Uh oh. Zero dollars for the NSF? That can’t be right.
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15 Comments
Honestly, if they are worried about spending bailout dollars quickly (in the 6-12 month horizon), the NSF should be an easy sell. Just fund more projects… It’s not like they don’t already get more grant apps than they can fund. I guess a lot of them are for multi-year projects. But still.
In other words, I can haz bailout too, pls?
But I thought it was more about creating jobs – not sure than NSF funding does that.
@no.2
NSF funding doesn’t create jobs?!? it pays for entire research labs (plus equipment) for years at a time! plus they sometimes discover stuff in those labs…
@gradmommy
Thanks to lack of NSF funds, I might be out of a job or at least cut to half time (with commensurate loss of benefits). Half my pay (as a lab tech) comes from NSF and NIH grants that are usually reapproved every other year like clockwork (it’s a very productive lab with a well known (in the field) PI), but this time we’ve heard nothing. The other half of my pay is currently coming out of start-up funds for a new professor, but if he doesn’t get some NIH/NSF funds soon, there goes the rest of my job. Both of them are very productive and good grant writers, and normally shouldn’t have any trouble getting money, but there’s just not any to be had right now. We NEED federal science funding agencies to get properly funded again.
@2, 3: The argument about job creation has been used against the NEA recently, as well, although my colleague Bill Ivey has been fighting the charge. I love the line from Gioia: After Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins responded to queries about federal support to artists with, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people”, Gioia’s rejoinder is: “As far as I’ve heard, nothing has changed about the dietary needs of artists.”
Time to call your senator? Here are some talking points from the poorly named science-lobbying group, ScienceDebate2008:
From the perspective of short-term economic stimulus (*), spending is spending; there’s no reason to label $X million spent through NSF as any more or less effective as stimulus than $X million spent in the same time through another program. And I’d agree with Dan @1 and Tina @6 that this is among the simpler ways to deliver stimulus quickly — and projects that are fast and have long-term value are not that easy to come by.
(*) Which is not the only perspective, but investments in education and research fare well in major other respects as Tina notes @6.
I love to see how academics like to disguise their own self-interested as “for the general good.” My point of view is the following. At least in the short run, you want to spend on people who will spend a higher proportion of what they earn, and save a smaller proportion. Which means, if you spend a lot on low income people the stimulus is higher, because poorer people use a higher proportion of their income for consumption. And also in terms of social justice, I think it’s always better to use the opportunity for redistributing income.
So the point is: I think academia has priority over investment bankers, but I think that overall we academics are a relatively priviledge segement of the population, so people poorer than us should get priority over this money.
And I think we should reflect on what part of our complaints are really about fairness and which part are a justification of our own self-interest to keep doing “cool” stuff.
And I think we should reflect on what part of our complaints are really about fairness and which part are a justification of our own self-interest to keep doing “cool” stuff.
Puh-lease. Where in the comments above is anyone making a complaint about fairness? On what planet is a group of sociologists going to make a claim that we deserve money more than poor people?
I’m just saying that in order to criticize something we need to see what are the choices that are being made, that is, what would be sacrificed if we asked for more money for ourselves, given that poorer people have less power to bargain for a piece of the pie than investment banks etc. Not saying we shouldn’t ask for more money, but that we should look at the picture as a whole.
@Socfreak: If the Republicans wanted to move the money from the NSF to increasing unemployment benefits, or nationalizing health care, I don’t think you’d see the same kind of comments from this group. But that’s not what’s going on here – the Republicans are trying to cut down the size of the bill and shift money into tax cuts which can almost only help the wealthiest folks.
But the NSF is a good long-term investment, and a little extra money in it right now could be used in the short term (especially assuming that other funding sources, like corporations and foundations, will be funding less right now) in a way that meets the criteria for good stimulus (quick to get up and running, creates public goods, uses resource that would otherwise be idle or very underused). We should be building all the schools that need to be built, and so on, but we should also be giving a bit of money to artists and scientists and etc. who are having a bit more trouble finding funding right now.
The alternative is not spending the money on something else, but rather not spending it at all (and thus not increasing the deficit quite so much, but at the expense of lowering economic growth right now).
Tina, can you link us to the original Talking Points story? I can’t seem to find it — but it looks like the 100% NSF cut in that proposed budget just means a 0% NSF increase. That is, the funding level would stay flat for next year. Am I reading that correctly?
http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2009/02/science_funding_to_be_slashed.php
Oh, look, I just linked to the link I was asking for.
Another thing. Funding for NSF is not only funding for research projects, but is funding for education. Departments use that money to pay graduate students, lecturers, utilities, and who knows what else. I know my University is losing millions this year. My department is basically getting a BILL for over 200,000 because of these cuts. NSF grants have a very real role in insuring the continuation of high(er) quality of classes for undergraduates. To say nothing about keeping graduate students above the poverty line.
Regarding low/high income, a lot of the people paid on grants are lower income people like grad students and lab techs, not high income professors. Also suppliers of goods and services. This obviously varies by field.