💰🧪 Funding outside the box: A Quick Q&A with … philanthropy expert Stuart Buck
'Breakthroughs are by definition a break with the status quo'
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in the USA and around the world:
Research funding is inherently risky. There are no guarantees that funds, be they public or private, will generate valuable insights, but now and again, obscure research bears surprising fruit.
Take LiDAR, the remote sensing method that utilizes laser technology: Originally dreamed up in 1930 — before the invention of the laser — for studying meteorology, it’s now enabling the use of self-driving vehicles. Then there’s CRISPR gene editing tech, which started as a basic research project and has gone on to do everything from treating genetic disorders like sickle cell to increasing crop yields. The list goes on.
As I’ve written about in the past, the current administration has seen federal agencies like the NSF and NIH undergo steep funding cuts, alongside harsh reductions in personnel. It’s impossible to measure the possible ramifications of these cuts — the accidental discoveries that will never be made and the unexpected returns society will never see. But private philanthropists can pick up some of the slack.
In his essay in Palladium magazine, The Case for Crazy Philanthropy, Stuart Buck makes the argument that, in order for donors to truly make an impact, they need to take a chance on some unconventional recipients. Formulaic, tried-and-true giving to major research universities might feel like the safest bet, but taking a chance on unlikely candidates is likely the path to truly groundbreaking advancements.
Buck is the executive director of the Good Science Project. He is also a senior advisor to the Social Science Research Council. Buck has previously served as vice president of research at Arnold Ventures and as vice president of research integrity at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
. . . we know for a fact that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs had their origins in research that at one point might have seemed frivolous or irrelevant.
1/ Why is it so difficult for government institutions to justify supporting risky, unconventional research — even when the potential payoffs are enormous?
Government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF) are inherently political, to state the obvious. That means a couple of things: They feel a responsibility to the taxpayer to be legible and accountable about what they fund and do; and they want to avoid political scandals or even just minor political criticism, such as the long-running Golden Fleece Awards that the late Senator Proxmire would hand out to the research grants that he thought were the most frivolous.
Yet we know for a fact that many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs had their origins in research that at one point might have seemed frivolous or irrelevant. To take just one of many examples, Peyton Rous was an early 20th-century researcher at Rockefeller University who became fascinated with whether he could take a cancerous tumor from one pure-bred chicken, distill out the cancerous cells, and inject another chicken such that it too would get cancer. He ended up discovering the first-over oncovirus (Rous sarcoma virus), and laid the groundwork for future work on retroviruses like HIV. Indeed, he won the Nobel Prize at age 87 for the work he had done well over 50 years earlier. But at the time, his colleagues urged him to stop doing research on cancerous chickens—as of 1910 or so, nothing seemed more irrelevant to human health.
There are many such breakthroughs.
2/ Is it the government’s responsibility to reward unconventional research?
I would say yes, at least in part. It’s not exclusively the government’s responsibility. But given that private markets like venture capital have difficulty justifying research that is purely curiosity-driven with no particular market in mind, and given that the federal government already spends upwards of $100 billion a year on R&D of various kinds, it only makes sense for at least some of that federal spending to be set aside specifically for research that currently seems useless.
Future breakthroughs like the Rous sarcoma virus are almost by definition unpredictable in advance by a large-scale bureaucratic process that depends on the prior consensus of one’s peers. Indeed, if a given idea is already the scientific consensus of your peers or of the private market, it is anything but a future breakthrough.
If these dramatic cuts are successful, there would be a sudden shortfall of tens of billions of dollars per year. It is impossible to imagine that private philanthropy would have the resources to fill that kind of gap.
3/ Can private philanthropy make up for the severe federal cuts to basic research we’ve seen over the past several months?
Let me break that question into two.
First, the immediate cuts to research grants at NIH and NSF (often based on DEI reasons) actually only totalled a little over $3 billion (see here and here). Those cuts, while devastating to individual labs and researchers, were a small percentage of grants in the grand scheme of things. If need be, private philanthropy could easily make up that one-time discrepancy (indeed, the Gates Foundation alone could do so).
Second, the question is much different if the Administration is successful either at ramming through a number of proposed budget cuts, or else in refusing to spend money even if appropriated by Congress. As to NSF, for example, the Administration has proposed a mere $3.9 billion budget, compared to about $10 billion last year. The Administration has also proposed cutting NASA’s science budget by 47 percent to about $3.9 billion, as well as a 40 percent cut to NIH, and much more. If these dramatic cuts are successful, there would be a sudden shortfall of tens of billions of dollars per year. It is impossible to imagine that private philanthropy would have the resources to fill that kind of gap.
4/ Are wealthy individuals better equipped to fund breakthrough scientific research than government research institutions?
In some ways, yes. Wealthy individuals don’t have to answer to voters or taxpayers for every individual grant. That means they can fund literally anything they want—whether it be funding college kids to drop out, or a Seasteading Institute, or new attempts to decipher ancient scrolls, or a Harvard professor’s obsession with extraterrestrials. Their sheer lack of accountability enables them to take more outside-the-box bets, if they want.
But that’s the key question: “Do they want to do so anyway?” Wealthy philanthropists are still constrained by their own motivations and desires. When a wealthy person gives $X million or even $X billion to some cause, they are not hoping for a financial return, but they are often hoping for a psychological return. That is, they are hoping to receive public praise and gratitude for their generosity. They would be disheartened to hear from their peers, “Huh, that gift was weird. Why did you give money to that?”
Moreover, wealthy people, like the rest of us, can suffer from a lack of imagination, and can opt towards funding and creating the same institutions as everyone else (sociologists call this “institutional isomorphism”). Thus, we see an endless stream of private philanthropists who make multi-million dollar donations to the likes of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, etc. Perhaps they could think of something more creative to do with their philanthropy, but it wouldn’t be nearly as obvious to journalists and their peers.
Just like the saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM,” no philanthropic adviser ever got fired for saying, “Let’s give a few hundred million to Harvard.”
5/ How can we incentivize more “crazy philanthropy” among the super-wealthy? Do they even need outside incentives?
For the reasons I mentioned above, I think wealthy philanthropists do need outside incentives to give money in more creative or effective ways. Just like the saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM,” no philanthropic adviser ever got fired for saying, “Let’s give a few hundred million to Harvard.” I mean no offense to Harvard (my alma mater for law school) when I say that some philanthropists could think of more creative ways to deploy their philanthropic capital.
E.g., they could donate to:
Analogue Group,
a brilliant new organization focused on finding scientists and researchers working on unappreciated areas;
Speculative Technologies
(SpecTech), an organization focused on developing new materials and manufacturing technologies;
Convergent Research,
which is setting up “focused research organizations,” a new type of research organization that is aimed at technological progress within five years.
Moreover, wealthy philanthropists could come up with more initiatives like the Vesuvius Challenge, which was outside of any of the normal institutions and disciplines that normally confine how people think.
In many cases, a particular philanthropist might feel unqualified to do anything of the sort. As a stylized example, someone might think, “I made all my money launching a B2B service company, and I have no idea what to do as to science, the arts, etc., other than give to the typical suspects.” Good point, well taken. Such a person could at least try to hire someone with the diverse interests and expertise of a Tyler Cowen (or even 10 percent of his skills), and then empower that person to hire a team to make philanthropic donations that are more creative and insightful.
6/ What would society gain from a wider diversity of structures among research institutions?
As I have written, it is somewhat amazing that after hundreds of years in the growth of universities, and after all the 19th century activism that created many new universities (e.g., Johns Hopkins, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and CalTech), we have a set of top universities that all look basically identical. They all have the same structure (board of trustees, president, chancellor, provost, etc.), the same set of departments and fields, the same set of degrees (four-year undergraduate, masters’ degrees, PhD programs), the same opportunities for post-docs, the same participation in the same federal funding programs, and so forth.
When all institutions look the same, their output tends to be the same as well. Tens of thousands of scientists (usually government-funded) labor within the same constraints, incentives, and pressures to conform.
If we want to see a higher rate of scientific breakthroughs, we should pursue institutional diversity for that reason alone. Breakthroughs are by definition a break with the status quo in some respect — and if the status quo is too uniform and powerful everywhere, it would be hard for any individual scientist to contradict the entire ecosystem that provides his or her entire livelihood and professional reputation.
Institutional diversity may be one of the key ways to produce ideological diversity in science — that is, scientists who are empowered to take a different view precisely because they have a different position and source of salary, rather than being forever hobbled by those constraints.
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