However academia has lots of cushy high-paid and high-status jobs to offer, fancy stone buildings to work out of, and a non-stop conveyor belt of self-congratulatory puffery to offer about how smart academics are and how foolish everyone else is. What’s not to like for the beneficiaries of such a system?

That’s laughable. In terms of innovation, we can’t hold a candle to the period from the end of the civil war to WW1. Academia was no where to be found in terms of innovation at that time.

Even today, it is where academia and the market intersect that innovation occurs. A place like Silicon Valley is innovative because of its university connections, but also because of its corporate and venture capital connections. I wouldn’t give academia all, or even most, of the credit.

Bee, I don’t know enough yet to endorse your particular approach, but as I said I can endorse more social science of academia.

Presumably “orders of magnitude” was meant in a rhetorical sense. I recently made a conjugate mistake during an interview when I referred to the billions of dollars spent yearly on marketing lipstick, and called the Singularity / intelligence explosion “a billion times more important”. If you try to calculate the expected value of an intergalactic civilization, it seems likely that I dropped at least fifty zeroes for the sake of compact rhetoric.

Amara sent me a link to your comment above. There is not yet a place to discuss. I will probably have a post introducing my proposal over at my blog and will send you a note then, feedback is welcome. To briefly address your questions:

is the claim that more funding should go to 1) sociology of science in general, 2) physicists trying to do sociology of science, or 3) her particular (unclear to me) approach to physicists trying sociology of science?

1) Yes, we are claiming that more funding go to the sociology of science in general because the field is becoming increasingly important, which imo has not fully been realized yet. However, we can’t very well write a proposal just wishing for ‘more funding’. Therefore we have worked out a very precise context that we hope will find support and which embeds this research.

2) No, this must be a misunderstanding. The institute does interdisciplinary research between physics and sociology/politics, but a) this does of course include people working in all of these areas, not only physicists (this would be a disaster) and b) though the interdisciplinary part is of course in various regards related to the interdisciplinary one we did not plan to have physicists in this area.

3) The institute IS my particular approach. I have a personal opinion about what I think will work, so do you I presume, and I also have an opinion about your opinion (that I believe I made quite clear). However, the institute is not about what I think will work, but about providing an environment to explore/work out proposals that can improve the situation. (Your proposal might have fallen into this area. I say ‘might’ because I don’t wish to be the one and only person who makes a decision about which projects would be the most promising to work out).

Best regards,

Sabine

In academia, on the other hand…. Well, when was the last time a popular university went bust? Universities do not improve due to selection. So how else do they improve? Academic acclaim is like watching the Oscars: the people making the judgments are the people involved in the system. Where is the external validation?

I am not saying that we should burn the schools or anything, but we should be wary of assigning too much wisdom to these institutions. They are strong on tradition, and it’s a good tradition, but they are weak on improving how they work.

http://modernizationimperative.blogspot.com/2006/12/nobel-prizes-as-scientometric-measure.html

But we have to recognize that the pace of institutional change is measured in decades not years; due to the constraints of planning, funding, executing, writing, disseminating and responding-to research projects (so that a cycle of communications takes many years to complete) – and also the relatively slow turnover in expert manpower.

There is no such thing as optimal efficiency – all efficiencies are relative; but it would be amazing if the US academic system didn’t improve further – so long as competition, selection and evolution continue.

It is the rest of the world’s universities that should be the focus of our concern…

There is pressure to start new companies because it’s a high-risk high-reward gamble. New ideas in the academy may also be gambles, but successful academics are remain cheap and can be bought out by old universities.

But there is also pressure to start new companies because old companies don’t pursue them. Companies should be less risk-averse than individuals, but the existence of start-ups shows that they aren’t. I think it’s best explained as a principal-agent conflict, but it could also be explained by founders being at the tail end of irrationally optimistic people.