Bloodbath for Science

> it implies an unbounded amount of money funneled into research

Er, no; it's complaining about a 20% cut in research. How does that imply unbounded money?

> the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country

The budget that's just been hacked at -- the DOE's science funding, which according to the article provides most of the US's funding for basic scientific research -- is about $5B. The US federal budget is somewhere north of $3T. It is not the science spending that is going to "bankrupt the supporting country".

> There isn't a government expenditure that can't be supported the exact same way and with virtually the same arguments

That would be fair comment if the proposal were a blanket 20% cut across all government spending. But of course it isn't. The proposed cuts are in fact about $100B, or about 3% of the federal budget. So the question isn't "should basic scientific research be exempt from cutbacks when the country's finances are in trouble?" but "should basic science suffer 7x greater cutbacks than government spending as a whole?".

(Actually, I bet these cutbacks aren't the whole story and there are other reductions going on that aren't covered by this list. So, who knows?, maybe the proposed cuts to basic science are only, say, at a 3x greater rate than the overall government spending reduction. That doesn't change the point I'm making.)

If by academic in nature you mean grounded in reality instead of a bad analogy then yes it is. Now that we've decided not to view the problem through the lens of personal or corporate finance we can look at the problem as it is: macroeconomics.

Luckily, we're in agreement! Yes, inflating away the problem is fraught with peril just as you say. But I will suggest to you that high unemployment is also very perilous. The rule of law beaks down when you have high unemployment for long periods of time. We've seen some instances of that recently…

In a time when private sector is laying off people, should the government also be cutting and reducing the workforce? What should these workers do? Its not like they chose old unneeded jobs: unemployment has been pretty even across industries.

As you know, this policy of belt-tightening is called austerity and the countries trying it aren't doing so great either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity

Perhaps the government should act as a countercyclical balance to the private sector? When the private sector is irresponsible, takes too much risk and blows up, who is there to clean up the mess? The government can't just declare bankruptcy and start over. Perhaps we can view the government as a safety net, giving people jobs when the private sector fails to put them to work? Perhaps we can think of ways to make a robust and diverse private sector instead of one dominated by giant multinational risk-taking, non-competitive lobbyist machines that push risk onto the public and privatize the profits. That's what I want to see... a well regulated market with a diversity of companies trying to get ahead and a government overseeing it without playing favorites. Difficult. Maybe impossible. But that's where I want to go.

>In the real world, there's a bound on the amount of money that should be funneled into research. That bound should probably less than the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country

More to the point, it should realistically take into account the real capabilities of the scientific community at large. If president Obama decided tomorrow, "hey, we're going to sink $10T into creating warp drive by the end of the decade": how many charlatans do you think would start scurrying toward the money? How many legitimate physicsts would shrug their shoulders knowing they'd just lost out on their collider grants and cobble together proposals for a piece of their action, scientific integrity be damned? How many startup companies would be formed as R&D rent-seekers to develop "next-gen metallurgy and materials science for the project"? And do you think that we would really have warp drive at the outset of 10 years?

Why is it so hard to consider that maybe, just maybe, we are already overinvested in science now, just as we would be if we sunk $10T into warp drive today? All the hallmarks are there. Record levels of fraud (see retractionwatch if you want your soul to sink a bit), severe PhD employment pipeline problems...

your flawed assumption is that private companies are the only funding source. What about non-profit researcher foundations, such as HHMI? What you haven't seen is that in the past decade or two these foundations have been whittled away by the growing government behemoth. It used to be that every other graduate student was on some private grant or another, but now they are all written on RO1 NIH grants. With inflation eroding away at research endowments and faster-than-inflation growth in most laboratory equipment prices, a private research grant supplies maybe $100k a year, which is now insufficient to pay for even a research associate $50k + benefits, plus equipment. Plus, NIH gives research institutes "overhead" which is negotiated on a per-unit basis with each institute. So greedy-ass research institutes are not inclined to even allow their researchers to apply for grants which don't permit overhead.

When you have a line to an apparently unlimited line of credit, the practices are going to be wasteful because of perverse incentives (at the NIH they have glassware-breaking parties at the end of spending cycles to use up their budget because if they come underbudget they are at risk of having it reduced) and you are going squeeze out private (non-profit) competition.

I don't really know what system could work. The current "max out publications" approach apparently doesn't work, as it only leads to mass production with low substance. I guess it is unfortunate that the people with the money (politicians) are not in a position to really judge the science they are supposed to fund. So superficial judging criteria are bound to happen.