Summary of Metascience 101 - Introduction
The state of science in the USA - What's going right? What's going wrong? And how can we do science better?
The following is a brief summary of “Metascience 101 - EP1: Introduction” from The Macroscience Podcast. It was really interesting - I highly recommend listening to the whole thing.
The US federal government is the single largest funder of basic scientific research in the world.
Scientific knowledge is a merit (in some cases a public) good, and so would be underprovided by the private sector alone. Therefore government intervention is required.
There are lots of different funding mechanisms, because not all science is the same (e.g. public funding vs. private funding vs. universities).
In general, there is more grant-based (“push”) funding for basic scientific research (which is not very commercialisable). More commercialisable research is more concentrated in the private sector, where funding is through tax credits and patents.
The social returns to science are huge - currently, public spending/interventions are insufficient.
Firms (such as pharma) underinvest in long term research, due to fixed patent terms and short termism. Do Firms Underinvest in Long-Term Research? Evidence from Cancer Clinical Trials.
Scientists who receive funding through the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation are tightly tied to projects related to their grants. They are highly dependent on the availability and focus of funders. This can come at the detriment of working on projects that they personally feel are most impactful.
Science is shifting away from younger scholars and solo work towards team science. We need to maintain incentives to work in science despite longer training. And we need effective ways to evaluate ideas, including decisions on patent rights and research grants. And we need incentives that work for team science. Current funding structures and science policy haven’t adapted to this yet. As Science Evolves, How Can Science Policy?
The USA is an incredibly attractive place for international scientific talent, and this is a good thing for the country and the world. Agglomeration effects are powerful. But currently, the US immigration system doesn’t do a good job at retaining talent.
It’s very expensive to get scientists to switch their research via targeted funding. It’s more efficient to just encourage new scientists to pursue these targeted grants. The Elasticity of Science.
ARPA-style funding models offer more autonomy and the chance to take moonshot risks. But we need more thinking on where such a model can be more productively applied.
We need more and better metascience, i.e. evaluation of science funding mechanisms. It’s still a fairly nascent field, with low hanging fruit and huge potential impacts.