What would be different about science in a good economy? Four primary structural things, which in turn have a multitude of implications.

• First, in a worthy economy each scientist would work at a balanced job complex rather than occupying a higher or lower position in a pecking order of power.
• Second, each scientist would be remunerated for duration, intensity, and, to the extent relevant, harshness of their conditions of work, not for power or output, much less for property.
• Third, each scientist, with other workers in his or her scientific institution, whether it might be a lab, a university, a research center, or whatever other venue, would influence decisions in proportion to how he or she is affected by them.
• And fourth, the level of resources that scientists would be allotted to engage in their pursuits would be determined by the overall economic system via participatory planning, rather than via market profit seeking or authoritarian dictates.

As a result, this future science would no longer be a hand maiden to power and wealth nor so exalted or so reviled as to be different in kind in respect to material well being or decision making rights than other pursuits.

A scientist who makes great discoveries within a desirable economy would no doubt enjoy social adulation and personal fulfillment for the achievement, but would not earn extra material plenty or  voting rights. Likewise, a scientific field will not be funded on grounds of benefiting a few powerful or wealthy people, but only advancing human insight or social advance for all.

Will there be huge expenditures on tools for advancing our knowledge of the fifteenth decimal point of nuclear interactions or the fourteen billionth light year distant galaxy even before there is great expenditure on reducing the travail of mining coal or containing or reversing its ecological impacts, or of providing alternative energy sources?

Will there be research undertaken on grounds of its military application instead of on grounds of its implications for knowing our place in a complex universe?

These are questions that will arise and be answered in a new future. Good economic institutions determine the broad procedures not the specific outcomes people will choose, though we can certainly make intelligent guesses about the latter.

When the latest, greatest particle accelerator project was being debated in the U.S., a congressman asked a noted scientist who was arguing for allocating funds to the super collider what its military benefits would be. The scientist replied it would have no implications for weaponry, but it would help make our society worth defending. The scientist’s motivations and perceptions failed to impress Congress which voted against the project.

Do we know that in a participatory economy the participatory planning system would have allotted the billions required? No, we don’t know one way or the other. But we do know that the calculation would have had nothing to do with militarism and everything to do with making society a more desirable, wiser, and more insightful place.

So a participatory economy – indeed any really desirable economy we wind up with in place of capitalism – would in no way inhibit scientific impulses but would instead greatly enhance them due to having an educational system that seeks full participation and creativity from all sectors, and due to allocating to scientific pursuits what a free and highly informed populace agrees to. Science in the sense of creatively expanding the range and depth of our comprehension of the world depends greatly on real freedom, which is to say real control over our lives to pursue what we desire – which is what a good economy would provide.

Consider Albert Einstein on the topic, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction [not to mention financing, which in his day were far less of an issue] have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.”

A question for yet another installment arises – what about technology?

---