For Hofstadter, McCarthyism -- a movement that prized an odd combination of ignorance and certainty about the influence of communism -- was the epitome of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Scientists and intellectuals whose high-minded debates and arcane professional pursuits were beyond the ken of much of the public were inherently suspect. Yet it was the achievement of a communist state, the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union, that snapped America out of its anti-science stupor.
The United States didn't necessarily become pro-intellectual, but it did embrace science in a foundational way, beginning to build Pritchett's pyramid. Today, many of Pritchett's ordinary scientists work outside the corporate sector, at universities and laboratories dependent on federal funding. Yet they have direct pipelines to America's engines of economic growth through offices of patent lawyers and research assessors eager to monetize their work. The researcher at the top of the pyramid can channel his or her most important discoveries straight into the economy, but first we have to build the pyramid.
Right now, the pyramid is under threat. In the United States, the Republican Party has long been in thrall to the anti-science crusaders, having become, as Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana put it, the "party of stupid." Most recently, Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, successfully passed an amendment to a stopgap budget bill that would cut off public funding for many forms of research in political science. This was a potentially counterproductive move at a time when even credit-rating agencies were punishing American bonds for Washington's dysfunction; research might have helped to discover the structural causes of the dysfunction.
Even leaving the social sciences aside, the recent record of the United States has been disappointing. Obviously, the anti-science crusaders can do little about the voracious appetite for research in the private sector, but they have been successful in stalling public funding. As a share of GDP, funding for basic research has changed little since the 1980s, usually staying close to 0.2 percent. The share was actually higher in 1991 than it was in 2011, even taking into account the continuing boost from stimulus money. With the stimulus running out and automatic budget cuts taking hold, the share of the economy devoted to basic research will be lower still.
The opposite trend is occurring abroad. In the last decade, the Chinese government's spending on science quadrupled, reaching more than $50 billion in 2010, or close to 0.9 percent of GDP. Overall spending in the United States -- including basic research and applied research -- was $65 billion.
Two years ago, President Barack Obama called this state of affairs a "Sputnik moment" that should shake the United States out of its dangerous complacency on science. Yet there is no signal coming from China or any other country that American science is falling behind. Rather, we are simply seeing slower increases in the productivity of our workers -- two straight years of less than 1 percent growth in productivity for the first time since 1980 -- and a greater dependence on technologies developed and manufactured overseas. Since 1989, imports of scientific, laboratory, and medical equipment have increased almost eight times over, while exports have risen only fivefold.
In the past few years, we've seen how a minority in the Congress could hold the nation hostage, damaging its economic prospects in the name of narrowly held principles. Even among a similarly small minority, the hostility to science may still be enough to push the United States into the minor leagues of innovation; the damage is already being done. In fact, we're lucky that the first Sputnik moment happened at all.
CORRECTION: It turns out Billy Graham is alive. FP regrets the error.
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