if a grant is the same $1M and Bozo University gets to spend all million on the actual research at hand, but UCSF only gets 200K, how is UCSF more efficient?
Wouldn't the LN2 be traceable to the project either way as direct non-overhead cost, but UCSF efficiency makes that cost lower, achieving the same overhead ratio but either a lower grant cost or more researcher stipend?
Plenty of actual research costs count as overhead to avoid the need to hire an army of accountants to allocate every single bit of spend.
For example, the electricity costs of the lab in which the research is run would typically be paid for by the university and would be considered overhead. It's not "administrative bloat". Most of the particularly gross administrative bloat is on the undergraduate side of things where higher tuition costs have paid for more "activities".
Note that the institution I used as an example doesn't even have undergrads. It is not using NIH grants to cross-subsidize a college. Medical research is the only thing they do. And they are the #2 recipient of grants, after Johns Hopkins.
F&A rates (facilities and administration, “indirects”) are subject to negotiation every 4 (IIRC) years, where those costs are accounted for (perhaps not well enough, but that is a separate point). The administrative component of F&A been capped at 26% for years and R1 universities are maxed out, so the negotiations are over the facilities component.
You can know what the research organization costs as a whole; and you can know what's "worth" charging to individual projects. The rest is indirect costs, which you can measure and use this data when negotiating indirect cost reimbursement with NSF or NIH.
I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our efficiency:
1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest is compounding as we borrow to pay it.
2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten these and prepare to pay more as we age.
3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine FUD.
4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for this.
We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes. What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar to these other nations?
I'm not sure I meant to take a mantle as RFK's personal champion, but my _hope_ comes from hearing his points on prevention and improving the quality of the food supply. The incentives of both the healthcare and food industries in the US seem to be misaligned with a healthy population, much moreso in the US than in other countries in the West.
Just think of all the other diseases that will be prevented when millions of kids die from the following: preventable illnesses due to lack of vaccines, suicide without antidepressants, starvation after DOGE slashes food stamps, and treatable diseases because DOGE slashed S-CHIP./s
Improving the diets of Americans enough for it to have a real impact on healthcare spending is a 3-4 decade undertaking. Without significant support from Congress, this is basically just a windmill that RFK is charging at.
I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the direct result of trade deficits in dollars.
If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.
So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.
Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.
Inflation is about 3%. That's higher than optimal but hardly a crisis. It does not suggest a broad negative judgement.
Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.
I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is built on what we had before, and abstracts away what we had before. 99% of us don't remember how to make even the simplest Assembly program, and yet we unleash billions of instructions per second on the world.
Even outside of math and computers, when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away, freeing us to focus on ever-more-specialized pursuits. Those that are useful will too be abstracted away, and for the better.
Your comment exposes how much metacognitive laziness you have in modern society that you didn't realize that people still do these things, just not you. They aren't obsolete tasks, just done at a layer you don't see.
I don't have to prime a well pump any more because my house and workplace are hooked into the municipal water system. I don't have to prime a pump because that task has gotten so abstract as to become turning a faucet handle. But engineers at the municipal water plant do have to know how to do this task.
Similarly, filling an oil lamp and lighting it is now abstracted for normal people as flipping a light switch (maybe changing a light bulb is a more appropriate comparison). But I actually have filled an oil lamp when I was a kid because we kept "decorative" hurricane lamps in my house that we used when the power went out. The exact task of filling an oil lamp is not common, but filling a generator with fuel is still needed to keep the lights on in an emergency, although it is usually handled by the maintenance staff of apartment buildings and large office buildings.
As a consumer I can't choose which camera model, but I can choose which car manufacturer. So I should choose whichever car manufacturer chooses the best camera models, all else being equal.
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