Bright Blue has been building relationships with think tanks across the pond. Over these pages, four experts tell us what Tory policy can learn from their research
Once upon a time, before George W. Bush, before George H.W. Bush, there was Vannevar Bush. Roosevelt’s wartime science advisor, Bush, V., helped shape not just American but global approaches to the public funding of science. His 1945 report Science, The Endless Frontier, remains relevant and readable. Read it antiphonally with his somewhat unnerving prophecy in Atlantic of the World Wide Web – as a technology evolved from microfiche.
As Americans are too fond of saying, that was then, and this is now. For tech observers, emerging from Washington is either a storm system in a teacup, or, just perhaps, a perfect storm actually worthy of name. First we have the “sequester,” which is Washington-speak for a brutal cut in federal budgets, mandated by a committee set up to resolve budget issues which in turn decided to design cuts so nasty that both sides would presumably have to agree on a compromise. But they didn’t, so we have the cuts. Then there’s a broader discontent with science funding, which comes and goes with each media exposé of what seem (and sometimes are) foolish projects. Research on the effect of Farmville on relationships, and how quickly parents respond to trendy baby names. Senator Tom Coburn, indefatigable and independent-minded Republican maverick, highlighted some in a scathing report on the National Science Foundation. The House of Representatives’ science committee is taking fresh interest in the kind of projects on which money is being spent, and there are reports that this has led to the National Science Foundation ceasing to fund political science.
Not that anyone is arguing we should stop funding basic science. But the bipartisan consensus built in Vannevar Bush’s vision – that federal dollars get pumped in and are then doled out by peer review, by scientists themselves, – is developing cracks.
That’s not all, of course. We have climate, which is now a highly political question. It’s one of those subjects on which it is hard to say anything without adding a string of footnotes. Let this suffice: we face discrete though not un-related issues, on each of which reasonable people can disagree with varying degrees of consensus/certainty. (Is climate changing? Did we cause it? Can we do anything about it? If we can, what?) But these have become one coagulate mass – and up for merely binary decision. Because Washington does love binary.
And then we have a deep-seated unease, driven by data as well a sentiment, that the historic American dominance of global science an technology is in jeopardy. This case was powerfully made a few years back by the National Academies in a document with the foreboding title Rising above the Gathering Storm. In practical terms the discussion is centered around the significance of innovation (a term much-discussed in Washington though hardly evidenced in its political culture), and the core place of STEM education. That is, science, technology, engineering, mathematics. As in the UK, the US has for a generation been breast-beating as public education keeps failing to deliver either competitive global scores or an end to the underclass.
Put all these pieces together, and we do have quite a tizzy.If this looks more like a laundry-list than facets of a single entity, we should not be surprised. There’s little coherence in Washington’s grasp of the science and technology question in 2013.
