Roger Backhouse wrote:

>it is not clear why the ESRC should distribute funds outside that
>system.

The question is, if one were to undertake bona-fide independent
research, 'would the ESRC fund it'? According to what you have said,
the answer is no because the ESRC funds only what is in its system. To
get into the system one presumably has to jump through bureaucratic
institutional hoops and dance to the political paymaster's tune - but
where is the independence in that?

Sergio Noto lamented the current state of knowledge in economics and
jestingly offers various explanations. A fifth option could be added
which is that, in the UK at any rate, academia has largely become a
creature of political funding (perhaps not in the views it espouses
but by virtue of what it doesn't undertake, which, if it were
independent, it might). The implication of Pat Gunnings remark was
that government (state?) funded education is driven by a bureaucratic
rather than an educational logic for the understandable reason that,
in a bureaucracy, rules must govern the system.

The point is not how funding influences research in specific cases
(which naturally one could survey historically) but in the absence of
an independent research culture at large, how, what goes by the name
of research is actually just the manifestation of a funder's agenda.
We don't see what didn't get funded - only what did get funded - and
therefore, in a sense, we do not know what we are missing (especially
when society's 'free' resources have been skimmed off in taxes to be
allocated by 'government'.)

The very idea of an 'education system' is an expression of centralised
control structures (operating out of tax-revenue) that enforce
compliance by  'bureacratic requirements' in order to ensure that only
'suitable institutional affiliation' is funded. It would be
interesting to know when the term 'education system' came into being
and if it coincided with the involvement of the political state as
supreme-educator. Whether it is reasonable that the government (aka a
political party operating through the state) should have an agenda
which it funds by taxing generally and then selectively distributing
is perhaps a matter of individual judgement. Surely, research is best
done when driven by researchers who have  arranged their
organisational circumstances to allow them to act independently - not
just to be independent-minded.

Can one be half-independent?

Arthur Edwards