Epidemiology is pretty expensive as it is. The sign seems to still be positive for spending more on scientists—diminishing returns have set in hard in some areas like pharmaceuticals, but I haven’t heard of an actual net negative.
Obviously scientists are not constant in how many problems they cause, or else the answer would be either ‘science could never get off the ground’ (if they caused more problems than they solved) or ’they’re not a net negative (since science is making progress and obviously made it off the ground). So presumably there’s some sort of changing marginal returns; usually, marginal returns diminish.
What does it look like if marginal returns are positive? Well, you toss in 1 scientist and get n more units of scientific output. What does it look like if marginal returns have fallen to 0? You toss in 1 more scientist and get 0 more units of scientific output. And if marginal returns have become negative, then you toss in 1 more scientist and see -n units, or scientific output in absolute terms falls.
Currently, all the datapoints I know of like the pharmaceutical industry point to diminishing returns (eg. fall in per-capita output, but not absolute output), and not negative ones. But it’s very hard to quantify scientific output...
That’s my guess for this particular effect, and overall, but I have heard plausible arguments that when you add up all the different externalities their collective effect is large, proportionally. For instance, competition for grants diverts a lot of time from good scientists to grantsmanship, and reduces the autonomy of young investigators who might otherwise undertake higher-risk research. Further, it seems plausible that at the margin funding brings in lower-quality scientists who produce less value for the negative externalities they produce. More quantitative data would be very nice for testing these claims.
Epidemiology is pretty expensive as it is. The sign seems to still be positive for spending more on scientists—diminishing returns have set in hard in some areas like pharmaceuticals, but I haven’t heard of an actual net negative.
I suspect that you are correct but I have to wonder if there were a net negative how would we easily tell?
Obviously scientists are not constant in how many problems they cause, or else the answer would be either ‘science could never get off the ground’ (if they caused more problems than they solved) or ’they’re not a net negative (since science is making progress and obviously made it off the ground). So presumably there’s some sort of changing marginal returns; usually, marginal returns diminish.
What does it look like if marginal returns are positive? Well, you toss in 1 scientist and get n more units of scientific output. What does it look like if marginal returns have fallen to 0? You toss in 1 more scientist and get 0 more units of scientific output. And if marginal returns have become negative, then you toss in 1 more scientist and see -n units, or scientific output in absolute terms falls.
Currently, all the datapoints I know of like the pharmaceutical industry point to diminishing returns (eg. fall in per-capita output, but not absolute output), and not negative ones. But it’s very hard to quantify scientific output...
That doesn’t stop people trying. Do other countries besides the U.K. have a similar system?
That’s my guess for this particular effect, and overall, but I have heard plausible arguments that when you add up all the different externalities their collective effect is large, proportionally. For instance, competition for grants diverts a lot of time from good scientists to grantsmanship, and reduces the autonomy of young investigators who might otherwise undertake higher-risk research. Further, it seems plausible that at the margin funding brings in lower-quality scientists who produce less value for the negative externalities they produce. More quantitative data would be very nice for testing these claims.