Broken Beakers

Broken Beakers: The Washington Post recently put out a story about the fact that there are too many scientists in America, an unfortunate consequence of the state's central planning of that vital component of the economy:

A glut of new biomedical scientists ... entered the field when the economy was healthier. From 1998 to 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled to $30 billion per year. That boost -- much of which flows to universities -- drew in new, young scientists. The number of new PhDs in the medical and life sciences boomed, nearly doubling from 2003 to 2007, according to the NSF.

But that boom is about to go bust, because an equal number of permanent jobs failed to follow. One big factor: Since 2004, federal research spending across all agencies has stagnated relative to inflation, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Although the injection of $10 billion in federal stimulus funds to the NIH from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 "created or retained" 50,000 science jobs, according to the NIH, that money is running dry, putting those positions at risk.

The lack of permanent jobs leaves many PhD scientists doing routine laboratory work in low-wage positions known as "post-docs," or postdoctoral fellowships. Post-docs used to last a year or two, but now it's not unusual to find scientists toiling away for six, seven, even 10 years.

The fact that so many scientists find themselves in long holding patterns is bad enough, but for many, the nature of the work makes it worse than merely frustrating. Speaking about his postdoctoral work, one interviewee notes that "I couldn't answer the question of how this was any different from undergraduate work."

But even that's not the whole story by a long shot, as Frederic Bastiat made clear over a century and a half ago. What might our economy be like now, with so many hard-working, talented individuals performing more productive work? What might it have been like had these individuals, better-informed about what the market would reward, specialized in something else a decade or more earlier? And how much better might their individual careers have been had they not been led down a blind alley by the pied piper of government-funding of science?

-- CAV