Koch’s donations have fueled the expansion of a branch of economic research that aligns closely with his personal beliefs of how markets work best: with strong personal freedom and limited government intervention.
They have seeded research centers, professors and graduate students devoted to the study of free enterprise, who often provide the intellectual foundation for legislation seeking to reduce regulations and taxes...
Koch’s donations have fueled the expansion of a branch of economic research that aligns closely with his personal beliefs of how markets work best: with strong personal freedom and limited government intervention.
They have seeded research centers, professors and graduate students devoted to the study of free enterprise, who often provide the intellectual foundation for legislation seeking to reduce regulations and taxes..
Koch no longer personally reviews those applications — his foundation staff does...Koch, though, has articulated a set of principles to determine who gets his money. He has prized researchers whose values, as he calls them, are rooted in an economic philosophy that aligns with his— the belief that economic and personal freedoms produce the fastest advancements in human well-being.
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". In that article - which Koch cites as a big influence on his efforts - Polanyi says that research dollars should flow to the scientists whose work is supported by the scientific consensus. 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".
One way to see this is as a defensive reaction against the interventionist turn in economic thinking. On many issues, academic economists are now less pro-free-market than the general public. And the most famous public-facing economists now tend to be left-leaning rather than right-leaning - Hayek and Friedman have given way to Piketty and Krugman. So the Koch donation campaign might be an attempt by libertarians to stem the tide.
Another way is to see it as a defensive reaction against the overall leftward turn of academia. Many social science disciplines - anthropology, urban studies, social psychology, and probably sociology - seem to have been captured by leftist ideology to a greater degree than econ was ever captured by libertarianism, even in the 70s and 80s. Koch might be using his hundreds of millions to try to preserve econ as a bulwark against this leftist capture of social science.
A final interpretation is that Koch is just doing what Koch always does - steadily pushing libertarian thought on the world by whatever means seem most expeditious.
Whatever it is, though, I don't like it. Unlike Koch, and unlike many of the lefty social science types I've been having debates with recently, I don't believe that social science is an inherently ideological enterprise. And I think 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.
from Noahpinion http://ift.tt/1t6Vcvc