Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…But not in the social sciences. Actual hard science — how can we, as a society, have a higher rate of scientific advance? You get to change things. Well, I’ll cheat for a minute and say what I’ll change is for people to be more willing to accept the possibility that they’re wrong, which is not a policy lever that we actually have control of. I’m a big fan of Richard Feynman’s quote: “The first thing is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” We romanticize science a great deal, and I think we romanticize the objectivity of academics and scientific researchers. They have their own pet theories, their own fads, their own reputations. It’s very hard to do science. It’s very hard to do good science. If you ask me what policy lever I’d choose, it’s not obvious to me. I will say that I’m not happy with the patent situation, particularly in the case of pharmaceuticals, so I think there is some research there. One thing that alarms me in the pharmaceutical business right now is that the return to certain research and development is too high. The patent system and the restrictions on generics have made research in pharmaceuticals less productive than it would otherwise be. That’d be one thing I would encourage changing — the patent landscape. I’m a big fan, as I think you are, of prizes to solve problems. There’s a wonderful website called InnoCentive that just puts up prizes of $10,000, $25,000, I saw $100,000 — I don’t know if that’s the top or whether there are probably some that are bigger — where creative people from outside the field that’s usually being looked at come up with creative ideas. Other than that, I’m not sure what we can do. Nothing else comes to my mind. What would you do, Tyler? To encourage science?…

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