Public Investment in the Knowledge Economy Lucy Barnes in Jacob Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen, eds. The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets and Power Cambridge University Press, 2021.
In the spring of 2020, the world was faced with a new, highly contagious and deadly disease. Epidemiological, medical and public health expertise became rapidly salient, the potential life and death consequences of scientific technology and expertise made apparent. At the time of writing, it is not clear what the long-term consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic will be. At its outset, the huge importance of knowledge and scientific expertise in government responses and national well-being provides a stark example of a more general underlying trend in the political economies of advanced industrialised capitalist democracies. Though without the same universal life-and-death stakes, changing technologies of production have been increasing the importance of knowledge as an input to economic progress and prosperity for the past forty years. But ensuring adequate investment knowledge is difficult, whether through market mechanisms or democratic political processes. In the United States, proposals for the federal budget made by the President before the outbreak of the pandemic included reductions in federal research spending for the fourth year running, including deep cuts to the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (Mervis 2020). Meanwhile, public support for American higher education has also been in long-run decline, as direct state support has declined, and federal aid to students (such as Pell grants) cover only a diminishing share of the cost of pursuing tertiary education (Mettler 2014). Viewed in isolation, it is possible to see these outcomes the apotheosis of a particular, but long- running, Republican aversion to science (Mooney 2005) and to (typically liberal)