Dr Terence Kealey is a member of the Department of Clinical Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge. In the nineteen eighties he made himself extremely unpopular among his university colleagues by challenging claims being made at that time by Save Britain's Science. That organisation, with the support of many if not most distinguished scientists, maintained that the numbers of scientific papers from Britain as well as the numbers of citations attracted by those papers had declined; and this all as the result of a restriction of tax-financed funding. In a chapter on "The So-called Decline of British and American Science" Dr Kealey reviews the evidence. This shows that the claims by Save Britain's Science were in fact the reverse of the truth, and that the decline in government funding had been more than compensated by an increase in support from non-government sources.
It was, presumably, experience of that controversy about the supposedly catastrophic effects of what was in truth a fairly modest limitation of government funding which led him to produce the present book. Seven of the twelve chapters are primarily historical. The first explicates what is for Dr Kealey a key contrast: that between Francis Bacon's idea that academic science will lead to applications in the development of technologies while these in turn will lead to increasing wealth and Adam Smith's conception that pre-existing technology produces new technologies which influence and are influenced by academic science, and that it is this interaction that produces increasing wealth.
The next two chapters on "Research and Development in Antiquity" and "The So-called Dark Ages" contrast the technological stagnation of the Roman Empire with important advances made by so-called barbarians. The next three chapters on "The Commercial Revolution", "The Agricultural Revolution" and "The Industrial Revolution" are straightforwardly and very usefully informative. How many of us knew, for instance, that although England was in 1688, after even more commercial Holland, the second richest country in Europe, over half the population was still grossly underfed? Again, it is salutary to be told that neither Watt, nor Trevithick, nor Newcomen, nor Stephenson - who all made vital contributions to the development of steam engine ever received any scientific education or indeed much schooling of any other sort.
Chapter 7, "Economic History Since 1870" is full of always valuable and sometimes surprising falsifications of popular misconceptions. Anyone who feared that MITI, the Japanese Ministry for International Trade and Industry, was a coven of infallible bureaucratic wizards will be relieved to learn that Mutsu, Japan's only nuclear powered ship, built in 1975, had leaked radiation ever since its maiden voyage, and that the whole project was written off at a total cost of 400 million sixteen years later. Again, when Japan's channel tunnel between Honshu and Hokkaido was finally opened in 1988 it was ten years behind schedule and three times over budget. So right across the economy Japan's bureaucrats, like their opposite numbers nearer home, seem almost invariably to have spotted - and lavishly backed with, of course, not their own but the unfortunate Japanese taxpayers' money - not winners but losers.
Chapter 8, "Science Policies in the Twentieth Century" concentrates on "the USA and the UK, because they share a common and pivotal history. Each was, in turn, the lead country economically, becoming so while pursuing laissez faire policies for science. Each, however, is now scientifically dirigiste". Dr Kealey examines why this development occurred in these two countries, and "why almost every other major industrialised country is now scientifically dirigiste."
In Chapter 9, "The Economics of Research: Why the Linear Model Fails" Dr Kealey develops the contrast explained in Chapter 1, and supplies abundant examples to show the superiority of the Smithian to the Baconian model. This chapter, like the rest of Dr Kealey's book, is full of material which will delight readers of Free Life and supporters of the Institute of Economic Affairs. It begins by telling us how "During the early 1980s, the Japanese Government initiated a major project: the fifth generation computer." Fearing that "The Japanese were going to take over the world's electronic industry" Britain "launched the Alvey programme, the EEC launched ESPRIT" and other governments launched half a dozen more. The result was, of course, total failure. "The wonderful Japanese fifth generation computer makes a good doorstop, but little else" and "the European electronics industry is in a desperate condition."
Chapter 9 "The Real Economics of Research" states, and brings out the consequences of the laws promised in the title of the book. These are the putative "Economic Laws of Funding Civil Research and Development". The first is that "the percentage of national GDP spent increases with national GDP per capita". The second "states that the public and private funding displace each other." And the third "states that the public and private displacements are not equal: public funds displace more than they do themselves provide." Whether or not these putative laws can properly be rated laws of nature Dr Kealey certainly provides good evidence for thinking that they provide useful working principles to guide political practice.
The consequences of the first are that Research and Development is subject to diminishing returns, and that though economic growth will continue for a long time it will eventually stop when its cost in terms of further capital investment becomes unacceptably high. The consequence of the second and the third is said to be that, because "government funding of civil Research and Development damages the enterprise . . . governments are inexorably being forced out of the funding of civil Research and Development."
I cannot see how Dr Kealey contrives to persuade himself that this conclusion follows. For you might as well say that, because stated funded education monopolies are known to produce worse education results, and more expensively, than competing independent schools, governments are being forced inexorably to break up such monopolies. Would that they were!
Finally, consider a remark made by a man who was for a period a Regent of France; "The English are destined by moral and natural law to be subject to the French and not the other way around." Dr Kealey's characteristically topical comment is: "That was a perfectly proper attitude for a Frenchman, but it is odd that the British political caste, in its adherence to Brussels, should now agree."
Antony Flew