Academics have been discussing carbon taxes as a way to save the environment for more than four decades. (There is a 1977 Nordhaus paper. But if you play around with scholar.google, you may find anticipations.) It's a huge, interdisciplinary scholarly discussion by now with economists, philosophers, policy types, all kinds of environmental scientists, and quite a bit more chiming in (papers, conferences, books, congressional presentations, foundations pushing it, etc.). While governments adore new sources of income, it's remarkable how little uptake the (uniform) carbon tax has had even in relatively high tax countries with (say) considerable taxes on fuel/petroleum. (Here's a list.) I don't mean by this it cannot be explained (lots of theories in economics and political science can do that). But rather, given the breadth of intellectual commitments and fire-power (and Nobel enhanced prestige), this has been a gift that governments have, by and large, refused to accept.
There are more such policy oriented intellectual communities that have managed to draw in very smart and savvy supply of young minds: for example, universal basic income (UBI) is a very old idea. In the academy, it's been debated in various ways since the 1960s and it has had a professional community since the 1980s. Not unlike the carbon tax, it draws on all kinds of different academics (perhaps with some competition from and overlap with the negative income tax, etc.). Despite the existence of the welfare state, a full franchise, and the transferring around of 40-50% of GDP by the government in most wealthy countries, it, too, has had relatively little uptake (given the formidable intellectual cross ideological investment).
I think one can tell stories like this about the (slightly more recent) capability approach (and the human development index), cold fusion, and, perhaps, gene therapy (here's the current list). I welcome your own suggestions. The phenomenon I am gesturing at is, of course, not limited to policy salient (and medical) sciences. I grew up on breathless stories of string theory and particle accelerators. The latter has had some successes, but relative to the investment of talent and (oh, you damn economists) opportunity costs, it's meh.
So, there are these decades long, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary research projects (okay, maybe string theory is a bad example) that, at any given time slice, are eminently plausible and exciting. They are the foundations and mortar for scientific cathedrals. And because they have not had policy uptake [yes, okay, write your angry comments] -- which is the proof in the pudding --, it would be wrong, a category error, to call any of these a degenerative research program.
Grant me, for shits and giggles, that it's constitutive of science, at least since the scientific revolution [and if I am right, Seneca already grasped it], that if you are in a scientific project that a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses, but, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end. But in policy/bio-medical sciences, there has to be (h) uptake. Because only with uptake (be it as field experiments or as pilot programs, and then [drumroll] an agency devoted to it), can you have (i) lift-off with further refinement in light of a feed-back loop with messy experience. And it's (i) that is the life-blood of what when I was a kid used to be called a 'progressive' research program in the policy sciences.
So, on the ideal-type picture sketched here, all science, policy or not, is to be overtaken by the future. But for the policy science caught 'in the form of limitation between un-being and being' (that is, the ones without uptake, but with fresh recruits to the cause) there is no real future, except as a kind of thought experiment.
What I am describing has been studied, of course in an analogous context. Harry Collins wrote a beautiful book on Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) before its success. And I am sure that the social-psychological issues are not dissimilar. But if LIGO had always been unable to detect those waves, then at some point that would have been informative about (ahh) nature. (Not that it would have stopped Collins from writing more.) But the lack of uptake in a policy science is different. In general, the lack of uptake of policy-salient multi-disciplinary, multi-generational is not theoretically informative about people or the political process. I don't mean they can't be studied fruitfully from without. Perhaps, archeologists and historians will find half-built cathedrals informative, but probably in order to illuminate the fully built and/or destroyed ones.
Now, since academic life is full of disappointments, rejections, and delayed gratification, I doubt the phenomenological experience of being in such a long range, ambitious multi-disciplinary, policy oriented projects without uptake is any or much different from other academic communities. Challenging, technical problems continue to solved, and clever new review articles will be written. I doubt there is any trouble with motivation (perhaps even less so because of shared, necessary religiosity about the project). I have to admit, I have never been part of an intellectual community that understood itself as progressing, so I actually have no first hand access to what that phenomenological experience is like (except the growth of citation scores).
Obviously, such coriolis research programs may be incubators for and welcoming ecological niches for launching other projects (presumably there is a way to tell a story about NASA or Bell Labs like this). Excellent universities and research communities always are welcoming to people who may, in hindsight, just be passing through to their big thing.
I wish I had a lovely take home message about the significance of it all. But perhaps, the petering out of this post is sufficient homage to the topic.
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