by Jonathan Kujawa
Among our many flaws, humanity prefers to be shortsighted. We tend to set our priorities by what we see right in front of us. This makes some sense. After all, there is no point in worrying about storing food for the winter when facing down a saber toothed tiger. But eventually winter arrives.
There is a reason Aesop told us the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Children want to stay up late, eat candy for every meal, and skip anything that seems like work. As we grow up, we hopefully learn the value of investing in our future.
But just planning for the next winter is not what got us to where we are today. Hobbes said the natural life of a human was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”. We may still sometimes be nasty brutes to each other, but most of us have long lives filled with health, wealth, and ease.
The progress of the last century is astonishing. When my grandfather was a young boy, the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. When my parents were children, polio was a real worry [1]. When I was young, international phone calls were a dollar per minute, shopping options were limited to whatever the local stores carried, and the sum total of knowledge on a subject was contained in the encyclopedias at the library. Now we have transcontinental flights, a polio vaccine, and the internet.
How did we get from there to here? I can tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t just solve today’s problems. We also invested in solving future problems, even problems we didn’t know existed. Even the times when we made a maximum effort to solve a hard problem of the day (the atomic bomb, the moon landing, the Covid-19 vaccine), we depended on the prior work of people who were interested in developing our fundamental knowledge with no immediate application in mind.
There will always be a tension between the problems of today and an investment in the future. We have pressing needs, and it can be hard to trust that research driven by curiosity is worth the cost. Especially when the research sounds nonsensical or when its utility is impossible to imagine. And it’s true that much of that research will never come to anything.
But when it pays off, it pays off big. Non-Euclidean Geometry was an idle amusement until it was key to understanding spacetime and, in turn, gave us space travel and GPS. The numerology of elliptic curves was an esoteric glass bead game until it became the ubiquitous key ingredient of modern cryptography. The theory of Linear Algebra was developed with no idea that it would be essential to Google Search and the current AI explosion. All of mathematics could be funded on a tiny sliver of the profits generated off of the discoveries of a century ago [2].
The proximate cause is the announcement two weeks ago that the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US will unilaterally reduce its payments for Indirect Costs to 15%. This sounds like a niche change of no real consequence. You might be surprised to learn that this was a shocking hair-on-fire emergency for researchers across the country, including many who will never have NIH funding. The expectation is that if it can happen at the NIH [4], then it can happen at the National Science Foundation (NSF), or any of the other federal funding agencies.
The NSF is of particular concern to mathematicians. Nearly all federal funding for curiosity-driven research comes through the NSF. If you care at all about where US science will be in the decades to come, you should hope the NSF continues to be well-funded.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
— Albert Einstein
The cut to Indirect Cost rates is so consequential that it warrants explaining. A university that has researchers funded by the US government has an Indirect Cost rate. A typical rate is in the 50%-60% range [5]. This is added on top of the Direct Costs of doing the research. Direct Costs are what it says on the tin: all the expenses directly related to doing the proposed research. Things like equipment, supplies, and personnel. If the NSF agrees to give $100,000 towards the Direct Costs of a research project, then they are also agreeing to give the university an additional $50,000-$60,000.
Like everyone, I was shocked when I first learned about Indirect Costs. It felt like a crazy-high 50% tax on research. But that is a completely backwards way of looking at it.
There are lots of nonobvious costs associated with research. The research equipment takes up space in a university building, that space costs money to maintain and to heat. That equipment requires electricity to run. The supplies are likely stored in a refrigerator paid for by the university, and delivered to a loading dock built and maintained by the university. The personnel doing the research causes university HR to have more paperwork and more benefits to manage. Test tubes need to be washed in a dishwasher, and someone needs to buy that dishwasher and the soap that goes in it. The researchers need access to the internet and journals to keep up on the latest work. The grant itself requires time from university staff to handle ordering, to manage budgets, and to provide oversight and reporting (after all, we don’t want fraud and waste) [6].
While the university does all of this anyway as part of its ordinary business, the incremental additional cost adds up. Someone has to pay it. If society has decided by way of the NSF that this research is worth funding, then it is reasonable to expect it to pay the full cost, even if it adds 50% [7].
It’s also worth saying that the Indirect Cost rate is determined in a negotiated agreement between the university and the US government. If the government thinks it’s being overcharged, it is free to renegotiate. And as the one writing the checks, the feds hold all the cards in those negotiations. There is no reason for unilateral cuts. Of course, the chaos and wielding of raw power is the point.
Now you might say that if the research is worth doing, then shouldn’t the private sector be willing to fund it? Well, that brings us back to where we started. The private sector is willing to pour vast sums into short-term goals. Even goals of dubious worth. Mark Zuckerberg spent $10+ billion a year for years on the Metaverse.
By way of comparison, the annual budget of the entire NSF is roughly $10 billion dollars. Zuckerberg could have chosen to double what the US spends on the science that will lead to the breakthroughs of the twenty-second century. Instead, we got janky avatars in a soulless landscape.
This is part of a much bigger and more consequential story. There are huge pressures on universities these days to take a short-term view. Whether it be in how it teaches and graduates students, to what research it supports, to where it makes its investments for the future.
But universities are meant to take the long view. They were created as a way to institutionalize planning ahead. Through its dual mission of supporting research and teaching, the university is an important way we contribute to our collective future. We’ve been reaping the benefits of the previous generations’ investments while simultaneously hollowing out what got us here.
Recent events are a symptom of our willingness to yield to our childish impulses. This is not a new weakness. In 1939 Abraham Flexner wrote:
Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women — old and young — detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place-yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable. In this paper I shall concern myself with the question of the extent to which the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which un-dreamed-of utility is derived.
In his essay The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, Flexner argued that curiosity-driven investigations are worthwhile for their own sake and lead to some of the greatest of breakthroughs. It is well worth reading as a reminder to think beyond today.
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[1] Indeed, Paul Alexander lived his life in an iron lung and only passed away last year.
[2] If engineering is working to solve the problems of the next year, applied math and physics are working to solve the problems of the next decade, and theoretical math and physics are working to solve the problems of the next century.
[3] Image borrowed from here.
[4] Which does the most obviously useful research there is!
[5] For example, the University of Michigan Indirect Cost rate is 56%.
[6] And to state the obvious, that Indirect Cost money is spent by the university. It goes right out the door to the local economy. It is buying equipment, paying suppliers, and employing people.
[7] The university could pay for these Indirect Costs, of course, but with their limited budgets, the end result would be a lot less research done. Even a place like Harvard would make drastic cuts.
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