political commentary

any of the world’s rich and famous have once again converged on the town of Davos, Switzerland to study the best way to harangue us poor plebians about global warming. And like clockwork, bloggers are once again criticizing them for flying there in 1,700 private jets and burning up the equivalent of a small endangered mahogany forest in jet fuel. It’s all very entertaining kabuki, and it gives us a chance to ponder what kind of world we’ll be stuck in if the warmers get their way.

I suspect the main difference will be that hot dogs will all cost $43 and chicken salads will cost $55. That's apparently the price of a Davos hot dog. To the mega-rich, that price is as irrelevant as the fact that no amount of spending could have a measurable effect on climate. Their purpose is to build a legacy of good deeds, and symbolic deeds are as good as real ones—maybe better. The more cynical among us suspect that making us all poor may be the real goal of the AGW movement.

The problem is not so much that the rich and famous want absolution for their conspicuous consumption, or even that they don’t understand any of the science they accuse the so-called deniers of ignoring. The problem is they believe they don’t have to know. They’re rich enough to pay others to know it for them.

Davros, totally different, but at least he understands science

But how do rich people like Al Gore and Bill Clinton know the people they’re paying aren’t just telling them what they want to hear? They have to take it on faith that those who are calling themselves scientists aren’t just making the whole thing up. They could be sitting around in their lab coats, their shiny new Agilent 5975C humming in the background, saying something like “... so then I told him temperatures would increase by nineteen degrees by 2050 ...” and laughing hysterically.

When a scientist’s boss asks what they think of his latest idea, what is their response? For me, if I think it’s just a harebrained, impractical scheme (not that that ever happens), I usually say it’s interesting, and maybe we could tweak it a little. Most of the other scientists I work with don’t dare go even that far.

Does this “Yes, boss!” mentality influence academic research? Most basic science research in the USA is funded by the federal government. Some libertarians argue that this funding displaces privately funded investment, citing the fact that the more research a company does, the more successful it becomes. Left-wingers argue that privately funded research is more susceptible to the “Yes, boss!” effect, and corporations are too narrowly focused on profits and subject matter. A correlation between profit and research, they say, does not prove causation.

Private nonprofits, especially, are easily taken over by political ideologues. The American Psychological Association, for example, has turned into a cesspool of political activism. Its website boasts of its long-term support of gay marriage, and many of its articles talk about “diversity,” “racism,” and so forth, topics dear to the heart of ultra-left-wing liberals, but of questionable scientific value. In their pages you’ll find phrases like “androcentric, culturocentric, and ethnocentric chauvinism manifested in the Euro-American and male-dominated social racist society [sic]”. Hardly what you’d call objective science. Science is starting to fray around the edges. First sociology and psychology. Then climatology. What will be next?

At least the Feds try to keep it nonpartisan. NIH grant funding operates on the principle of peer review. Their study sections are composed almost entirely of working academic scientists. The administrators are, in large part, former academic scientists themselves. Study section attendees are ruthlessly scrutinized for their knowledge and fairness. If they don’t measure up, they’re not invited back. While NIH grants may not be perfect, they try hard to be fair. Putting scientists in charge of who gets funded has created a robust meritocracy.

But government funding also turns scientists, who are by nature libertarian free thinkers, into virtual employees of the government who have to do what the government wants. When you write a grant, there’s only one goal: to make it fundable—that is, pleasing enough to the boss, played by the study section. Some industries now structure their entire R&D model around SBIR and STTR grants. It leads to dependency, and the research that’s proposed is designed to fit the government’s needs. Peer review also doesn’t stop institutions or entire fields from being taken over by fads, of which global warming is the canonical example.

So, to answer the question, the “Yes, boss!” mentality occurs even in academic research. Fads and government pet projects disrupt meritocracy. But where meritocracy still exists, the system is as close to optimal as we know how to make it.

While some industries, such as the semiconductor industry, are doing first rate research, others are struggling. Corporate culture contributes to the malaise, with the tradition of drawing executive leadership from managerial and legal departments instead of science departments. Like the bigshots at Davos, they are too busy to know anything—they pay people to know things for them. And those people know what they are and aren’t allowed to say.

It would be as pointless to ask some executives to crack open a science book as it would be to ask Bill Clinton to keep his pants zipped. But if we’re to remain a world leader in science, we need to put more scientists and scientifically literate people in charge. And frankly, it wouldn’t hurt to have one or two more at Davos as well.