social science is kinda like vegan meat tho
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Depends which kind of economics you mean. There's a lot of theoretical mathematics economics that is pretty much applied maths. It can provide some insight into real economics but economists often get carried away with that because it makes the wildly incorrect assumption that everyone is rational and has perfect information. Then there's economics that tries to take actual people into account, which you basically have to do by experiment. E.g. one thing I looked up recently: do blind auctions or open bids gain more profit (answer was inconclusive). That's more like social science. More relevant questions but less reliable answers.
DiscourseFan 2y ago
I don’t know. A lot of the discourse meant for social progress and revolution became gaurded at the highest echelons of the academic system and perverted to suit the needs of the state apparatus. In my mind, the end of this practice means at least some hope of the work moving back to where it needs to go. On the other hand, our society today is highly educated and academic work is just a job. A huge swath of the population goes through school before entering the work force: how are you going to get to them? But, campus organizing has never gone away really, and perhaps it will make things especially difficult for administrators if they don’t have any professors to scapegoat.
- nxobject 2y ago
  The question is: how are you going to fund this type of thought, and find a funder that values dissemination and public engagement? Academics "pay their way" through teaching (even if it's second hand by training TAs that teach students.) Private philanthropy is often embedded in its own social context – when you have lots of money and you're interested in the social sciences, you're likely doing so not because you're engaged in the public. I think this type of work is necessary. It's sad that we have only a handful of people who've thought about society in ways that we can quote... e.g. Chomsky et al. But, sadly, we have to fund the people somehow at least...
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    It will be funded, it will always be funded, just not in public education. Its impossible to root out critical consciousness entirely because that is a condition of possibility of capitalism. But like usual, it might stay in the halls of the wealthiest private institutions instead, where it will not be useful. The crisis will result in radical movement either way, even if its unsuccessful. Imagine 10,000 Luigi Mangiones working together; there are other places this knowledge is disseminated.
grahar64 2y ago
The current government is not very popular, to get in power the current PM had to make a deal with two devils (ACT and NZF). Fortunately they all hate each other and undermine one another at many points
- nxobject 2y ago
  What are the chances of drastic decisions like these getting reversed, if these decisions don't take root too deeply in time?
  - frio 2y ago
    It’s likely a future left-wing government will reintroduce these funds. The problem is the ratcheting effect: it takes no time at all to destroy something like this. Society reacts; people leave, people retrain, we lose the ability to do the thing we used to do. Then, a new government arrives and we rehire into these positions: it takes a lot more money to find people, attract them back to the country, get their programs established… and then the next government arrives and says “wow this is inefficient” and cans it again. NZ in general is starting to suffer from the swings in partisan politics, despite our MMP system. Similar problems happen with bread and butter infrastructure projects.
    - peterashford 2y ago
      True. The current government has taken a torch to everything the prior government did whether it made sense to torch, or not (replacement Cook Strait ferries for example). And they've enacted a bunch of extreme ideologically driven policies that no government left wing nor center could bear to keep. We're in for dizzying swings in direction
gm3dmo 2y ago
As somebody who has lived through about three decades of Powerpoints that begin and end with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs where on earth are the management consultancies supposed to steal their "ideas" from to generate new fads now. I'm for sure none of them have had an original thought of their own.
- fsloth 2y ago
  Not sure if this is for or against, but this is a good opportunity to argument why concepts developed “in humanities” are valuable (in case if it’s not obvious :D ) Maslows hierarchy of needs, while possibly inaccurate, is a very usefull model and concept to have. As our understanding of human condition improves, we need specific terms to understand them. Imagine is there was no word for love or hunger… for aristicracy or oligarchy… etc.
  - naasking 2y ago
    Accuracy and precision is useful. If Maslow's hierarchy of needs is neither, I question how useful it truly is. At best then, it would a narrative device to tell a persuasive story, but the fact that it has no factual basis means you can twist it to tell whatever story you want. This is a problem endemic to social sciences due to the replication crisis. Lots of social scientists in this article are saying that their field is important to the economy, but given they mainly produce results that don't replicate (~30% replicate last I checked), maybe they should focus on improving that so their ROI is actually compelling.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      Funny that you should say that. It's not just the social sciences that are having a replication crisis. [1] So this appears to be some sort of broad social problem that we don't totally understand. Seems like we need people who study societies to help figure it out. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
fsloth 2y ago
As a trained STEM professional the argumentation why STEM over humanities for the society of NZ would be better feels arbitrary and shallow. This looks like a combination of boorish managerialism and politically motivated budgeting - but maybe someone from NZ could comment?
- fedeb95 2y ago
  I wonder why politics is always the last thing being cut...
- peterashford 2y ago
  NZr here. You have it exactly right.
macleginn 2y ago
Someone is probably already working on a grant application, ‘A longitudinal study of a small nation’s divestment from social sciences and the humanities’. They will have to ask for a lot of travel money.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
fcatalan 2y ago
This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain. It was thrown away as the uninteresting rants of beardy old men, to make space for things like some trite dabbling with Word and Excel billed as "digitalization". So now things like History, Literature and many STEM subjects feel completely ungrounded. When my kids have some trouble understanding things and they ask me, the answer is very often something I learned studying Philosophy. So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what the overlords are doing.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. Nothing else to it. Not sure why people should just get funding forever to constantly arrive at the same conclusion.
  - pipe2devnull 2y ago
    I also agree they are bad but to simplify anything down to “it’s bad there’s nothing else to learn” seems like a gross oversimplification.
  - acdha 2y ago
    “What else is there to research about disease? They’re bad, but people get infected.” These are things which shape our world, it’s worth understanding them at a level which doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker – and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always has spin-off benefits, even if that’s just providing a place for people to learn general research skills they take on to the workplace.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by how much? 5) Who uses them without harm? 6) What societal impacts, positive and negative, do they have? And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of those could be a hundred research projects. Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence, you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that just requires a lot of detailed research. For example, compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all, because "social networks bad"?
rwyinuse 2y ago
In my opinion the main problem is that there are too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. It would be better to have fewer scientists with adequate and consistent funding, than lots of underemployed scientists fighting for funding and living under constant uncertainty. Scrapping all support for any particular branch of science is an overreaction, but cutting number of graduates in these fields and focusing funding only on the studies with most practical benefits could make sense. As an example, social scientist studying poverty, unemployment or crime could produce useful information for policymakers to reduce these phenomena, and cutting all funding from such research is probably a bad idea.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Right level of funding in many cases is non-zero. Still balancing for employability and general funding say every 5 years would be reasonable approach for most social sciences. As many of the fields under that moniker produce very useful specialist when run at right scale. And these people might not even need PhDs always.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does" explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange for the long-term promise of the letters after your name, sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate students.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school. Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied. It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence. This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.
michaelt 2y ago
For context, this is "the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund" for "blue sky research" Out of a total university income of $4 billion per annum from a variety of sources https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-university-sector/how-nz-universities-are-funded https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-university-sector/how...
refurb 2y ago
Considering the track record of studies done in the social sciences and reproducibility, I'm not sure New Zealand is really going to lose much here. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replication-crisis-in-social-science-research-six-year-study-validates-open-science-methods/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replicati...
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  The reproducibility crisis is present in almost all fields, though social sciences are definitely a place where it pops up often. Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the problem worse. Computer science is also pretty embarrassing as a field of science: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproducibility_in_Computing_Research_An_Empirical_Study https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproduci... Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the problem worse Or it's a wake up call to shift focus to better methodologies that will reproduce more reliably. Time will tell. > Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well. Lots of computer science research produces useful products that make their own money directly, and so the need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main criterion. This is not true of pure research in fields that only produce knowledge. Reproducibility is key to be confident you actually have knowledge.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      > Lots of computer science research produces useful products that make their own money directly, and so the need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main criterion. That research isn't being conducted by academics applying for pure research funding from the Marsden fund...
  - 2y ago
bux93 2y ago
Can't have critical thinking in your country now can you?
- tetnis 2y ago
  Yes the social sciences are where the critical thinkers are. They think so critically that you can't reproduce their work.
- Argonaut998 2y ago
  Social “science” is anti-critical thinking. The scientific method is not used. Studies cannot be replicated.
n144q 2y ago
> it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund NZ$75 million is almost negligible? How can New Zealand do any kind of research or afford to just hire graduate students?
- dralley 2y ago
  Numbers that look small by American standards are somewhat more significant in a country of 5 million people.
  - acdha 2y ago
    NZ$15/person still seems like a drop in the bucket out of a $3.2B budget, especially since it’s boosting the local economy rather than going out of the country.
    - dralley 2y ago
      It's a bit more than 2% of the annual budget. How much higher should it go? There are tons of other things that need funding - healthcare (NZ has single-payer), coast guard / military, industrial / agricultural policy, environmental protection, etc.
      - acdha 2y ago
        The whole thing is a bit more, but much of that is not going to social sciences at all and a lot of things which are lumped together are useful - economics is a social science, for example, and if you search for the EHB code on the most recent awardees you’ll see that it includes things like studies on autism or suicide which seem pretty useful to me. https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-fund-awards-2024/ https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    American numbers fund world research, not just American research.
jmclnx 2y ago
All I see this really doing is increasing the Brain Drain. This assumes NZ has a Brain Drain and I am open to being corrected. But I am pretty sure it does have one based upon some of the comments here.
- permo-w 2y ago
  I think I heard that there's been a pretty bad brain drain recently due to low wages compared to Australia
- purple-leafy 2y ago
  Brain drain is insanely bad. Australia has better opportunities. New Zealand government hates the educated, and replaces them with lower paid immigrants. Oh, and they replace jobs that un-educated kiwis could do, with immigrants.
MicolashKyoka 2y ago
good, there is no need for a nation to have an abundance of social "scientists".
Ono-Sendai 2y ago
Cutting all blue-sky social science research does seem to go a bit far. On the other hand, I'm not sure NZ needs this: "The intimate technology shaping millions of lives: Exploring the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences." - 870k NZD "It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa" - 870k NZD "Sensationalising Sleep: Discourses and practices of sleep in Aotearoa" - 360K NZD etc.. From the Marsden fund 2022: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-fund-awards-2022/ https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...
- reaperducer 2y ago
  I'm not sure NZ needs this: Throwing the baby out with the bath water makes great sound bites for politicians, but weaker societies for everyone else.
  - GenerocUsername 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - reaperducer 2y ago
      Maybe our institutions need to stop pooping in the tub …and there's the sound bite.
  - nradov 2y ago
    Spending public money on unproductive work makes society weaker for everyone else. I'm not necessarily opposed to government funding for social science research but it's not clear that this research produces a positive ROI for taxpayers.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      Plenty of government programs that benefit the public are not cash flow positive so how do you define a positive return on investment?
peatmoss 2y ago
I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these cuts. Assuming that to be true, that is where I'd expect to see a lot of social sciences research to be carried out. Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them. In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Yeah even a sizable fraction of economic research is not credible enough to take at face value… let alone social sciences in general.
- bb86754 2y ago
  Agreed. But I don’t think economics is off the hook here either. To me it’s the social science that best masquerades as a “hard” science while still make huge jumps in logic that are rarely justified in the papers I’ve read.
  - peatmoss 2y ago
    I studiously avoided making a normative statement that economics should take over this role. Any personal preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about what I predict to happen. :-) I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.
timwaagh 2y ago
Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money. There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.
- tmpz22 2y ago
  We should scrap economics?
  - nradov 2y ago
    Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the research results produced by economists aren't necessarily wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research anyway then what's the point of funding it?
    - result2vino 2y ago
      Let’s peel away facade of the rhetorical questions here and look at what you’re actually saying. Now, a massive, MASSIVE [[citation needed]] is in order.
      - nradov 2y ago
        That's not how this works. The questions I asked were not rhetorical and almost entirely subjective. Citations aren't necessary.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political science to make a lick of sense.
wtcactus 2y ago
I see this as a good measure. I don't call for total abolishing of social "sciences" funding, but we need to stop putting real sciences and social sciences together in the same budget bucket. 1st, because the citizens are misled about the money that is actually making into real science. 2nd, because we hereby pass a message that when they hear the - now - infamous words "scientists claim", they will start being educated on if we are actually talking about proper scientists from physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, etc, or some ideologue from sociology that was being paid by public funds to spread some political ideology by abusing the term "science".
LightBug1 2y ago
First they came for the social scientists ... I reckon it'll be the artists next ...
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  I mean it kind of was the artists first. It's nearly impossible to make a living as a writer, musician or visual artist and has been for a decade at least. The ones who did manage to produce anything just had their collective works strip mined to fuel the AI products that are displacing petty freelance work, their last reliable source of any income however insufficient.
banach 2y ago
We live in dark ages.
oulipo 2y ago
Shameful
fpina 2y ago
Brutal!
Neonlicht 2y ago
It's difficult for Americans to understand but most countries HAVE to live within their means. The $ allows the US to have a trillion dollar deficit but most have to start cutting.
- derbOac 2y ago
  I think the concern is more about sweeping black-and-white decisions about funding than funding decisions per se? Also, discussions about "living within your means" almost always lead to questions about "who?" and "what is really leaving within your means?"
- intalentive 2y ago
  Exorbitant privilege won’t last forever.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  It's not just their deficit. The American economy is more diverse, productive and dynamic. For example, median income adjusted for cost of living was 32K in NZ and 48k in the US
- TimedToasts 2y ago
  Not all of us are in favor of trillion dollar deficits but we have almost no political power. :(
- peterashford 2y ago
  Not relevant to this case. The amount of money involved is tiny and projects already were heavily weighted towards those with economic benefit
mistrial9 2y ago
I met some Kiwis through ecosystem restoration work.. I was amazed at the close bonds and good cheer in the large group of mainly European-descent people I met.. on the other hand, they quickly talked about naming themselves, their children and places in the Maori language.. They were quick to repeat things like "we are living on stolen land, this is the traditional lands of ancient elders etc" It seemed to be on a collision coarse in some deep way..
- peterashford 2y ago
  Being aware of history is not a threat
fazeirony 2y ago
to me this is yet another canary in the mine moment. this same type of policy is happening all over and i feel humanity is headed for a very dark next few decades at the very least...
- lWaterboardCats 2y ago
  Social science isn’t some beacon of hope for humanity; the current state of it is a mess. It’ll be refreshing to see a shift away from the convention.
lambdaphagy 2y ago
It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole. There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some deliberate fraud, and an awful lot of venial epistemic sins. But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified with a certain political worldview, to the point where the suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more palatable to gen pop. Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are surprised when the people on the other side of that social engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to understand.
browningstreet 2y ago
Kind of curious that this is happening in NZ, the tourism beneficiary of literary and artistic (and yes, technical) largesse... "The annual tourist influx to New Zealand grew 40%, from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2006, has been attributed in large part to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon. 6% of international visitors cited the film as a reason for traveling to the country." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20New%20Zealand.-,Economic%20effects,for%20traveling%20to%20the%20country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20N....
DrStartup 2y ago
Social science isn’t really social science. It’s all mentalism
intalentive 2y ago
Social science research should probably be tied to a specific research program or campaign and integrated with policy and enforcement. Otherwise a researcher just writes a paper and that’s it. Better to be more like DARPA or Bell Labs.
fedeb95 2y ago
funny thing, economy is a social science.
karaterobot 2y ago
> The Marsden Fund was set up explicitly to support pure, “blue-sky” research, and its current modest budget could only support about 10% of the applications submitted. New Zealand’s science sector already has several other and much larger funding sources for applied research, including the NZ$359 million Strategic Science Investment Fund and NZ$247 million Endeavour Fund. But the Marsden Fund supports nearly all the country’s research in social science. Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core science research too. But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather than a one time catastrophe. My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in feast times, let alone in famine.
- frio 2y ago
  This government arrived on a promise of “fixing” our financial problems. A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created; as an example, our healthcare sector went from breaking even to being “hundreds of millions” in deficit after the budget was massaged. That created the “crisis” that let them fire the board in charge and appoint a commissioner who has been aggressively slashing public services in order to meet the new budget. The reduction in service is driving growth in the private insurance sector. Science is in a similar position. The shortfalls they’re talking about now are shortfalls they created last year and left to rot so they could have a crisis now. It’s cynical and depressing.
  - raydiak 2y ago
    Chilling foreshadowing playbook for the next four years of DOGE, DOE, DOJ, DOD, et al in the US
  - robocat 2y ago
    > A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created Can you point to a link showing this? Officially: Our revised budget for 2024/25 is a $1.1 billion deficit. This is significantly lower than the $1.76 billion deficit we were heading towards without our cost reduction programme,” Ms Apa says https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-and-updates/health-nz-end-of-year-deficit-confirmed https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-an...
abeppu 2y ago
> government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research It does seem misguided to assume that no research in the social sciences or humanities can drive economic benefits. Aside from economics which can obviously drive insights and recommendations of economic value, psychology includes e.g. industrial-organizational psychology (which can help teams and organizations be effective today), developmental psychology/educational psychology (which should inform education policy), etc. While I can understand a desire to ensure funding is targeted at readily applicable areas, this seems like it cuts off potentially valuable opportunities.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
acc_297 2y ago
Move over and make some space, Voltaire's Bastards are coming through.
aunty_helen 2y ago
If the world was free of second order effects, Judith Collin’s would be a great politician. Unfortunately throughout my life and having listened to her speak in person more than once, she’s came across as someone not intelligent enough to manage the responsibilities she gets herself into.
strawhatguy 2y ago
Sounds like a good thing, as social sciences aren't often, let's say, rigorous, and the conclusions are often dubious (since they aren't falsifiable. That said, isn't the headline misleading? It's not all support, it's all support - from this particular Marsden Fund.
rayiner 2y ago
New Zealand in 30 years after killing off the social sciences: https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Orbit_City https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Orbit_City
ethagknight 2y ago
The research is not banned. The free government money to fund research with questionable societal benefit has been banned. One may still study the impact of colonization on the Māori in recent history, and if there’s a good specific applicable reason to study that, government may fund it!
wkat4242 2y ago
Too bad, New Zealand was becoming a really nice place with Jacinta. It feels like they're becoming really conservative all of a sudden. I'm a progressive socialist and it worries me. I don't want to live in a country like that. I want a good welfare/health system, strong LGBT rights etc. My own country the Netherlands became neoliberal (hard capitalist) right at first and now radical right. I wouldn't want to live there anymore and luckily I don't. But it's annoying to have to emigrate all the time. Especially because I can't even vote in the countries I live in and it takes 10 years to change nationality. I've always thought I might end up living in New Zealand eventually because I think it's the most beautiful country in the world and I really respect how they protect the beautiful nature they have. It would be an amazing place to retire, going on long hikes through their beautiful environment.
- peterashford 2y ago
  NZ has a terrible health system, I'm afraid.

286 points by zdw 2y ago

ggm 2y ago

There's a famous quote usually attributed to Churchill, which like all famous quotes is probably apocryphal. It's about somebody saying much the same regarding drafting poets and artists for the war effort. His response was "what's the point of fighting?" And even as apocrypha I think it gets to a point: if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? Sure, NZ is financially fucked. I get it. Cut down all the forests, sell the water, sell the land, sell the bees. Sell the lifestyle to Peter Theil. I like New Zealand. It's not perfect. Cutting social science won't make it better any more than cutting te reo will. "The flogging will continue until morale improves" also comes to mind. Helping the economy by cutting wages and living conditions? Is that what they want people to study? NZ has been broke for decades. They survive on the smell of an oily rag. This is selling the oily rag. (An Ozzie btw)

dragonwriter 2y ago
> social science (which isn’t a science) This is literally true in the sense that social science isn’t a science because it encompasses numerous sciences, but it is not true if the intent to say “social science (which isn’t science)”. (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a laboratory, but then those issues exist for some phyiscal and life sciences as well.
- ggm 2y ago
  It's just memetic in many ways. The bar for statistical relevance is low across all fields hard and soft, it used to be you could parade Cyril Burt out but we're well beyond a point where he's different to any discipline, social or not. I should have resisted the temptation to repeat the slur. Demographics couldn't be more important in a world dominated by millions of refugees. Or, for example, we'll be arguing about vaccines forever and having people who study why that is, is important. I think social sciences should be funded properly. I think NZ will regret this, just like the UK lived to regret Thatcher de-funding Russian studies, only to fail to seize advantages in the end of the cold war: insufficient people with skills facing Russia. I'm a computer scientist (which isn't a science)
  - drunkenmagician 2y ago
    I'm a Kiwi, but living abroad now. I have mixed views on this announcement, I do agree with the basic sentiment that NZ is broke and has been for a long time. That means 'decisions' on public spending need to be in the national interest, for the current govt, that translates into 'fiscal interest'. That said, cutting "all" govt funding to social sciences is not the right call. I would have though that a smaller budget and stricter set of criteria for funding would have been a better approach. NZ has always had a 'fringe element' looking for funding for dubious research of limited value, but de-funding everything that is not of economic value feels like the wrong approach.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    I just can't find any reference to Thatcher cutting Russia studies, it's quite a strange thing to imagine given that she presided over the peak of the cold war. Could you help? I know that Blair closed great chunks of the foreign office and that has seriously impacted the UK's ability to represent its interested abroad, but that's not just Russia. I find it hard to imagine what the UK could have done in terms of taking advantage at the end of the cold war. I mean maybe if we had all moved to Germany then we would have been well placed to get the benefits that those folks got. On the other hand we did, eventually, get to shut down the British Army of the Rhine which saved a lot of money, and a bunch of skilled labour from eastern europe migrated to the UK as well. What potential benefits from a Russian engagment could the UK have realised?
    - ggm 2y ago
      Possibly this was a slur against her made at the time but I was told this as a young student at uni in 79-82 window.havw a read of https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-soviet-studies-at-lancaster https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-sov... for context. During the initial rapprochement years British banking was nothing like as present in the Russian denationalisation and the emergence of the oligarch kleptocracy. The decision of the Russian elites to invest in London came much much later.
- naasking 2y ago
  > (Social sciences may often require hypothesis testing in statistically-controlled experiments or have other practical limitations on experimentations because they address phenomenon that cannot easily and/or ethically be experimented with as much freedom as one would want in a laboratory Social sciences have deeply problematic methodologies and the IRB is a cancer that's no longer about ethics but gatekeeping.
namdnay 2y ago
I guess this is itself a social science experiment, namely to see if there is a link between doing social science and having "a balanced, happy society" :)
- jl6 2y ago
  I wonder how much funding will be needed to observe the results?
gonzobonzo 2y ago
> if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? The implicit claim that you're making is that state funded academic studies of social science are important for a balanced, happy society. But where's the evidence that this is the case? Someone could argue (and at times have) that the state should fund religious institutions because they're necessary for a happy society. But some would counter that religion isn't necessary for a happy society, while others might counter that religion is important for a happy society but that it's unnecessary for the state to support it. If we're making the claim that these things should be funded by the state, and that they're important for a happy society, then those claims should be backed up by some fairly strong evidence.
- demarq 2y ago
  So how do you get that evidence?
  - gonzobonzo 2y ago
    Shouldn't this be asked of someone making the claim, and not of someone who says that the claims should be backed up by evidence? If someone claims that Apple cider vinegar cures cancer, they should be the ones providing the evidence. You shouldn't be asking people who didn't make the claim how to find evidence for it. Though after decades of funding the social sciences I would have hoped that someone would have looked into whether or not they're actually accomplishing anything. If not, it would speak volumes.
    - ashwoods 2y ago
      I think you didn’t get the question. If we were to seek that evidence, who would turn to?
      - amarcheschi 2y ago
        Economist! /s
jl6 2y ago
> what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? I’m usually supportive of fundamental research where there are no specific benefits known ahead of time, because the track record of fundamental research is pretty good in terms of eventual payoff - but some of the social sciences are definitely on the soft end of this, and the examples given in the article don’t seem to make a strong case for being something NZ needs, when considered alongside all the other things NZ needs.
- CaptArmchair 2y ago
  I strongly disagree. One of the examples mentioned studies population changes during NZ's colonization. It's part of Maori-led research. Such research provides a better understanding of the history and culture of the indigenous population of NZ. In turn, this research contributes towards contextualizing and enriching relationships between communities within the larger modern NZ society with respect to the economic and political plight of these groups. The overarching theme here is identity. Both on an individual level, as well as a community level. Our shared past, heritage, traditions, stories, relationships with others,... are all what make us "us". And social sciences are paramount within that never-ending debate. In a way, defunding research which studies particular indigenous communities within society is tantamount to effacing those communities from a larger national historical identity. However, doing so will never end that drive communities have to remember and to assert their own history and identity. That's why studying how the arrival of Europeans in New Zealand has had an demographic, political, economical, cultural effect on the indigenous population definitely is fundamental research. And an important one at that.
  - jl6 2y ago
    Do you want to get social sciences defunded? Because this is how you get social sciences defunded. The academic obsession with identity is completely toxic.
seydor 2y ago
We are at the age of engineering human behavior and societal engineering is in the realm of STEM. social science is like alchemy in an age where chemistry already exists
- jyounker 2y ago
  Every time you interview a user or set up a survey to determine customer preferences, you're using techniques developed from social sciences.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    All the video games and online gambling trying to maximize micro transactions and revenue are too.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      Advertising ...
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    It is an interesting point. However, I can do these things without studying social science. Basically what you described is "talking to people" and "gathering information"
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    Mostly you are doing statistics, which is math. Social science (when it is the good thing) also uses statistics to get answers to questions.
- jampekka 2y ago
  > We are at the age of engineering human behavior and societal engineering is in the realm of STEM. We are definitely not. I'm saying that as someone researching how to use computational methods to model human behavior. We know very little about human behavior/mind/brain or society at that level.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
oldpersonintx 2y ago
> what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? avail yourself of the thousands still at work in other allied societies the world has more people at work pursuing pure academics than ever, and they are sharing their work
jajko 2y ago
I don't get why NZ is 'fucked'. One of the richest people on the planet, with amazing nature, very, I mean absolutely terrific strategical location. Democracy. Big friends with US. I could go on for a long time. Is it 'fucked' in same way some folks from say Staten island or New Jersey say its fucked since they are not central Manhattan so everything else is subpar or wrong? I don't think rich people want to have their SHTF backup location in shithole, you have prettier cheaper places all over the world, yet folks want to go there. If you meant there are issues, sure they are everywhere, even in nordics or Switzerland. Not an interesting nor helpful position.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  "Senior" software engineer salary in NZ is maybe $120k NZD (about $70k USD), median house in Auckland or Wellington (which is where you need to be to earn even that much) is about a million NZD. Cost of living is very high. Maybe f*cked is hyperbole but if you don't already own property it is quite difficult to sustain a reasonable standard of living (let alone "get ahead") as a wage earner. I love NZ but it didn't make economic sense to stay.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Sounds about the same as the UK ... but that is a median 1 bed flat in London.
  - tjpnz 2y ago
    A million NZD plus however much you spend on fixing it up so it doesn't make you sick or kill you in an earthquake. And after that you're stuck working in a country which outside of a few very niche areas is a complete dead end where tech's concerned. I miss my family, but couldn't bear the thought of continuing my career there.
- pixelesque 2y ago
  What on earth do you mean by: "One of the richest people on the planet"? National have started an "austerity" programme, tens of thousands of civil servants have been laid off, housing is disgustingly expensive (and the quality of it is awful as well), the price of goods and food is pretty expensive (even dairy products that are produced here are often more expensive than in Europe). The location's only great strategically if you ignore the (huge) future earthquake potential. Cities like Wellington have also had a chronic lack of infrastructure investment, so there are HUGE issues with water / sewage leaks - pretty much every week there's a new water main leaking somewhere in the city. (Have lived here for 10 years, and am looking to return to Europe - things are going downhill pretty fast here IMO).
naasking 2y ago
> if you stop doing social science (which isn't a science) then what do you do when people turn out to need social scientists? Aren't we interested in having a balanced, happy society? Do social scientists actually produce the knowledge required to create a balanced, happy society?
globalnode 2y ago
is that like saying: if we get rid of all the artists to fight a war is the country really worth saving?
- ggm 2y ago
  That's the apocryphal Churchill quote.
purple-leafy 2y ago
Get right-wingers in, this is what happens to a country. Right wing politics is bad socially, and economically, unless you are already stinkin-rich

throwaway69123 2y ago

[flagged]

ashton928 2y ago
That's a big loss indeed... Speaking of which, what have social scientists done recently?
- dijit 2y ago
  They’re a support framework for macro decision making. All those economics papers you read, all those studies on lifestyle and integration and the effects of migration etc; all come from social sciences. Economics is a social science.
  - kurayashi 2y ago
    Just to add a few from a very quick Wikipedia search: > In addition to sociology, it now encompasses a wide array of academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science.[1] [1]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science
  - apocadam 2y ago
    I'm not entirely sure that for the purposes of funding it is. Typically it exists in the Business school/faculty as opposed to arts in NZ.
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    It's not going really well, is it? It looks like that every political election in the West is a gigantic plea to end or reduce illegal immigration, yet pretty much every study I see about the correlation between illegal immigrants and crime says that yes, illegal immigrants are overrepresented in crime statistics (mainly an effect of them being younger, male and poorer / less educated in average), but somehow crime rates are unaffected by illegal immigration, and never try to explain the "somehow" (the answer is probably that more crimes go unreported and illegal immigrants are not enough yet to tip the global crime scale). The impression is that investigating these topics in too much detail is frown upon (as in: not good for your career) in academia, and it's always more politically prudent to gloss over them. (see for example: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.1.181 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.1.181)

openrisk 2y ago

Last time I checked economics is also a social science... If you have a headache cutting your head is not the optimal remedy.

hshshshshsh 2y ago
No. But cutting the tumour probably is a remedy. The question is are social sciences tumour or the head?
sabbaticaldev 2y ago
social science is kinda like vegan meat tho
IshKebab 2y ago
Depends which kind of economics you mean. There's a lot of theoretical mathematics economics that is pretty much applied maths. It can provide some insight into real economics but economists often get carried away with that because it makes the wildly incorrect assumption that everyone is rational and has perfect information. Then there's economics that tries to take actual people into account, which you basically have to do by experiment. E.g. one thing I looked up recently: do blind auctions or open bids gain more profit (answer was inconclusive). That's more like social science. More relevant questions but less reliable answers.

DiscourseFan 2y ago

I don’t know. A lot of the discourse meant for social progress and revolution became gaurded at the highest echelons of the academic system and perverted to suit the needs of the state apparatus. In my mind, the end of this practice means at least some hope of the work moving back to where it needs to go. On the other hand, our society today is highly educated and academic work is just a job. A huge swath of the population goes through school before entering the work force: how are you going to get to them? But, campus organizing has never gone away really, and perhaps it will make things especially difficult for administrators if they don’t have any professors to scapegoat.

nxobject 2y ago
The question is: how are you going to fund this type of thought, and find a funder that values dissemination and public engagement? Academics "pay their way" through teaching (even if it's second hand by training TAs that teach students.) Private philanthropy is often embedded in its own social context – when you have lots of money and you're interested in the social sciences, you're likely doing so not because you're engaged in the public. I think this type of work is necessary. It's sad that we have only a handful of people who've thought about society in ways that we can quote... e.g. Chomsky et al. But, sadly, we have to fund the people somehow at least...
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  It will be funded, it will always be funded, just not in public education. Its impossible to root out critical consciousness entirely because that is a condition of possibility of capitalism. But like usual, it might stay in the halls of the wealthiest private institutions instead, where it will not be useful. The crisis will result in radical movement either way, even if its unsuccessful. Imagine 10,000 Luigi Mangiones working together; there are other places this knowledge is disseminated.

grahar64 2y ago

The current government is not very popular, to get in power the current PM had to make a deal with two devils (ACT and NZF). Fortunately they all hate each other and undermine one another at many points

nxobject 2y ago
What are the chances of drastic decisions like these getting reversed, if these decisions don't take root too deeply in time?
- frio 2y ago
  It’s likely a future left-wing government will reintroduce these funds. The problem is the ratcheting effect: it takes no time at all to destroy something like this. Society reacts; people leave, people retrain, we lose the ability to do the thing we used to do. Then, a new government arrives and we rehire into these positions: it takes a lot more money to find people, attract them back to the country, get their programs established… and then the next government arrives and says “wow this is inefficient” and cans it again. NZ in general is starting to suffer from the swings in partisan politics, despite our MMP system. Similar problems happen with bread and butter infrastructure projects.
  - peterashford 2y ago
    True. The current government has taken a torch to everything the prior government did whether it made sense to torch, or not (replacement Cook Strait ferries for example). And they've enacted a bunch of extreme ideologically driven policies that no government left wing nor center could bear to keep. We're in for dizzying swings in direction

gm3dmo 2y ago

As somebody who has lived through about three decades of Powerpoints that begin and end with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs where on earth are the management consultancies supposed to steal their "ideas" from to generate new fads now. I'm for sure none of them have had an original thought of their own.

fsloth 2y ago
Not sure if this is for or against, but this is a good opportunity to argument why concepts developed “in humanities” are valuable (in case if it’s not obvious :D ) Maslows hierarchy of needs, while possibly inaccurate, is a very usefull model and concept to have. As our understanding of human condition improves, we need specific terms to understand them. Imagine is there was no word for love or hunger… for aristicracy or oligarchy… etc.
- naasking 2y ago
  Accuracy and precision is useful. If Maslow's hierarchy of needs is neither, I question how useful it truly is. At best then, it would a narrative device to tell a persuasive story, but the fact that it has no factual basis means you can twist it to tell whatever story you want. This is a problem endemic to social sciences due to the replication crisis. Lots of social scientists in this article are saying that their field is important to the economy, but given they mainly produce results that don't replicate (~30% replicate last I checked), maybe they should focus on improving that so their ROI is actually compelling.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Funny that you should say that. It's not just the social sciences that are having a replication crisis. [1] So this appears to be some sort of broad social problem that we don't totally understand. Seems like we need people who study societies to help figure it out. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

fsloth 2y ago

As a trained STEM professional the argumentation why STEM over humanities for the society of NZ would be better feels arbitrary and shallow. This looks like a combination of boorish managerialism and politically motivated budgeting - but maybe someone from NZ could comment?

fedeb95 2y ago
I wonder why politics is always the last thing being cut...
peterashford 2y ago
NZr here. You have it exactly right.

macleginn 2y ago

Someone is probably already working on a grant application, ‘A longitudinal study of a small nation’s divestment from social sciences and the humanities’. They will have to ask for a lot of travel money.

deleted 2y ago
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fcatalan 2y ago

This is so myopic. I feel it's similar to the scrapping of Philosophy from the common high school curriculum here in Spain. It was thrown away as the uninteresting rants of beardy old men, to make space for things like some trite dabbling with Word and Excel billed as "digitalization". So now things like History, Literature and many STEM subjects feel completely ungrounded. When my kids have some trouble understanding things and they ask me, the answer is very often something I learned studying Philosophy. So now let's also not do any research on for example... Social Networks. It's not that they are a relevant aspect of modern life worthy of careful observation. Don't dare look closely into what the overlords are doing.

deadbabe 2y ago
What else is there to research about Social Networks? They’re bad, but people get addicted. Nothing else to it. Not sure why people should just get funding forever to constantly arrive at the same conclusion.
- pipe2devnull 2y ago
  I also agree they are bad but to simplify anything down to “it’s bad there’s nothing else to learn” seems like a gross oversimplification.
- acdha 2y ago
  “What else is there to research about disease? They’re bad, but people get infected.” These are things which shape our world, it’s worth understanding them at a level which doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker – and, right-wing mythology aside, the cost is not very high. Academics are cheap and their work almost always has spin-off benefits, even if that’s just providing a place for people to learn general research skills they take on to the workplace.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by how much? 5) Who uses them without harm? 6) What societal impacts, positive and negative, do they have? And I could keep going, but you get the idea. Any one of those could be a hundred research projects. Even if your sole goal was to regulate them out of existence, you'd need a lot more than "I think Facebook is bad". You'd at least need a solid enough definition of the problem to craft the ban in such a way that it stuck. But that's a very unlikely outcome, so most of the people working on this are looking to minimize harm while maximizing value, and that just requires a lot of detailed research. For example, compare Facebook vs Mastodon, or vs HN. Do we ban them all, because "social networks bad"?

rwyinuse 2y ago

In my opinion the main problem is that there are too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. It would be better to have fewer scientists with adequate and consistent funding, than lots of underemployed scientists fighting for funding and living under constant uncertainty. Scrapping all support for any particular branch of science is an overreaction, but cutting number of graduates in these fields and focusing funding only on the studies with most practical benefits could make sense. As an example, social scientist studying poverty, unemployment or crime could produce useful information for policymakers to reduce these phenomena, and cutting all funding from such research is probably a bad idea.

Ekaros 2y ago
Right level of funding in many cases is non-zero. Still balancing for employability and general funding say every 5 years would be reasonable approach for most social sciences. As many of the fields under that moniker produce very useful specialist when run at right scale. And these people might not even need PhDs always.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does" explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange for the long-term promise of the letters after your name, sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate students.
lolinder 2y ago
> too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school. Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied. It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence. This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.

michaelt 2y ago

For context, this is "the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund" for "blue sky research" Out of a total university income of $4 billion per annum from a variety of sources https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-university-sector/how-nz-universities-are-funded https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/about-university-sector/how...

refurb 2y ago

Considering the track record of studies done in the social sciences and reproducibility, I'm not sure New Zealand is really going to lose much here. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replication-crisis-in-social-science-research-six-year-study-validates-open-science-methods/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/amid-a-replicati...

jeroenhd 2y ago
The reproducibility crisis is present in almost all fields, though social sciences are definitely a place where it pops up often. Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the problem worse. Computer science is also pretty embarrassing as a field of science: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproducibility_in_Computing_Research_An_Empirical_Study https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359147521_Reproduci... Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well.
- naasking 2y ago
  > Using it as an excuse to cut funding only makes the problem worse Or it's a wake up call to shift focus to better methodologies that will reproduce more reliably. Time will tell. > Based on this result (0%), New Zealand may as well dispose of all computer science studies as well. Lots of computer science research produces useful products that make their own money directly, and so the need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main criterion. This is not true of pure research in fields that only produce knowledge. Reproducibility is key to be confident you actually have knowledge.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    > Lots of computer science research produces useful products that make their own money directly, and so the need for reproducibility is less if impact on the economy is a main criterion. That research isn't being conducted by academics applying for pure research funding from the Marsden fund...
- 2y ago

bux93 2y ago

Can't have critical thinking in your country now can you?

tetnis 2y ago
Yes the social sciences are where the critical thinkers are. They think so critically that you can't reproduce their work.
Argonaut998 2y ago
Social “science” is anti-critical thinking. The scientific method is not used. Studies cannot be replicated.

n144q 2y ago

> it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund NZ$75 million is almost negligible? How can New Zealand do any kind of research or afford to just hire graduate students?

dralley 2y ago
Numbers that look small by American standards are somewhat more significant in a country of 5 million people.
- acdha 2y ago
  NZ$15/person still seems like a drop in the bucket out of a $3.2B budget, especially since it’s boosting the local economy rather than going out of the country.
  - dralley 2y ago
    It's a bit more than 2% of the annual budget. How much higher should it go? There are tons of other things that need funding - healthcare (NZ has single-payer), coast guard / military, industrial / agricultural policy, environmental protection, etc.
    - acdha 2y ago
      The whole thing is a bit more, but much of that is not going to social sciences at all and a lot of things which are lumped together are useful - economics is a social science, for example, and if you search for the EHB code on the most recent awardees you’ll see that it includes things like studies on autism or suicide which seem pretty useful to me. https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-fund-awards-2024/ https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  American numbers fund world research, not just American research.

jmclnx 2y ago

All I see this really doing is increasing the Brain Drain. This assumes NZ has a Brain Drain and I am open to being corrected. But I am pretty sure it does have one based upon some of the comments here.

permo-w 2y ago
I think I heard that there's been a pretty bad brain drain recently due to low wages compared to Australia
purple-leafy 2y ago
Brain drain is insanely bad. Australia has better opportunities. New Zealand government hates the educated, and replaces them with lower paid immigrants. Oh, and they replace jobs that un-educated kiwis could do, with immigrants.

MicolashKyoka 2y ago

good, there is no need for a nation to have an abundance of social "scientists".

Ono-Sendai 2y ago

Cutting all blue-sky social science research does seem to go a bit far. On the other hand, I'm not sure NZ needs this: "The intimate technology shaping millions of lives: Exploring the possibilities of menstruation and perimenopause tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences." - 870k NZD "It takes a village: Picturing family support for transgender young people in Aotearoa" - 870k NZD "Sensationalising Sleep: Discourses and practices of sleep in Aotearoa" - 360K NZD etc.. From the Marsden fund 2022: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-fund-awards-2022/ https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportu...

reaperducer 2y ago
I'm not sure NZ needs this: Throwing the baby out with the bath water makes great sound bites for politicians, but weaker societies for everyone else.
- GenerocUsername 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    Maybe our institutions need to stop pooping in the tub …and there's the sound bite.
- nradov 2y ago
  Spending public money on unproductive work makes society weaker for everyone else. I'm not necessarily opposed to government funding for social science research but it's not clear that this research produces a positive ROI for taxpayers.
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    Plenty of government programs that benefit the public are not cash flow positive so how do you define a positive return on investment?

peatmoss 2y ago

I didn't dig beyond what was reported in this article, but my suspicion is that economic research will be excluded from these cuts. Assuming that to be true, that is where I'd expect to see a lot of social sciences research to be carried out. Some disciplines in the social sciences in recent years have taken a pretty hard turn towards qualitative methods and epistemologies that are either misaligned with or explicitly reject the scientific method. I think dropping funding for social sciences is a mistake, but at the same time (and I'm tipping my hand a bit here), the social sciences might benefit from a renewed emphasis on methods that can result in generalizable findings. I've read some case study / qualitative papers in recent years that, uh, do not give me the strong impression that some parts of the academy are serious stewards of the funding society entrusts to them. In short, I think a correction is warranted, but I hate to see it happen as part of a charged ideological / political process.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Yeah even a sizable fraction of economic research is not credible enough to take at face value… let alone social sciences in general.
bb86754 2y ago
Agreed. But I don’t think economics is off the hook here either. To me it’s the social science that best masquerades as a “hard” science while still make huge jumps in logic that are rarely justified in the papers I’ve read.
- peatmoss 2y ago
  I studiously avoided making a normative statement that economics should take over this role. Any personal preferences I have here are separate from my beliefs about what I predict to happen. :-) I ~agree with you about the quality of econ papers. In some cases, I see the quantitative facility of econ papers as being better than similar studies executed by e.g. sociologists. But in some cases, flashy quant skills are used to distract from more fundamental issues. Assuming my prediction that social science research shifts to econ comes to pass, I think the natural pressure will be to drag econ's present quality bar downward.

timwaagh 2y ago

Love the decision tbh. Social science does not deserve money. There has been too much fraud going on and I'm not sure about the benefits compared to hard science or medical science. I do understand why this impacts Maori disproportionately but making this matter about race is unfair. we're talking about a very small number of researchers here. The average person of whichever race is only affected in the sense that his tax dollars are spent more effectively.

tmpz22 2y ago
We should scrap economics?
- nradov 2y ago
  Maybe? Has it produced any actionable results? I mean the research results produced by economists aren't necessarily wrong, but since policy makers just ignore the research anyway then what's the point of funding it?
  - result2vino 2y ago
    Let’s peel away facade of the rhetorical questions here and look at what you’re actually saying. Now, a massive, MASSIVE [[citation needed]] is in order.
    - nradov 2y ago
      That's not how this works. The questions I asked were not rhetorical and almost entirely subjective. Citations aren't necessary.
- deleted 2y ago
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- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  TBF, western economics is a joke compared to the other social sciences. It needs to be fused with sociology or political science to make a lick of sense.

wtcactus 2y ago

I see this as a good measure. I don't call for total abolishing of social "sciences" funding, but we need to stop putting real sciences and social sciences together in the same budget bucket. 1st, because the citizens are misled about the money that is actually making into real science. 2nd, because we hereby pass a message that when they hear the - now - infamous words "scientists claim", they will start being educated on if we are actually talking about proper scientists from physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, etc, or some ideologue from sociology that was being paid by public funds to spread some political ideology by abusing the term "science".

LightBug1 2y ago

First they came for the social scientists ... I reckon it'll be the artists next ...

giraffe_lady 2y ago
I mean it kind of was the artists first. It's nearly impossible to make a living as a writer, musician or visual artist and has been for a decade at least. The ones who did manage to produce anything just had their collective works strip mined to fuel the AI products that are displacing petty freelance work, their last reliable source of any income however insufficient.

banach 2y ago

We live in dark ages.

oulipo 2y ago

Shameful

fpina 2y ago

Brutal!

Neonlicht 2y ago

It's difficult for Americans to understand but most countries HAVE to live within their means. The $ allows the US to have a trillion dollar deficit but most have to start cutting.

derbOac 2y ago
I think the concern is more about sweeping black-and-white decisions about funding than funding decisions per se? Also, discussions about "living within your means" almost always lead to questions about "who?" and "what is really leaving within your means?"
intalentive 2y ago
Exorbitant privilege won’t last forever.
daedrdev 2y ago
It's not just their deficit. The American economy is more diverse, productive and dynamic. For example, median income adjusted for cost of living was 32K in NZ and 48k in the US
TimedToasts 2y ago
Not all of us are in favor of trillion dollar deficits but we have almost no political power. :(
peterashford 2y ago
Not relevant to this case. The amount of money involved is tiny and projects already were heavily weighted towards those with economic benefit

mistrial9 2y ago

I met some Kiwis through ecosystem restoration work.. I was amazed at the close bonds and good cheer in the large group of mainly European-descent people I met.. on the other hand, they quickly talked about naming themselves, their children and places in the Maori language.. They were quick to repeat things like "we are living on stolen land, this is the traditional lands of ancient elders etc" It seemed to be on a collision coarse in some deep way..

peterashford 2y ago
Being aware of history is not a threat

fazeirony 2y ago

to me this is yet another canary in the mine moment. this same type of policy is happening all over and i feel humanity is headed for a very dark next few decades at the very least...

lWaterboardCats 2y ago
Social science isn’t some beacon of hope for humanity; the current state of it is a mess. It’ll be refreshing to see a shift away from the convention.

lambdaphagy 2y ago

It's difficult to characterize the social sciences as a whole. There's some great work, some mediocre but honest work, some deliberate fraud, and an awful lot of venial epistemic sins. But for the most part, the social sciences have become identified with a certain political worldview, to the point where the suppositions of this worldview can be assumed in papers without needing to be consciously articulated or defended. Indeed a lot of this work is explicitly concerned with finding ways to engineer public opinion in order to make this worldview more palatable to gen pop. Putting aside the question of whether that's good or bad, it's always puzzled me that the experts on social behavior are surprised when the people on the other side of that social engineering project get mad about it. Of all the imponderables of human nature, that seems like one of the easiest things to understand.

browningstreet 2y ago

Kind of curious that this is happening in NZ, the tourism beneficiary of literary and artistic (and yes, technical) largesse... "The annual tourist influx to New Zealand grew 40%, from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2006, has been attributed in large part to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon. 6% of international visitors cited the film as a reason for traveling to the country." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20New%20Zealand.-,Economic%20effects,for%20traveling%20to%20the%20country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_tourism#:~:text=in%20N....

DrStartup 2y ago

Social science isn’t really social science. It’s all mentalism

intalentive 2y ago

Social science research should probably be tied to a specific research program or campaign and integrated with policy and enforcement. Otherwise a researcher just writes a paper and that’s it. Better to be more like DARPA or Bell Labs.

fedeb95 2y ago

funny thing, economy is a social science.

karaterobot 2y ago

> The Marsden Fund was set up explicitly to support pure, “blue-sky” research, and its current modest budget could only support about 10% of the applications submitted. New Zealand’s science sector already has several other and much larger funding sources for applied research, including the NZ$359 million Strategic Science Investment Fund and NZ$247 million Endeavour Fund. But the Marsden Fund supports nearly all the country’s research in social science. Tough situation. Their response doesn't sound crazy to me. You have to cut something if you don't have enough money, and if I had to choose what to prioritize, I guess it would be core science research too. But, how did they let the budget shortfall get so large? Did this catch them by surprise or something? I'd expect this to have been a slow ramping down of new grants and renewals over years rather than a one time catastrophe. My post-graduate degree and currently only publication is in a social science area. I'm sympathetic to that kind of research in some ways, but pretty cynical about it in other ways. Shrinking the pool of social science researchers down to a much smaller and more competitive group does not even sound like a bad idea in feast times, let alone in famine.

frio 2y ago
This government arrived on a promise of “fixing” our financial problems. A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created; as an example, our healthcare sector went from breaking even to being “hundreds of millions” in deficit after the budget was massaged. That created the “crisis” that let them fire the board in charge and appoint a commissioner who has been aggressively slashing public services in order to meet the new budget. The reduction in service is driving growth in the private insurance sector. Science is in a similar position. The shortfalls they’re talking about now are shortfalls they created last year and left to rot so they could have a crisis now. It’s cynical and depressing.
- raydiak 2y ago
  Chilling foreshadowing playbook for the next four years of DOGE, DOE, DOJ, DOD, et al in the US
- robocat 2y ago
  > A lot of these shortfalls have been artificially created Can you point to a link showing this? Officially: Our revised budget for 2024/25 is a $1.1 billion deficit. This is significantly lower than the $1.76 billion deficit we were heading towards without our cost reduction programme,” Ms Apa says https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-and-updates/health-nz-end-of-year-deficit-confirmed https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/corporate-information/news-an...

abeppu 2y ago

> government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research It does seem misguided to assume that no research in the social sciences or humanities can drive economic benefits. Aside from economics which can obviously drive insights and recommendations of economic value, psychology includes e.g. industrial-organizational psychology (which can help teams and organizations be effective today), developmental psychology/educational psychology (which should inform education policy), etc. While I can understand a desire to ensure funding is targeted at readily applicable areas, this seems like it cuts off potentially valuable opportunities.

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acc_297 2y ago

Move over and make some space, Voltaire's Bastards are coming through.

aunty_helen 2y ago

If the world was free of second order effects, Judith Collin’s would be a great politician. Unfortunately throughout my life and having listened to her speak in person more than once, she’s came across as someone not intelligent enough to manage the responsibilities she gets herself into.

strawhatguy 2y ago

Sounds like a good thing, as social sciences aren't often, let's say, rigorous, and the conclusions are often dubious (since they aren't falsifiable. That said, isn't the headline misleading? It's not all support, it's all support - from this particular Marsden Fund.

rayiner 2y ago

New Zealand in 30 years after killing off the social sciences: https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Orbit_City https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Orbit_City

ethagknight 2y ago

The research is not banned. The free government money to fund research with questionable societal benefit has been banned. One may still study the impact of colonization on the Māori in recent history, and if there’s a good specific applicable reason to study that, government may fund it!

wkat4242 2y ago

Too bad, New Zealand was becoming a really nice place with Jacinta. It feels like they're becoming really conservative all of a sudden. I'm a progressive socialist and it worries me. I don't want to live in a country like that. I want a good welfare/health system, strong LGBT rights etc. My own country the Netherlands became neoliberal (hard capitalist) right at first and now radical right. I wouldn't want to live there anymore and luckily I don't. But it's annoying to have to emigrate all the time. Especially because I can't even vote in the countries I live in and it takes 10 years to change nationality. I've always thought I might end up living in New Zealand eventually because I think it's the most beautiful country in the world and I really respect how they protect the beautiful nature they have. It would be an amazing place to retire, going on long hikes through their beautiful environment.

peterashford 2y ago
NZ has a terrible health system, I'm afraid.