Clinton v. Gingrich on science policy
by WonkoKevin
Most politicians are not policy wonks, in the same way that most modern baseball players could not tell you who holds the major league record for most doubles in a season, post WW2 (Todd Helton, 59, in 2000). Hillary Clinton, who led Democrats in Wonkosphere buzz share amongst liberal bloggers yesterday (38% to Obama’s 25%), gave a speech at the Carnegie Institute on science that got science policy wonks out in force. Liberals loved it and conservatives ignored it (they were busy with Sandy Berger story). Let’s take a look at what she had to say.
Here are the basic points of Senator Clinton’s science plan:
1. “First, when I am President, I will lift the current ban on ethical stem cell research.”
2. “Secondly, I will end the politicization of scientific research that has marked the Bush Administration and restore a climate of scientific integrity and innovation.”
3. “I will also have an advisor for science in the White House who reports directly to the President.”
4. “I will increase support for basic and applied research by increasing the research budgets at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Defense.”
5. “I have proposed creating a health information technology infrastructure as part of my health care plan, the American Health Choices Plan.”
6. “I will pursue an ambitious agenda in space exploration and earth sciences. I’ll fully fund NASA’s earth sciences program, launch a new, comprehensive space-based study of climate change, and reverse the deep funding cuts that NASA’s and FAA’s aeronautics research and development budgets have endured in the last few years.”
7. “I think that we’ve got to make science research, technology, mathematics a career in those fields, exciting again.”
8. “Fifth, we need an Apollo-like effort in clean, renewable energy.”
I got curious–is this that far out there, or are these views mainstream amongst the candidates? This is not trivial stuff. As Chris Mooney at Seed Magazine puts it, “The next president of the United States of America will control a $150 billion annual research budget, 200,000 scientists, and 38 major research institutions and all their related labs. This president will shape human endeavors in space, bioethics debates, and the energy landscape of the 21st century.”
If one steps back far enough, the candidates have similar views on what is important re science and technology. They almost all discuss the importance of the information technology, biotechnology, and energy technology; the need to fund R&D which can fuel economic development; and the need to adapt education towards the needs of the future technology sector. Democrats tend to be more specific in their plans and favor government-based solutions, while Republicans tend to discuss technology with respect to certain other issues, such as jobs or health care costs, and favor market-based solutions. Science and technology appears to be an area where both Democrats and Republicans agree on what’s important, but differ significantly on how to do it.
I did find one Republican though that had remarkably similar thoughts to Clinton’s on science and technology: Another policy wonk par excellence, Newt Gingrich. Flashback to 2001…
Gingrich announced today in Washington that he has joined the NanoBusiness Alliance as honorary chairman…”Newt Gingrich has long been the strongest voice in nanotechnology among America’s policy and governmental leaders,” said F. Mark Modzelewski, an appointee in former president Bill Clinton’s administration who now heads the NanoBusiness Alliance. “The emerging nanotechnology sector has gained a brilliant and tested leader.”
And five years later…
The first thing you do is you talk about it every day. You talk about why investing over here is going to help cure cancer. You talk about investing in new forms of learning to allow young Americans to break out. You ought to talk about what we could get done in space in the next 20 years if we had an entrepreneurial spirit… It should be as possible, or more possible, to succeed in America as a scientist or engineer as it is to succeed as a rock star, athlete, or movie star. Unless you set that goal—and that’s got to be a culturally defined goal, the rewards system has to be built in—we will not sustain our leadership role in the world.
To see how they really differ though, we have to examine their corresponding worldviews. Both are so wonkish that this is pretty easy to do. Gingrich’s worldview is informed by the Tofflers’ “Third Wave”:
“For a long time, I have been friends with Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the authors of Future Shock and The Third Way. I first began working with the Tofflers in the early 1970’s on a concept called anticipatory democracy. I was then a young assistant professor at West Georgia State College, and I was fascinated with the intersection of history and the future which is the essence of politics and government at its best.
“For twenty years we [who’s we?] have worked to develop a future-conscious politics and popular understanding that would make it easier for America to make the transition from the Second Wave civilization [the one our Founders gave us] - which is clearly dying - to the emerging, but in many ways undefined Third Wave civilization [Alvin Toffler’s Centrist Utopia].
“The process has been more frustrating and the progress much slower than I would have guessed two decades ago. Yet despite the frustrations, the development of a Third Wave political and governmental system is so central to the future of freedom and the future of America that it must be undertaken.”
Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, has a completely different view; from The Spectator:
Penn’s own book, Microtrends: the Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes (Allen Lane, £20), that we are talking over a forest of Diet Cokes today. The book advances the central thesis that the age of thunderous ‘macro-trends’ plotted by writers such as Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends) is emphatically at an end.
‘The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalisation,’ he writes, ‘but it is occupied by six billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.’ We are observing ‘the niching of America’, says the 53-year-old pollster, an ever-changing mosaic of ‘small, under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as 1 per cent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society’. Choice has prevailed over uniformity. It is ‘the triumph of the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy’.
It strikes me that Clinton’s campaign is very much about micro-niching. She didn’t really talk about how science and technology might impact health care, or jobs, or competitiveness, she talked science to scientists.
If all the candidates were forced to study both theses and pick one, I would guess that most of the Democrats would say that they believe in the micro-trends thesis and most of the Republicans would say that they believe in the macro-trends thesis. Micro-trend people believe that in a complex system, agent heterogeneity dominates and produces numerous stable evolutionary states which dynamically change with the environment. Macro-trend people believe that in a complex system, institutions dominate as they define the behavioral rules available to agents, therefore agents are less important than rule-makers.
