The Price of Prestige

132 chapter five

assume that governments are more interested in the potential value of the

inventor than in the often unintelligible results of the scientist. Since basic-

science projects offer few tangible applied implications, they cannot be eas-

ily explained as strategic investments. In material terms, the closer a proj-

ect gets to the “science” pole, the more it resembles a “pure Veblen good,”

and the more puzzling it becomes to those that ignore its signaling quali-

ties. The strategic investment argument, therefore, fails to explain many

Big Science cases, including the transits of Venus races explored below.

Big Science as a Promoter of Knowledge

If Big Science is taken at face value, then the main object of these proj-

ects is the accumulation of scientific knowledge. According to such in-

terpretation, governments fund Big Science because they value scientific

knowledge. Yet, such an explanation quickly succumbs to the collective

action problem. Science tends to produce knowledge that is accessible

to all, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, the “public

good” qualities of scientific research often lead to market failures that

can only be solved by governmental investment in R & D (Stiglitz 1999 ;

Stigler 1971 ).^8 However, when we move to the international level, govern-

ments find themselves locked into a similar collective action problem, this

time with no “world government” to intervene and regulate international

funding for basic research. Why should the French government invest in

basic research when German scientists are likely to benefit from that re-

search as well? Hence, a country that funds basic research is providing an

international public good (Solingen 1993 , 45 ). While most governments

are likely to prefer a world with greater knowledge, they are also likely to

prefer that someone else pay for it. This should lead to free riding and

suboptimal levels of funding. Consequently, the theoretical puzzle is not

why governments shy away from funding “pure” science projects, but why

they would ever pay for such projects, not to mention compete over the

right to do so.

Indeed, governmental investment in basic research tends to be con-

siderably lower than governmental investment in applied sciences. In the

end of the 1920 s, for example, the United States provided $ 200 million a

year to applied sciences compared with only $ 10 million for basic research;

only four thousand American scientists were involved in basic research

compared with thirty thousand scientists engaged in applied science. Her-

bert Hoover used the logic of free riding to explain this discrepancy: “We

have depended on three sources — that the rest of the world would bear this