Terence Kealey agrees, with a proviso

The fourth most interesting fact in science policy is that every attempt to show, empirically, that the government funding of research stimulates economic growth, has failed. As I have recently reviewed (1), no such attempt – ranging from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s to my own – has succeeded (2).

In fact, the consensus of such empirical surveys is that the government funding of research probably hinders economic growth. Which introduces the third most interesting fact in science policy: ‘crowding out’.

Crowding out

It transpires that the government funding of research ‘crowds out’ its private funding. Every time a government gives a pound, euro or dollar to research, the private sector reduces its own contribution by 1.25 pounds, euros or dollars.

That seems to apply even to the purest of science: we would have many more Wellcome Trusts and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations if only the National Science Foundation and the UK research councils had been strangled at birth.

Which brings us to the question here: should government provide core funding to science and discovery centres? If the empirical evidence shows that government money crowds out private money, then the answer must be ‘no’. Only if government funding were obligatorily linked with private funding, such that the one necessarily leveraged the other, should it be encouraged.

Nature of science

Which introduces the second most interesting fact in science policy: what does crowding out say about the nature of science? In 1605 Sir Francis Bacon argued in his book The Advancement of Learning that science was a public good: science is the basis of technology, he said, but – because it is easy to copy – no entrepreneur will fund it. Only governments would fund science.

But if, in fact, the government funding of science crowds out its private funding, then science cannot be a public good. It must be something else. What? Borrowing the original name of the Royal Society, I argue that science is actually an Invisible College good.

Why do academic scientists meet at conferences? Why do technology companies congregate in science parks? Researchers do not work in isolation: we are embedded in a network or invisible college of competitors with whom – to mutual advantage – we exchange information. Thus Thomas Allen of MIT has shown that some 23 per cent of commercial innovations come from swapping information with rivals, and the mutual dependence of academics on volunteered information is even greater.

But pace Bacon this information is not cheap to acquire. To access the research of others a person needs first to understand it, which means that a person needs to be researching in the same area. And to benchmark their work, that person needs to publish. Moreover, to access the tacit knowledge of a field – the cutting-edge stuff – a person needs to belong to its invisible college, where people trade information informally; and membership of that is firmly restricted to those who publish because people will trade information only with people with credibility. So although copying any particular piece of science may seem cheap, to access that science a copycat has already paid a huge price by producing their own pro bono publications. In science, as elsewhere, there are no free lunches.

Proper funding

Which introduces the most interesting fact in science policy: nobody wants to know. People assume that the funding of science would be neglected by the market and philanthropists, so people fear that any mention of non¬government support may endanger state money. But science is actually embedded in a network of companies and foundations that, left to themselves, would supply more funding than does government. So let government provide core funding as long as we minimise its malign crowding out. Let the government give money only if private money must follow.

Understanding science as an invisible college good integrates its different visions into a self¬sufficient and accurate one, and reveals how its funding should properly be organised.

Reference

1. T Kealey (2008), Sex, Science and Profits. William Heinemann Ltd

2. Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries (2003), OECD

Dr Terence Kealey is the Vice 
Chancellor of the University of 
Buckingham