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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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It's kind of annoying how every metric the gray heads use either boils down to money or is just directly money. It's like that's all that matters to them.
I dont think money spent on science is necessarily a bad metric for quantifying how much a government is prioritizing science. I do agree that more money spent on science != better science. I know from my own experience in geology that there are some things that China does well and a lot that they are really behind on and there's a lot of sub-par science that comes out of China. Does that matter when science is just a numbers game in the modern context? I couldn't say
The Clinton era proved just spending more does not equal better science.
What are you referring to? Im not American and Clinton was before my time
Clinton doubled the NIH budget in his tenure and even moved DARPA money into biomedical research. >$20B a year more spending, but it did not translate to more success in diseases research.
I think it's more of a way to get a quantitative comparison rather than just being about money. Don't get me wrong, money has corrupted everything. But in certain cases when you need to compare value between things, the closest thing we have to a common denominator is moolah.
I'd say material results are a pretty good metric.
And how do you compare the results? Can you say definitively that a cure for one disease is more important than another? What metrics do we use? Number of lives affected? Physical pain avoided? Who decides the final say in value? You need a medium to get an approximate value.