by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
Katherine Blunt’s WSJ article, “Why Your Electric Bill is Soaring — And Likely To Go Higher” absolutely ignores (or just possibly misses) that soaring gas prices are caused as much by Biden production restriction policies nationally. They are further exacerbated by policies like the New York State pipeline and fracking prohibitions just as much as they are by recent Ukraine issues. She should know that gas prices (unlike oil) are a local, not global market. Furthermore, most of New York increases are from a vast push into incredibly more expensive wind and solar mandates. Her own editorial board writes about this all the time, and she would do well to read it.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FED, GOVERNMENT
Recently, a young PhD student came to terms with the fact that academia was no longer based on merit. Rather, as a scientific researcher interested in procuring grant funding, he was dismayed to learn that certain terms such as “equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” were not only social goals, but now also scientific ones; in other words, they were increasingly being used in descriptions of actual scientific work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards millions in grants each year and the agency which renders their decision does so on two accounts: intellectual merit and broader impact. It is within the broader impact realm that the aforementioned social terms, among others, were being applied and interpreted. The appearance of particular terms related to identity politics in award abstracts, including “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” and “disparity” increased substantially over the last thirty years.
In 1990, only 3 percent of award abstracts contained one of the terms, while in 2020, 30 percent of all award abstracts included at least one of those terms. Notably, the category which changed the most was Education and Human Resources, which went from 4% to 54% during that time span.
The problem with scientific research playing politics means that social causes as a scientific end are being elevated while intellectual merit and other similar criteria are being diminished.
This reminds me of the observation Rasmussen made, that “the more that scientific institutions are viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues.” Science and science funding should stick to being concerned with searching for truth among empirical evidence, not social activism.
