Can science survive the marketplace of ideas? 

Far from painting a rags-to-riches story of lowly scientists making it big in biotech, Philip Mirowski illustrates a deliberate neoliberal plan to monetize the marketplace of ideas in his book Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science.  With biotech and Big Pharma as guides, Mirowski traces the commercialization of science through the innovation of the technology transfer office (TTO), strengthened ideas of intellectual property (IP), and outsourcing (and offshoring) of the academic science sector, leading to the American university itself trending towards a corporate model. To tell this story, he must “briefly enumerate the relevant range of economic and social phenomena” to consider, after which he can show how neoliberalism “has colored almost any discussion of the fate of the university and the ‘efficient organization of science’.” The  subsequent “empirical meditations on the state of contemporary science” that comprise most of the volume then reinforce Mirowski’s claims of scientific degradation due to structured neoliberal change.

Mirowski first introduces the perplexing world of American academics with the fictional professor and researcher Viridiana Jones, who serves as a counterweight for the book, preventing Mirowski from floating off into endless rants about the impotence of economists. The upshot of Viridiana’s situation is that something seems off about the economics of modern science, but Viridiana can’t quite put her finger on it – a feeling I know all too well. In the next chapter, we see why “economists seem such a letdown when it comes to science.”

The main issue to Mirowski is that an economics of science requires grave simplification of the production of scientific knowledge and its role in economic growth. Previous analyses are deemed “intractably obstreperous” (if we can forgive such self-indulgent locutions), as the whole discipline of economics relies upon “the authority and integrity of the natural sciences to provide secure templates for intellectual inquiry.” Tearing through the “concertedly macroeconomic perspective” of many economists by highlighting flaws in the linear model, the public good model, and growth theory, we arrive at the conclusion of Chapter 2: that “certain kinds of scientific infrastructure and institutional ties to power centers” are needed to produce meaningful science, and that economic and scientific development are more intimately linked than a simple model can suggest. An additional argument Mirowski makes in this chapter, if not immediately clear from the quotes above, is that economists as a whole can do little but “think they know some deep things about knowledge.”

In the next chapter, Mirowski fits the evolution of American science organization through the 20th century into three regimes. He concedes to the proponents of commercialized science that science and commerce have always been intimately linked, but argues that the “[m]odern science has turned out to be a qualitatively different phenomenon from its predecessors” due to structural changes in industry, government, and academia. In the current “globalized privatization regime,” which started in 1980, corporations outsource R&D, industries consolidate power through transnational agreements on IP and trade, companies privatize publicly funded research, and universities sever the traditional teaching-research connection. 

The fortification of IP in America and the subsequent rise of the material transfer agreement (MTA) as commonplace in science is described in Chapter 4 as a key transformation of the modern regime. The expansion of what is patentable, extension of patent lengths, and neoliberal encouragement to “treat the USPTO [US Patent and Trademark Office] as a cash cow”, in conjunction with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, conspired to push universities, industries, and scientists to commercialize research. Furthermore, it directly aided the corporatization of the university as subsequent IP protocols “irreversibly shifted the faculty-university relationship” towards a corporation-employee model. While Mirowski takes the MTA as a specific burden of the modern regime, he notes that it is but one way of commodifying research by gaining control of potential downstream uses of research tools. Something previously unprofitable now has avenues to make a buck, and thus, the biotech model was born. 

However, an unmarketable product still needs a buyer, and in comes Big Pharma. Chapter 5 stakes out the role of pharmaceutical companies in aiding and abetting the biotech theft of science from academic settings by “seeking to rein in the free dissemination of research tools.” The modern regime allows Big Pharma to offload in-house R&D to biotech startups and universities, early funding to venture capital and federal grants, and the whole drug development process to contract research organizations. The resulting “small elite captains of cognition” directing research, while chalked up to “division of labor” by neoliberals, is a serious problem to Mirowski that has fundamentally compromised the integrity and quality of the research process.

Or has it? This is the question Mirowski asks in the penultimate chapter of the book. His answer is a resounding yes, backed up by an admittedly “patchwork quilt of indicators” of scientific quality. After demonstrating why using bibliometric statistics for measuring scientific output is flawed, Mirowski turns around and uses the same data, after some analytical voodoo, to diagnose a degradation of scientific quality. The modern regime’s harm to science is demonstrated through other examples as well: just-in-time science, junk science, and patent degradation. While frustrating and worrisome, these examples fall short of demonstrating a non-anecdotal phenomenon and thus a convincing argument. I happen to believe based on my own qualms with capitalism, but here Mirowski relies too much on a faithful reader and an uneasy feeling.

The book concludes with a  meditation on the “willful intentional production of ignorance” so characteristic of the modern scientific regime. The neoliberal agenda to produce ignorance (à la Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway) is briefly covered, highlighting that in the new knowledge economy, producing ignorance is simply “a sound business strategy.”  This theme is perhaps underappreciated in the volume for the impact it has had on the current “post-scientific society” we might live in today.

Mirowski ultimately succeeds in his goal of demystifying the dizzying state of the American scientific sector. Since 1980, “science” has been drastically changed in terms of who performs research, where that research is performed, and to what ends the results are utilized. Neoliberal interventions have been the driving factor for such transformation, adding “science” to the list of near-irreversible structural (de)formations that sustain the “marketplace of ideas.” The result is an imbalance in the value of knowledge and ignorance, although Hayek would counter that “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.”

While the text itself can be a bit pretentious, and Mirowski’s disdain for neoliberals and economists in general perhaps too evident, the toeing of informality adds levity to an otherwise extremely dense text. It is easy to get lost in the murky waters of patent law, corporate structure, and bibliometric measures, but Mirowski navigates these waters while highlighting this very murkiness as a neoliberal project to hail The Market as unknowable – leading to the confusion residing in Viridiana Jones and the rest of us.

(06/27/24)