28 March 2017

The corruption of science

John Michael Greer writes:
Especially but not only in those branches of science concerned with medicine, pharmacology, and nutrition, the prostitution of the scientific process by business interests has become an open scandal. When a scientist gets behind a podium and makes a statement about the safety or efficacy of a drug, a medical treatment, or what have you, the first question asked by an ever-increasing number of people outside the scientific community these days is “Who’s paying him?” .... These days, in any field where science comes into contact with serious money, scientific studies are increasingly just another dimension of marketing. Dark Age America, John Michael Greer, 2016
It is a scandal, and it's no wonder that we are increasingly cynical about scientists' pronouncements on climate change, diet, or virtually anything else. Science, like politics, has become removed from the concerns of the people it's supposed to serve. The gap between on the one hand government and big business, and on the other ordinary people, grows ever wider. Without deliberate action that's unlikely to change, as many of the reason for the gap are self-reinforcing: more funding means more can be spent on advertising, and lobbying for still more funding and a more favourable - to corporate interests - regulatory environment. Ordinary people don't come into it. The result? Skepticism, cynicism, alienation, and despair. Not all the reasons for the gap can be ascribed to self-interest or malevolence, but it remains an urgent concern. 

My suggestion is that we start to express policy goals in terms of outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Broad, long-term goals such as the improved health of a country's citizens, should guide the activities of all the agents, public- and private-sector that have anything to do with health: not only big pharma, but also the medical profession, agribusiness, retailers, schools, town planners, architects and so on. We cannot solve our health problems simply by spending more on organisations whose sole (stated) interests have to do with health. And just as health is not just a matter for drug companies alone, so crime is not just a matter for the police and the corrections industry. And so on.

Which is why I suggest we issue Social Policy Bonds that would not only target broad, long-term social goals, but also inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into their achievement. Social and environmental goals are more easily understood and more meaningful than the narrow, short-term goals of the bodies that are supposed to be achieving them but end up, as we see in science, spending much of their energy trying to justify their survival and expansion. With more comprehensible, explicit, policy goals, more people would engage with the policymaking process. Our views might be debated and over-ruled, but we'd have a greater understanding of the inevitable trade-offs that resource allocation entails. Importantly too, we'd have buy-in to policies that are not only currently remote from us, but also someitmes conflict with our interests. Most important of all, the goals of a Social Policy Bond regime would be understood by, and linked to, the concerns of all of us. It's a sad indictment that we cannot say that of our current system.

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