Science: A Long Wave
One of the genuinely surprising aspects of OSTP’s new Science: A New Golden Age is its invocation of the linear model, as if American science policy has remained trapped within Bush’s institutional architecture for eighty years. The report presents itself as a fundamental rethinking of a system built around assumptions inherited from Bush. But the system has been adapting to the inadequacies of that model for half a century.
A Science Policy Outsider’s Theory of Change
Going mainstream has a cost. But staying outside has a cost too. The point is not to remain marginal forever. The point is to preserve the outsider’s discipline: the habit of asking what the mainstream cannot yet ask, the patience to move when the current opens, and the humility to know that it will take a few punts to get there from here.
The Wrong Gatekeeper
Scientists should judge scientific merit. Congress should define public purposes. Agencies should administer programs transparently. Courts should determine whether agencies remain within statutory authority. And the public should help deliberate on contested values, social consequences, and trade-offs. That is the missing democratic architecture.
