Friedman cry's "Wolf"

Friedman cry's "Wolf"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/opinion/friedman-the-way-we-were.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

"Countries that don't plan for the future tend not to do well there. When you watch the reckless behavior of the Tea Party-driven Republicans in Congress today, you can't help but fear that we'll be one of those. "

There is a plan in place which is being ignored: the US constitution. The plan is for most things to be done by individuals outside of government. The individual is free to optimize his efforts and to succeed or not based on his efforts. If he doesn't succeed, he is leaving the problem to others with good ideas. In the example below, the government is attempting to monopolize the creative effort, which it is not equipped to do.

"Because of the sequester and the fact that the N.I.H. budget has been losing ground to inflation for 10 years, "we will not be able to fund 640 research grants that were scored in the top 17 percent of the proposals we received," said Collins. "They would have been funded without the sequester, but now they won't. They include new ideas on cancer, diabetes, autism and heart disease — all the things that we as a country say are a high priority. I can't say which of those grants would have led to the next breakthrough, or which investigator would be a Nobel Prize winner 20 years from now."

Of those 640 top research proposals, 150 were from scientists financed in a previous budget cycle who had returned to the N.I.H. to secure another three to five years of funding — because they thought they were really onto something and a peer review board agreed. "Now we are cutting them off," said Collins, "so you damage the previous investment as well as the future one."

In 2014, the N.I.H. was planning to offer new money to stimulate research proposals in a dozen areas, including how to speed up the use of stem cells to cure Parkinson's and other diseases, how to better manage pain in sickle-cell disease and how to improve early diagnosis of autism. All were shelved because of the sequester, said Collins: "Why ask people to submit applications we would just have to turn down?""

Several points:
1. the projects defunded were evidently the least likely to provide results, unless the ranking was not correctly done.
2. The planned offerings could have been done in place of another percentage of the lease likely projects to succeed.
3. No administrator would admit the previous years funding was a mistake, so this is a face saving way to kill the dogs (bad projects).
4. a 10% cut should not be so noticeable. What is NIH doing with the other 90%, if there was indeed a cut at all. All cuts are from a projected increase from the previous year.
5. "Scientists" are presumably the tenured professors at major universities. I doubt these are doing much original thought. They are getting paid to publish. I also question whether the results are actually helping the biotech industry as much as the same money spent to relieve those companies from taxes and government interference.


Dave Farnsworth