He Who Pays the Scientist May Well Call the Tune

Left-wingers of my acquaintance are generally inclined to discount any scientific research funded by corporations, and to decry the distorting effect of such funding.

What then are we to make of the fact that, in fact, in the US, 85% of research funding currently comes from government (a higher figure is probable for most other developed countries)? (Source: Burk Kalweit, of the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America).

Do governments and government bureaucrats themselves have no vested interests? Are they generally innocent of politics and political concerns?

Of course not. Just the opposite. By comparison, corporate financing of research is rather benign. It is mostly interested only in profits, not power politics. Moreover, corporate interests diverge widely—for each company hoping to make money on an activity releasing greenhouse gases, there’s another hoping to make money selling CO2 credits. Government, by contrast, is in principle a monopoly. When there is more than one level of government involved, they habitually collude, while this would be illegal for business.

We should accordingly be highly suspicious of scientific research that tends to support further extensions of government power.

Research on, oh, say, the dangers of global warming. The pressing need for bicycle helmets. The benign effects of raising children outside the home. The benign effects of divorce. The horrors of tobacco use. The …

One need not assume that scientists are corrupt or can be bought to see a problem here. Suppose there is six times as much funding for studies looking into the harmful effects of tobacco use than for those looking into possible benefits. If all scientists involved act with perfect morality, there sill still be six times as many studies looking into tobacco’s possible harm as into tobacco’s possible benefits. This would mean, given that tobacco is neutral in its effects, that we would nevertheless probably discover six harmful effects for every benefit.

But of course, scientists are not perfect; like the rest of us, they are human. This means that the distorting effect of government funding is probably much greater. Consider the temptation: if the study finds that global warming, say, is real, justifying further government action, one gets funding for one’s research. One gets tenure, promotion, and an academic career. Who knows? Maybe some day a shot at a Nobel Prize. If, on the other hand, your study finds nothing, or something that tends to discount global warming, there is no funding. The end. The end of a career in which you have already invested a lot of time and energy.

What would you do? Of course, faking research altogether runs its own risks of destroying your career. But at very least, you would be sorely tempted to exaggerate any possible conclusions favouring government action, and to downplay anything that went counter to government interests.

Consider that the next time you read a news story saying the sky is falling, unless we all take prompt collective action.