Bookmarks 02/27/2012

• Time for environmental funders to stop neglecting the grassroots | Grist

  tags: environment activism finance fundraising unitedstates history

  • The left’s funders, on the other hand, have pursued high-profile national legislative wins. Their money is impatient and results-based. Institutions receiving the money are treated like untrustworthy employees, forced to submit endless progress reports and beg anew for money every year or two. The result is short-term thinking and number-pumping. Young people are treated like chattel, given unpaid internships and asked to accept poverty. Grassroots organizing and local politics are neglected in favor of D.C.-focused lobbying meant to influence elites.

     

    When it comes to environmental philanthropy, this familiar critique is, at least in broad outlines, correct. What’s more, environmental funding tends to be extremely siloed; there’s little overlap with broader issues of social and economic justice. Basically, a few big D.C.-based green groups get the bulk of the money, to be spent effecting federal legislation and policy, while smaller community-organizing groups go hungry.

  • A new report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy puts some numbers behind these concerns. It finds that “in 2009, environmental organizations with budgets of more than $5 million received half of all contributions” in environmental philanthropy, though they represent “only 2 percent of the nearly 29,000 environment and climate public charities in the country.”

• Which Scientist Can You Trust? by H. Allen Orr | The New York Review of Books

  • The Scientific Life tells two parallel tales, one about the evolution of academic and commercial science and the other about the role of personal virtue in the practice of science.
  • Surprisingly, he shows that industrial research, at least at some companies, was not invariably more regimented than that in academia.
  • First, to a greater extent than most appreciate, industry sometimes offered scientists intellectual freedom.
  • Throughout the twentieth century, academic science grew somewhat less free. One reason was money. Modern research is expensive and universities rarely, if ever, fund it fully. Scientists are thus obliged to seek outside support, usually from federal agencies.
  • The traditional tension between academic and industrial science has, in recent years, been complicated by the rise of a third species of science: that of the entrepreneur.
  • One consequence of the rise of entrepreneurial science is that the line between academic and commercial research has been blurred.
  • As the role of the scientist evolved, so too did the public’s perception of the scientist’s moral status. Early scientists, in the popular view, were not so much salaried members of a professional class as priests of nature.

  • This idea of moral equivalence between scientists and nonscientists ultimately became the new orthodoxy. As Shapin puts it, it appeared to many that 

    there were no just grounds in the nature of science—properly understood—or in the make-up of the scientist—properly understood—to expect expertise in the natural order to translate into virtue in the moral order.

  • (Ironically, the same event that ultimately led to the injection of vast quantities of cash into American science simultaneously helped rob scientists of their exalted moral status.)

  • More surprisingly, Shapin shows that the idea that scientists are like everyone else resulted partly from a deliberate propaganda campaign. During the cold war, American policymakers grew concerned about a shortage of scientists needed to combat communism. Unfortunately, several studies revealed that the public viewed the scientist as a creature apart. He was a paragon, an eccentric; he was contemplative and far too austere. Recognizing that this image jeopardized the recruitment of young people into science, a kind of marketing blitz began. As Shapin explains: 

    Leading spokespersons of government, industry, and the universities took it upon themselves to specify the ordinariness of the scientist and, therefore, the attractiveness of the scientific career to those who felt themselves to be neither geniuses nor morally special.

  • Shapin himself seems to have some doubts about the moral equivalence thesis (mightn’t scientists be morally special after all?). But this could reflect his relative neglect of one of the more obvious reasons for the rise of that thesis. During the twentieth century, it became painfully clear that scientists were capable of behavior that ranged from the dishonorable to the heinous.
  • Shapin sees the morality of scientists as part of a larger issue: the extent to which the personal qualities of scientists matter in the practice of science. His concern here derives from the claims about modern society of Max Weber and his disciples. These men maintained that one mark of the modern was a decrease in the significance of the personal and familiar and an increase in the significance of the impersonal and bureaucratic.
  • Instead, he concludes that personal qualities like virtue, trust, reliability, and familiarity continue to matter in science, perhaps more than ever.
  • As Shapin watched Internet and biotech entrepreneurs pitching their cases to venture capitalists, a pattern emerged. More than anything, venture capitalists weigh the personal qualities of the scientists that appear before them: their reliability, honesty, and creativity. As Shapin puts it, “judgment in these worlds of leading-edge technoscience and finance often implicates knowledge of the virtues of familiar people. People and their virtues matter. ”

• Schrödinger’s Goose » American Scientist

  tags: science technology capitalism finance history sociology academic

  • Yet Shapin is not so sure, and for him the persistence of a moral vocabulary in science is one of the key continuities between the 17th century and the 21st.
  • Moral vocation in science has never excluded its mingling with wealth and power. The monarchs who sponsored scientific academies in the 17th century were already looking for expert counsel on practical issues
  • Not least significant among the novelties of recent science, Shapin argues, is its social organization
  • collective organization of science was by no means confined to private corporations
  • Even those who have the status and resources to direct their own labs must choose problems and methods that promise quick results so that they will have something to report in the next round of grant proposals. Add to that the meddling of university committees, bureaucratic requirements and teaching, and the university is, so they say, even worse than a corporate employer.
  • He insists, against Weber, that scientific entrepreneurs have, in common with early modern natural philosophers, a sense of vocation, and that their more altruistic ambitions (typically, to save lives) are counted in their favor when venture capitalists (whom he also credits with a measure of idealism) decide which business plans to back.
  • On the goals of research and its practical contributions to our lives, Shapin tends to report the words and choices of the scientists and investors without endorsing or doubting them. In his preface he explicitly denies any wish to celebrate the role of technoscience in late modern American culture. On the whole, he leaves it to other scholars and social scientists to labor to determine how claims for entrepreneurial science stand up against the evidence of experience. It remains quite possible that its advantages have been oversold, and that our contemporary funding regimes are tending, subtly, to erode the integrity of science.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.