Ignorance is freedom

By M.S.

THE most urgent research priority for American social science is the question of why so many congresspeople are boastful ignoramuses. But since Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, succeeded in blocking National Science Foundation funding for political science last month ("except for research projects that the [NSF director] certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States"), this critical research subject will have a hard time getting a grant. Now, not content with having saved American taxpayers 1/12th of the cost of an F-35 fighter by defunding political-science research, our elected representatives are seeking to eliminate yet more wasteful spending on useless stuff like intellectual inquiry.

Yesterday, over the course of two contentious hearings, the new chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology floated the idea of having every NSF grant application include a statement of how the research, if funded, "would directly benefit the American people." Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that he was not trying to "micromanage" the $7 billion agency but that NSF needs to do a better job of deciding what to fund given the low success rates for grant applicants and a shrinking federal budget.

After all, how does researching "how the geometry of a surface's Teichmuller space has been used to study its mapping class group" directly benefit the American people? Or what about making detailed digital-imagery databases of fossilised insects? You can't drive on it, and you can't blow up terrorists with it. Yet we're spending literally thousands of dollars on these two grants alone! Why should Lamar Smith's constituents in Comfort, Texas be subsidising this pointy-headed nonsense?

What's particularly admirable about Mr Smith's drive to defund abstract higher-mathematics research, paleontology database-building, and every other branch of science that does not directly benefit the American people is that it's so altruistic. Mr Smith is clearly just trying to save taxpayers money. It's not like there's some private company out there that's trying to get people to pay for their studies of Teichmuller space, and wants to block government-funded research that's free to the public. Like back when Rick Santorum tried to block the National Weather Service from publishing forecasts because it was competing with his campaign donor, who owned for-profit forecaster AccuWeather. No, in this case Mr Smith's motives are entirely pure. He just wants to make sure that Americans' tax money is only spent on things that directly benefit the American people, like giving a gold medal to Arnold Palmer "in recognition of his service to the Nation in promoting excellence and good sportsmanship in golf." (That directly benefits Arnold Palmer, who last time I checked was part of the American people, so there you go.)

And no doubt this also holds true for the GOP's other big research-related priority: outlawing the American Community Survey. If Jeff Duncan, the representative from South Carolina now sponsoring the bill, wants to prohibit the Census Bureau from gathering any real-time social or economic data on Americans in the ten-year interval between censuses, it's not because of any partisan desire to keep Americans from realising that the top 1% of earners are growing fabulously wealthy while average workers are getting poorer. And it's not because private data-gathering firms want to block the feds from doing large-scale research in order to be able to charge a higher price for their own data. Indeed, private industry vehemently opposed ending the survey when it was first proposed last year. Rather, Mr Duncan's reasons are no doubt similar to those offered by the bill's sponsor at that time:

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.

I have no doubt that Messrs Duncan and Webster's motivations in offering this bill are not venial or self-serving. I have every faith that they are motivated by a sincere devotion to ignorance, a value they both preach and practice.