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<p>Does it now? Peer review being arguably the #1 most controversial topic in academia today. I doubt that you can interact with any current academics today for more than a short while before you inevitably hear somebody decrying the shortcomings of peer review. If the system of peer review was truly working as well as you claim, why is it viewed with such suspicion by the gamut of academics?</p>
<p>I think the best that can be said of peer review is that, while deeply flawed, it’s the only workable game in town. But that’s hardly to say that the system ‘works quite well’ by any reasonable metric. </p>
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<p>Uh, uninformed (at least, by academic standards) currently decide right now that plenty of topics of study are unworthy of research funding because they don’t see value in them. Barack Obama was never a tenured academic. Yet he’s effectively made decisions that certain types of research funding - notably in renewable energies - are far more worthy than, say, funding literary analysis on Victorian poetry. He certainly did not take allocate billions of taxpayer research dollars to a large-scale “peer review” committee who might then have decided to grant all of it to university Art History departments. George W. Bush - again, certainly no academic - did the same in allocating large sums of funding to military research. Heck, every President in history since the development of the modern research university has directed that certain funding be directed to certain endeavors. Even the Morrill Land Grant Act of the 1860’s specifically stated that certain areas of inquiry - notably engineering and agricultural sciences - were to be provided strong preference in funding state universities through Federal grants. </p>
<p>You say that uninformed people should not be involved in determining where research funding should be allocated. Oh really? Isn’t that what happens right now through the political process? Right now, uninformed voters determine through the conduit of (also uninformed) elected politicians where research funding should be granted. If we truly disagree with where Barack Obama chooses to allocate Federal research funding, then we are free to vote against him in 2012, despite the fact that us voters are “uninformed”. </p>
<p>The only logical outcome of the notion that “uninformed” people should not be involved in the determination of who receives research funding is to implement an overarching peer-review committee that has a mandated and irrevocable claim on a certain percentage of taxpayer receipts every year to allocate to whatever research they please. If that committee decides to allocate their entire budget to research to Art History rather than green energy, then there would be absolutely nothing that the voters or our elected politicians could do about it, as they are “uninformed” and therefore unworthy of deciding where that funding should flow. Surely we can all agree - if nothing else- that such a system would be deeply undemocratic, and frankly, unAmerican. Government research funding is provided by the taxpayers, who are surely loathe to abdicate their power to decide where it should be allocated, even if they are making ‘uninformed’ decisions. </p>
<p>The upshot therefore is that ‘uninformed’ people make decisions that deny research funding to certain areas of inquiry all the time. For example, the Superconducting Super Collider which was supposed to have been built in Texas was defunded by Congress and shut down, resulting the loss of jobs of scores of scientists and represented a significant blow to the technology economy in Dallas. However unwise you might think that choice was in the development of the nation’s scientific infrastructure, I don’t think anybody disputes that Congress (and by extension, the voters) had the legal power to do that, however “uninformed” they might be. I am certainly not aware of any ‘peer review committee’ of academics that could have refunded the Super Collider by diktat. Similarly, if a groundswell of voters were to demand to defund, say, the National Endowment for the Humanities, who’s to say that they should be denied the power to do so? It’s the taxpayers’ money. </p>
<p>Peer review committees can and do have the power to take a given allotment of funding and then decide which researchers, within the strictures of that allotment, will then be funded. But they do not have the power to decide how much or even if that allotment of funding will be provided in the first place. That decision is almost always made by “uninformed” people - either the taxpayers, a charitable foundation, rich university donors, or other such parties from which the money is sourced. </p>
<p>Now to be clear, obviously I have no issue with some rich donor deciding to fund whatever research he wants. However, the notion that ‘uninformed’ people have no sway in deciding what types of research are funded and which are not is frankly a outrageous proposal. Such decisions by uninformed people are being currently being made all the time.</p>