cc >> Sara Goldrick-Rab: The topic
of the next session is The Narrowing of Public
Interest: How Universities Became Economic Engines.
And we have with us Elizabeth Popp Berman, assistant professor
of sociology at the University of Albany at SUNY.
She received her PhD in sociology from the University
of California Berkeley in 2007, and she studies how social
institutions make decisions about how to organize
the relationships with the marketplace in higher education
and elsewhere. She's written a great book
called Creating the Market University: How Academic Science
Becomes an Economic Engine, which was published this year by
Princeton University Press and received the President's Book
Award from the Social Science History Association.
I am really excited that she's here.
As it turns out, we were Spencer Dissertation Fellows together a
decade ago, and I can't believe I'm old enough to say that now,
neither one of us should be. I am really happy to have her
here. And then we're going to hear,
also, a perspective on her talk from Sheila Slaughter as well.
So this should be a very stimulating session, and I
appreciate you all being here. >> Elizabeth Popp Berman: Thank
you very much, Sara. So topic of the larger
conference today is the public interest in the future of public
higher education in the 21st century.
I'm going to talk primarily about the scientific research
function of the university, and I'm going to talk mostly about
the 20th century and not the 21st.
I'm going to try and move that into a point where we're saying
what does the things that have happened over the last 30 years
or so say about where we are now and where we're going to be
going in the future. Just to give you a quick sketch
of the talk, this is my book that just came out, Creating the
Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic
Engine. Really, the main thing that I'm
trying to do here in this book is, to borrow from Sheila
Slaughter's term, explain where did academic capitalism come
from, and in the science end at the university in particular.
So why did US academic science move toward the market?
And I'm going to try to make three main points during my time
here today. One is to give you a brief
explanation of why did universities make this shift.
Just sort of the empirical answer to that.
Then to kind of connect back to some of these larger questions,
what has this meant in the long run for universities, and then,
in particular, what are the implications for the future of
public higher education specifically.
So those are the three main things that I'm going to try to
talk about today. The main research strategy of
the book is I look at three different practices that are
pretty widely seen as representing this shift and can
look at those historically as case studies.
And so I examine the emergence of university patenting, the
expansion of university industry research centers, and, finally,
the emergence of faculty entrepreneurship, particularly
in the bio sciences. And so the larger strategy here
is that these are all practices, obviously there's some overlap
and some intersections between these, but they each developed
on a relatively independent trajectory.
And, thus, you would assume that if there were some things that
they share in terms of why they emerged at the time that they
did, what caused them to emerge, that's indicative of some kind
of larger trend about why universities have moved in the
direction that they have. My initial sort of oriented
question here was try to evaluate the relative roles of
universities, industry, and government.
In driving this, my initial expectation was that a lot of
this was going to be about universities going out and
looking for new resources that particularly, in the '70s you
had periods of cut-backs, that universities were kind of
actively seeking new ways to make money, which would make
sense. What I found was actually that
it was really policy decisions that were the most important
thing driving these changes, much more than universities
actively saying we're going to go out and find new sources of
money. And so that kind of lead to a
second round of research because the policy decisions that made a
difference here were really quite diverse.
More diverse than I was expecting.
And, in addition to some of the ones that you would expect, like
the Bayh-Dole Act, there were also very important ones.
Big capital gains tax cut made a big difference for the emergence
of biotech entrepreneurship. Things as obscure and seemingly
unrelated as changes in pension fund regulations, which really
transformed the venture capital market and again, made a very
big difference to the emergence of biotech entrepreneurship.
So it was this very eclectic group of decisions that went
beyond just things that appeared to directly affect or be aimed
at universities or academic science.
What they did share, though, was that they all happened within a
relatively narrow time frame. So we're looking at about 1978
to 1985. So that was one clear
similarity. And when I really went into the
politics of these decisions, what I found was that arguments
about the economic impact of technological innovation were
really critical to making these policy decisions.
And so, I won't go into the details of all this, but I
looked at 10 decisions overall, all but one of which were made
in that time frame. That one there on the bottom
happened a little bit earlier. But of these 10 decisions, in 9
of the 10 of these cases, you can see a really strong evidence
of a lot of arguments saying that we're going to make this
decision because the US economy is in the tank, and we need to
figure out how to turn it around.
The way to do that is to encourage technological
innovation because we know that technological innovation drives
economic growth. So 9 of the 10 it's very
visible. In 6 of the 10 you can actually
make a pretty reasonable case that introducing these arguments
was decisive. Usually the evidence for that is
that you had people trying to promote the policy before that.
This is the case for the Bayh-Dole Act.
They had been trying to push is for a while.
It wasn't until they sort of actively switched strategies and
started framing the proposal in terms of the economic impact of
innovation that it was able to become politically successful.
So that's kind of the core argument of the book and of what
I'm going to say today is that what was really critical here
was coming to think about science and technology as
specifically an economic input and that that was something that
was relatively new. Now, from where we stand today,
it's kind of hard, I think, at times to imagine how you could
not see science and technology as an economic input.
That seems kind of almost self-evident based on how we see
the world today. One thing that was kind of
important for me early in this project in sort of realizing how
much things had changed was I went to visit the archives at
the University of Illinois. This is a picture of ILLIAC,
which was one of the first supercomputers at the University
of Illinois in the early '60s. And in Illinois in the early
'60s, the governor asked the president of the university to
try to figure out what the university could do to help
regional economic development. And if any place should have
been in a good position to do this, Illinois should have been
great. They had top 10 departments in
chemical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, I think
chemistry. They had the resources to be
able to do this. So he appointed a committee.
He had faculty members from economics and some of the
different sciences and from regional planning, I think, and
they met for a year and a half to try and figure out how can
university help drive regional economic development.
At the end of it they came out with the most lackluster report
you can imagine. They had no idea what the
university could possibly do. They made some sort of
halfhearted suggestions that maybe we can have night classes
for engineers, maybe we can do some more consulting, and they
made the great classic academic suggestion that perhaps we could
study regional economic development.
But they really didn't have any way of thinking about what is
the university's economic contribution specifically.
If you fast forward, just by my good fortune, the university got
a very similar request 30 years later in 1999 from the governor
to evaluate, again, what it could do to help leverage its
economic impact. And this time it had a quick
answer. They created a vice president
for economic development. They titled their annual report
the University of Illinois: Engine of Growth or something
like that. It was something very similar.
They expanded their technology transfer office.
They started an incubator program for new start-ups.
They had a whole different framework for thinking about
what it was that the university did in relation to the economy.
So that's kind of one example of how much things have changed in
terms of how we think about what the science end of universities
does. The second example, I'm sure
many of you are familiar with the report on Science: The
Endless Frontier, but for those who might not be, this was
written by Vannevar Bush, published in 1945, kind of the
document that laid out post-war science policy.
A few years ago, economist Paul Samuelson acknowledged that he
actually drafted much of the report.
So if you would think that anything sort of laying out
science policy would kind of have an economic competent to
it, it would be a report that had been drafted by an
economist. But if you look at it, very
little mention of anything that is explicitly economic.
There's a brief mention that science can create new
industries which is going to create jobs, but I went through
and counted the amount in which they talk about economic issues.
It's about 3% of the whole report.
So a very minor theme. And so these are just some
examples of how the way we think about science and technology has
changed over time.
And that I just said. So, one thing I want to
emphasize here, though, is that moving towards thinking about
science as being important because it does drive economic
growth and economic development also means that you necessarily
have a shift away from thinking about some of its non-economic
impacts, its other kind of impacts to the extent that they
don't necessarily always line up with economic development.
So if you think about where this shift came from, why did we
start to think about the issues in these terms, it didn't come
from university administrators. They did sort of jump onto this
relatively early, but that was not the origins of this change.
It actually emerged with economists.
Economists started really talking a lot about the role of
innovation in driving growth starting in the late '50s,
certainly in the 1960s, and you can even see it among economists
who were pretty prominent in policy circles.
So this was out there among policymakers in the '60s, but it
wasn't a message that got a lot of resonance at a time when
innovation in the US seemed to be doing pretty much just fine,
and people weren't that concerned about the economy and
the state of the US and the larger global marketplace.
It really wasn't until the 1970s when the economy is really going
downhill, we start to have a pretty concerted push by people
largely from large R&D intensive companies to really emphasize
this innovation issue and to push this to something that the
US needs to fix. And so by about 1977 or so, this
has become a prominent enough issue that it's starting to
become seen among policymakers as almost common sense.
That we need strengthen technological innovation to help
the economy. This is something that is
popular with both republicans and democrats.
It's not a terribly controversial thing at the time.
Everybody kind of is able to get on board with this.
Republicans and democrats, of course, have very different
ideas about what it is that you should do to do that.
Republicans generally want to cut taxes, deregulate,
strengthen patent rights, and loosen antitrust regulations.
Democrats are much more interested in doing something
that looks more like industrial policy.
But they're both really agreeing on this core idea that we need
to somehow improve innovation. What ends up happening is that
you have, basically, you have all these different sorts of
policies. Again, some of them these things
that are pretty directly aimed at universities or at science,
but some of these policies that are really in other policy
areas, like tax policies and this pension policy issue, that
are framed in terms of their ability to harness innovation or
to improve innovation. And certainly not every policy
that somebody says is going to improve innovation passes, but
the policies that are able to be framed that way just kind of
have a little bit of a political edge at a moment when that's a
particularly compelling argument.
And so these policies, again, they're not exclusively sort of
conservative or right leaning. They're really somewhat mixed.
You do have a lot of industrial policy kinds of things mixed up
in here, but they're all more or less sold in these terms of
driving innovation. Now, university administrators,
like I said, they're not at the cutting-edge of this, but they
kind of get on board with this program relatively
There's a couple of reasons. One, even though I did not find
that these policies or these practices were emerging kind of
in direct response to seeking revenues.
A lot of these new practices were coming out of areas that
were doing pretty well financially.
There was a lot of money for the bio sciences.
It wasn't like they had to go become entrepreneurs because
they didn't have any research money.
Nevertheless, universities were relatively strapped, and so once
it became clear, especially by the late '70s, about 1979, when
it's becoming clear that biotech really is going to be very
lucrative for a certain set of people.
The universities are starting to see this as something they
should figure out how to take some advantage of financially.
The other issue is that it's becoming increasingly clear the
policymakers really care about this.
And so even if this might not necessarily have been many
university administrators first choice of the language that they
might want to frame their own, what the value of science was
in, it's pretty politically convenient to be able to do
this. So you see a pretty rapid shift
of university administrators towards getting on board with
this sort of language of the purpose of science and
technology is a specifically economic one.
And, in a lot of ways, this was a successful decision.
We talked a lot over the last, I guess, day and a half about many
of the problems that universities have seen, but
there has been a lot of money that has gone into trying to
figure out how to leverage science and technology in these
economic ways, and that's a place that I think money still
is available at a time when a lot of other kinds of money
aren't. So, strategically, this has been
a pretty good decision. So, I want to move from there to
talking a little bit more about where we are today, how that
affects where we find ourselves now.
So, what have the long-run effects of this been?
I think to some extent, it had been mixed.
I don't think that things have turned out quite as badly as
some people thought they might, and I don't think the promise of
using science and technology to drive development has been quite
as wonderful as other people thought it would be.
One microcosm of this, perhaps, is patenting where the fear has
been that universities are sort of going to patent everything,
and it's going to have a really hindrance on people's ability to
use that knowledge to do additional research.
There have been some effects. Fiona Murray has done work on
the anticommons effect, so the extent to which patenting stuff
prevents other people from using it down the road.
And there is a modest effect. It's not that large.
On the flip side, though, you can also say, well, patents, the
number of patents being issued to universities has been pretty
flat for about the last 10 years.
So it's not like people are just patenting more and more stuff
and it's going to take over everything.
So, again, not as extreme, perhaps, as either side
initially might have thought, but there are some issues, some
significant issues. One of the most significant, I
think, is what's happened in medical research, partly because
clinical medicine, it's very difficult to evaluate what
treatments actually do sometimes, and there are so many
people now who have some sort of financial interest in the
outcome. You had the emergence of a whole
industry related to the pharmaceutical industry whose
job it is to manage publications which means that when you've got
a whole set of people whose job it is to ghost write articles
and attach them to other people, you really sort of reach a point
where you sort of run the risk of undermining the whole
enterprise of believing the stuff that's out there in
peer-reviewed journals. So that's one place that it's
really more problematic than others.
Another is that it's just difficult to measure but there
has been some shift. If you're shifting towards
funding, areas that are more commercially relevant.
That means necessarily there are going to be other things that
you're not necessarily funding as much.
One example of this might be in agriculture where there's a good
bit of money for funding a handful of commercially dominate
crops but much less money for funding something like
sustainable agriculture or more minor plant varieties that it
might makes sense to have investment in but just aren't
going to be particularly commercially valuable in the
short run. The other thing to keep in mind
here is just that, again, at a time when budgets aren't really
particularly increasing, to some extent this really is a zero sum
game. If you're pulling money away
from one particular type or if you're putting money into one
particular type of research, there's something else that
you're not supporting at the same time.
I'll give you one example, sort of a contemporary example of how
this can kind of play out when you shift towards focusing on
the economic impact. NSF, I don't know how many of
you guys, some people at least are aware of this, but in the
last year or so NSF has been undertaking a review of the
criteria by which it awards grants.
And so about 10 years ago, or a little bit more, NSF added a
criteria where in addition to sort of talking about the
intellectual merit of your project, you have to talk about
its broader impacts. This is pretty well established
at this point, and so people incorporate that into every
grant. But about, in 2010, as part of
the American COMPETES Reauthorization Act, which is an
economically oriented science and technology policy if there
ever was one. They asked NSF to reevaluate
these criteria, and the America COMPETES Act laid out a set of
goals for science. And so it had a list of goals
that kind of fall into two main categories.
One is sort of an economic set of goals.
Increase competitiveness, development of a globally
competitive STEM workforce, increased academic industry
partnerships. Then there's sort of a more
educational set of goals, both at the K-12 and undergraduate
level. They kind of threw in national
security at the end there for good measure.
Why not? >> Yeah, why not?
But what NSF had proposed as of last summer when it published
its proposed revised criteria for comment was that for broader
impacts instead of saying what your impact on society would be
which is kind of a general open-ended question, you'd now
have to address one or more of these specific goals.
And while there aren't necessarily anything wrong with
these specific goals, it's a very limiting idea of what one's
broader impacts might be. So if you just think of all the
things that might not count as broader impacts, that would
include something like helping food security or helping with
improving health, you're preventing or mitigating climate
change, you could think of all sorts of things that don't fall
into economic competitiveness, education, or national security
that might be important. Now, NSF got a lot of push back
on this, and I don't know anything about the internal
politics behind it, but they have since moved back towards
retaining more of a benefit to society language rather than
tying the merit criteria to these specific goals.
So perhaps this isn't going to, this doesn't look like it's
going to play out the way that it did initially.
But the thing that I wanted to highlight here is just the kinds
of language you use about what your priorities are really does
have real effects in terms of what's going to get funded and
what's not. If you're going to focus on
funding stuff that is clearly economic in nature, there are
other things that aren't necessarily going to be
justifiable anymore. So, coming back for a few
minutes here to kind of tie this back to what does this mean
about the future of public higher education, in particular.
In some ways, a lot of the changes that I've talked about
here apply more or less to public and private institutions,
generally. If NSF changes their merit view
criteria, obviously that's going to apply to both public and
private universities. Probably the biggest difference,
I think, though, in how this affects public versus private
institutions is that this is certainly not new, this has been
going on since the '80s, but you really have an ongoing state
level push to try to figure out how to use universities to drive
regional economic development. And so, again, sort of coming
from the assumption that in a time of non-growing budgets, at
best, this is a zero sum game. To the extent that you're
putting your money into trying to figure out how to use science
and technology to drive regional growth, there's other places
that you're not putting it, maybe most notably undergraduate
education. This is my own institution, SUNY
Albany. The governor of New York has put
$800 million over the last decade into a nanotech center
which, I checked the website, I think it's 53 undergraduates it
enrolls. It was in the 50s.
So almost entirely a research center intended to drive
regional economic development totally not focused on
undergraduate education, and this is at a time when the
university is not only cutting budgets but actually closing
departments. So it's a real shift in
priorities. Other universities have seen a
lot of this as well. This is UCSF, Mission Bay
campus. One of the few areas of growth
in the University of California over the last decade has been
these couple, there's four institutes for, what are they
called? Institutes for science and
innovation that focus on different specific sciences.
There's a quantitative biology one and a nanoscience one and an
information science one and so forth.
These are large scale public/private partnerships.
The point is to leverage state dollars with industry
contributions. At Wisconsin, the equivalent of
this is probably the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery.
Again, large scale public/private partnerships.
Certainly, public/private connections can be useful and
worthwhile, and I don't mean to suggest that the people who are
in these institutes aren't doing valuable science, but the point
again is if you shifted this direction, you're necessarily
shifting away from other priorities in a way that we
don't necessarily always talk about completely explicitly.
So, if you want to say what are some things to think about
what this means is that this shift is happening
simultaneously with this investment in undergraduate
education. And another probably equally
important thing is that, certainly, while science and
technology drives economic growth in some sort of broad
sense, it's much less clear that universities can effectively
leverage it to drive regional economic development.
There's a handful of places that have done this very well, but
they've also had a lot of, think of the Stanfords and the MITs,
but they've also had a lot of advantages.
It's much less clear that a place like Albany or even a
place like Wisconsin is going to get the kind of pay back it's
hoping for by making this kind of investment.
So to come back here at the end to this question that we talked
about so much yesterday about the Wisconsin Idea.
The Wisconsin Idea, and I have to admit, not being from
Wisconsin, I lifted this from, I think, Wikipedia, which don't
tell my students. So perhaps this isn't the best
summary of the Wisconsin Idea, but universities should solve
problems important to the state and its citizens.
That seems pretty consonant with what everybody was saying
yesterday. That's a much broader vision
than for universities to serve as an economic engine.
And being an economic engine might be once piece of that.
That might be one way to serve, but that's a very limiting set
of possibilities that you have. And many of the kinds of ways
that people talked about the University of Wisconsin possibly
serving the state, some of them were economic, but some of them
were much more practical, much more directly oriented toward
solving problems or educating future citizens.
It was a much more diverse mission.
I will just leave with something that's a little bit more
speculative, but I thought it was something that would be at
least a little bit controversial.
I think it's also arguable that sort of shifting toward this
economic kind of thing plays out on the educational side of
universities as well as on the scientific research side.
If you think of the extent in which we sort of move towards
thinking about education as investments in human capital.
I think, again, it's a very similar, it's an analogous kind
of shift where we see the purpose of education as being
it's ability to give people this, it's an investment that
you undertake because it's going to give you a long-run economic
return. And I think there's some
implications of that that maybe we would not always be so crazy
about, or at least that kind of move away from the traditional
sense of what a public university is.
One is, for example, that this tends to go along with an
assumption that we're going to shift toward individuals bearing
more of the cost burden of their education, generally through
taking on more debt. I realize that human capital
theory doesn't have to imply that individuals have to bear
all the costs and you can have positive externalities and all
that, but the way people actually talk about it often
ends up like this. I think when we shift towards
trying to think about how do we leverage the impact of education
with specifically economic goals in mind, it's a long-term idea,
it should be over somebody's lifetime you're going to have
this payoff, but we often approach it in a very short-term
way, and so you end up in situations where the way that
you try to increase people's human capital is by getting as
many people through college as possible which, as Sheila
mentioned this morning, the risk of that is, of course, that you
just sort of water it down and you're not necessarily doing
anything that's really contributing to people's skills
in the long-run. So the implementation tends to
be different than the ideal might be.
And finally, of course, not just a question about implementation
but, again, about values, again focusing specifically on
education as an investment with an economic return kind of
leaves out of the conversation other sorts of values, and
particularly some of the civic purposes that we might like to
see result from higher education.
So, if we say that universities are an economic engine, which,
again, certainly not the only way that people talk about
universities, but is a much more dominate thread in the
conversation than it would have been, certainly, 30 years ago,
and I would say even 10 years ago.
I just like people to kind of think about the idea that this
is a narrower mission than the Wisconsin Idea or in general, I
think, the traditional mission of the land grant universities.
And that necessarily if this is the one, the mission that we're
going to choose and go with and that dominates, you should also
be aware that that's necessarily going to mean there are other
things we're choosing not to support, and there are tradeoffs
there that aren't necessarily always explicitly articulated.
So I will stop there. [APPLAUSE]
Okay, I'm going to make some comments.
This is an excellent paper. I really enjoyed it.
There are many important points. Can you all hear me?
Is the mic on? Many important points,
especially, I think, the zero sum game where if you invest in
some of these things the there's not money to invest in others.
The lack of disinterested knowledge, which was, of course,
one of the main things that universities supplied for the
public good. That happens when everybody has
an economic investment in the knowledge that is available.
And the narrowing of the sorts of things that we consider
appropriate to the mission. Some things to think about.
I think it was not just the economists who are responsible
for this, and not just the state.
I really think that it was that economists said coincided with
the power dynamics of the business class at an opportune
moment. The turning point is the
mid-'70s. Why then?
Certainly because the economy is starting to get in the tank, but
that's not the only thing. I think it was tied to the end
Keynesian economics and the beginning of the neoliberal
term. Keynesian economics in the US
played out as guns and butter. Stimulation of the economy
through the Cold War military spending in return for a
somewhat welfare state. And a substantial segment of R&D
was done by universities in that arrangement.
Basic research with all the ironies that involves, and so it
was mainly Department of Defense funding.
It was a lot of money. Steven Muller, then president of
Johns Hopkins, said US universities enlisted in the
Cold War and not just in the sciences.
There were language programs, often replaced by area studies,
an interesting shift from women to men, participation in the CIA
and many other intelligence gathering ventures for which
Yale was particularly known, and USAID programs and the list goes
on. I lost my place here.
Oops, I'm going the wrong direction.
The mid-1970s was right after the end of the Vietnam War, and
military funding was down, especially for research
universities where the weapons sought by the Department of
Defense had not been delivered in the way expected, and
universities were penalized for that even before the end of the
Vietnam War. And where campuses had become
sites of protests against that war, including this one.
At least one research university president testified, I think it
was from the University of Rochester, before Congress
calling for reinstatement of DOD funding along with the promise
that protest would never happen again and the statement that
students who had protested were class traitors.
But even more importantly, defense funding was down not
only for research universities, but for defense industries which
had played an important part in keeping the American economy
strong. And the US was losing ground in
manufacturing compared to Germany and Japan.
1983 was the later, and the US had slipped on every indicator.
The US business class, operationally defined as the
leaders of large industries, was, as David Dixon so clearly
wrote about, infuriated by the success of protest in initiating
cross-industry regulation in areas that it had never been the
case before, like environmental quality and worker safety and
health, and there were two others but I can't remember them
now. It's been a while since I looked
at this stuff. I only remember that there's
four. Politically, business leaders
began to develop think-tank type organizations across a wide
variety of areas that pushed for what we would now call a
neoliberal approach to the economy.
The one that was, I thought, always most salient for higher
education was the business higher education forum was the
principal's only organization of the leaders of corporations and
the CEOs of corporations, and, as they then came to be called
shortly after that, the CEOs of universities.
I would argue that the legislation you talk about could
be captured under the competitiveness legislation that
happened in the '70s, '80s, '90s and continues in America
COMPETES. It was talked about at that
period as competitiveness legislation.
I think you may say that elsewhere in the book.
Yeah. I would say the competitiveness
stuff came a little later. They weren't using the language
yet until '81 or so. >> Close.
Yeah. By the early '80s they were
talking about it in those terms. >> And if you look at the AAU
president's testimony before Congress 1980 and post-1980, you
see that they then use what I call the, they switch from a
narrative of basic science to a narrative of entrepreneurial
science in their testimony before Congress.
I love Wesley Posvar's most of all.
He said, "We will contribute to innovation.
We will change the economy by orders of magnitude with less
inputs than we are called for now."
So, I think we have, basically, corporate-led and
corporate think-tank-led policy that drew on economist thought
going back to Hayek and others about human capital technology
and innovation, but unless you had the turn the end of the war,
the whole thing, I'm not sure it would have happened.
And that led, eventually, to a sort of federal policy that was
industrial policy from the bottom up.
No specific winners and losers but powerful industries were
subsidized through a variety of competitiveness policies, most
of which have implications for research universities.
And I think we're still there. And I love your book, not your
book but what I've read of it so far, but I do think that the
turn had its roots in the sorts of things I'm talking about.
Can I respond? All right.
I think it's an interesting question of how much of this was
about the organized business interest and how much of it
wasn't because I think, for me, one of the things that I found
surprising was the extent to which the intellectual stuff
behind this actually, I think, did matter.
And it wasn't coming from Chicago schools, like the people
you would think of as neoliberal.
The people who were making these growth arguments were
center-left, Kennedy Administration economists.
This is like the Robert Solows. >> I don't disagree with that,
but I think stuff only gets picked up when you have business
people and policy people who do it.
It's true. I think, to me, the place that I
think the business was successful in sort of an
organized way was in pushing the idea, they were very good at
pushing the idea that innovation is important and that we need to
do something about innovation. And I think that was an
organized success. And you can kind of see that.
It's interesting, a lot of it emerged in the National Academy
of Engineering. >> Sure.
Yeah. >> So that's really where a lot
of the conversation coalesced. >> They agree by the '90s.
You can see that they've given up the idea of basic science in
the national academies. >> Yeah, this is the early '70s
even that I'm talking about. So I think that you do have
organized large R&D intensive companies who are promoting the
argument that we have to do something about innovation.
And then, of course, those set of people have a very specific
idea of what the solutions are to solve innovation that do line
up with this sort of larger conservative business interest.
But to me what's interesting was the extent to which this was
picked up by both sides. And I don't see it as much being
promoted by conservative think-tanks and those kinds of
groups. >> Well, it depends on whether
you consider the places like the Business Higher Education Forum
conservative. Probably you wouldn't.
No, no, I'm willing to say that they're conservative.
They're not super conservative.
So I just think that that's the new consensus.
And I think it's not necessarily conservative.
I do think it's a lot of liberals who go that way too.
But I guess for me the thing is that I don't see it as just
coming from them. The business class pushed it,
but I really do see this as more of a bipartisan move.
And I think that if you hadn't had a lot of, I think that you
have lot of left-leaning technocratic economists who were
also pushing this same idea. To me, some of that's what it is
is that you have people who really believed, who saw a role
for government in managing science, but they were
rethinking of science in these economic terms.
And then once you start to think about that that's how we measure
the success of science is economic.
Whether you're on the left or on the right is going to end up how
you decide that that should be actually implemented in
practice. But either way you're going to
focus on one particular set of things that science can do and
not be as interested in another. So I guess the place that I
would disagree is not that business interest wasn't pushing
this in conjunction with a particular set of policies, but
I just think there was a lot more of this on the left than
people sometimes acknowledge. >> That may very well be the
case. 75% of both Houses vote for
competitiveness legislation with the exception of NAFTA and maybe
two other ones between 1980 and 2005.
And I know it was almost unanimous.
Yeah. I'm saying 75% is not lightly
taken. That's a commitment on the side
of both the left and the right, if we want to use that language,
for all of the competitiveness legislation, to say nothing of
the things that happen in administrative law.
Should we take some questions?
So we don't have fundamental disagreements.
We won't be as lively as you and Richard Vedder.
No. >> That was pretty lively.