Must-Read: Noah Smith: Republic of Science or Empire of Ideology?

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Republic of Science or Empire of Ideology?: “[Jim Tankersley of] The Washington Post has a long story about Charles’ Koch’s attempt to influence the economics profession with massive donations…

…The Post’s article is titled ‘Inside Charles Koch’s $200 million quest for a ‘Republic of Science'”. This is a reference to a 1962 article by Michael Polanyi called ‘The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory’….The Post article’s author, Jim Tankersley, drily notes:

[Koch’s donation effort] raises the question of whether Koch has become, for university researchers, the sort of distorting force that Polanyi warns against.

Why yes. Koch is making a sustained, multi-hundred-million dollar effort to push the academic economics profession toward a libertarian ideology. This is a ‘Republic of Science’ to the same degree that North Korea is a ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’…. I don’t like it…. It sets back our understanding of the world when people try to flood any portion of academia with researchers whom they think will promote a certain set of conclusions. I don’t have much more to say than that, so here’s one of my favorite Feynman quotes:

Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming ‘This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!’ we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

A real ‘Republic of Science’ would focus on an open-minded search for truth, not the enshrinement of one pre-decided dogma.

Updates: I also thought this passage from Tankersley’s article was interesting:

None of the largest recipients of Koch dollars appear on a list of the most influential academic economic departments in the United States, as calculated by the research arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Only one professor who works at one of Koch’s most-supported centers cracks a similar list that calculates the top 5 percent of influential economists in the research community
Koch-funded researchers make a larger impact in the public arena. They frequently testify before Republican-led committees in Congress. Their work often guides lawmakers, particularly conservatives, at the state level in drafting legislation, and they have provided the foundations for judicial opinions that affect the economy on issues such as whether the government should intervene to stop large companies from merging.

It’s possible that the Koch doesn’t want to influence economic science itself, as much as he wants to sculpt its public-facing component. The end result could be two econ professions – a dispassionate, truth-seeking one occupying the upper levels of the ivory tower, at MIT and Princeton and Stanford, doing hard math things and careful honest data work that slowly trickles out through traditional media channels, and another in the lower-ranked schools, doing a slightly fancier version of the kind of political advocacy now done by conservative think tanks. The former would have the best brains and the best understanding of the real world, but the latter would have much more policy influence and impact on the wider intellectual world. This is different from the wholesale yoking of science to ideology that I was envisioning, but it also doesn’t seem like a pleasant vision of the future.