By Marc Jampole
We may be entering a new age of court sponsorship similar to
Renaissance Europe when landed nobility adopted painters, sculptors,
playwrights, choreographers and writers, supporting their efforts and in return
reaping some of the glory of creation. But in this new age, it’s not
aristocrats by birth who provide the support but the aristocrats of money such
as Larry Elison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Gordon Moore, union-hating
liberal Michael Bloomberg and the nefarious David Koch. And the support is
going not to the arts, but to research scientists.
The New York Timesarticle that details the enormous amounts given by these and other
billionaires to support scientific research zeroes in on the big problem of the
ultra-wealthy selecting research topics: they decide what’s important and not
scientists or the government, which represents all of us. Traditionally, peer-review groups at campuses and research facilities or
government agencies decided what research deserved funding. When the government
did it, it mostly let scientists make the decisions and awarded research on
merit and importance and not politics, except partially during the Bush II
faith-based Administration. It is true that industry has often had an outsized
say in setting scientific policy; for example, when Truman decided to implement
the results of a white paper advocating commercialization of nuclear power and
denied funding for recommendations in a white paper on solar energy. But having influence is not quite the same
thing as making the decision without any checks or balances.
Now government support for scientific research is down, as
Congress would prefer to keep taxes on the wealthy at historic lows over
investing in our future. The billionaires are stepping into the breach, but
only in the areas that they care about.
As might be expected, most of the billionaires giving large
dollars for science research donate to fight a disease with which they are
familiar. David Koch and Michael Milkin have both had prostate cancer. Google’s
Sergey Brin’s mother had Parkinson’s. American oil oligarch Harold Hamm had
diabetes. Leon Black’s wife had melanoma. Eli Broad’s son has Crohn’s
disease.
This privatization of America’s science research policy is
as bad for the country as the privatization of prisons, education and
war-fighting have been, but the privatization of actual decisions of who gets
how much is even worse. We would be much better off having scientific groups
decide on funding for specific projects than non-scientists with lots of money.
In the past, higher taxes on the wealthy helped to finance
the American science that cured polio and other diseases, put men on the moon,
earth-quaked buildings and computerized the world. The growing inequality of wealth—the rich
getting richer and everyone else falling behind—gives the wealthy an unfair say
in the personal lives and futures of everyone. Their control extends beyond the
ability to buy more goods and services, as they buy more political influence,
more campaign ads and even more scientists. Who is is to say whether the
billionaires will share breakthroughs with the rest of the world—perhaps they
will want to make money on the new discoveries. We see what happens when
private entities own drug discoveries—some drugs are a thousand dollars a pill,
while no American company is willing to make flu vaccines because the profit
margin isn’t great enough. Privatization of science will likely lead to similar
inequities.
I also wonder if the billionaires will employ their standard
business practices in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Will David Koch
suppress any research into food allergies that link them to global warming or
the burning of hydrocarbons? Will Jeff Bezos insist on introducing Amazon’s
employee-unfriendly wage and workplace practices into the science organizations
he supports? Will scientists working for Michael Milkin be more likely than
average to falsify data?
A much better approach would be to raise income taxes on
high incomes, and end the special tax rate for capital gains tax and the
carried interest exemption. In other words, raise taxes on the wealthy and use
part of that money to increase public support of scientific research.
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