Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D.
J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University
and the
Director of the National Consortium on Violence Research
on behalf of the
Consortium of Social Science Associations
for the
National Science Foundation
before the
VA, HUD, Independent Agencies Subcommittee
Committee on Appropriations
U.S. House of Representatives
Honorable James T. Walsh, Chairman
April 12, 2000
I am Alfred Blumstein, University Professor and J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University and the Director of the National Consortium on Violence Research. I am also the current President of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). COSSA represents over 105 professional associations, scientific societies, universities and research institutes concerned with the promotion of and funding for research in the social, behavioral and economic sciences (SBE). COSSA functions as a bridge between the research world and the Washington community. A list of COSSA's Members, Affiliates, and Contributors is attached.
I want to express COSSA's appreciation for the Subcommittee's past strong support for NSF. As you do every year, you confront difficult choices among competing agencies under the Subcommittee's jurisdiction in a budget constrained by the desires of some to limit federal spending.
COSSA strongly believes that investing in NSF's research and education efforts will help determine this country's future economic well-being and national security. Therefore, COSSA, in agreement with the Coalition for National Science Funding, strongly recommends a FY 2001 budget for NSF of at least $4.57 billion, a $675 million increase for the agency that is the key to the nation's investment in science and technology. We ask for at least the 17.3 percent increase called for in the administration's request. This budget enhancement will return many-fold its value in economic growth, help save lives, promote prosperity, and improve society, and provide more excellent science from more excellent scientists. In addition, we strongly support Director Colwell's goal of doubling the NSF budget in five years.
As NSF celebrates its 50th birthday, the nation's past investment in basic research has clearly delivered the great technological advances that have provided for the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation's history. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has repeatedly noted the connection between the "extraordinary surge in technological innovation" and America's current record breaking economy.
The requested increase for FY 2001 will prepare us for the great advances in the 21st Century. The budget enhancement would allow NSF a much-needed boost for the size and duration of its research and education grants. It would also lead to improving the scientific literacy of the nation's students and general population. As our business leaders understand, without improvements in education and training and new innovations and scientific findings, technological growth will stall. NSF needs a significant influx of new funds.
COSSA supports the proposed budget of $3.54 billion, an increase of $582 million, for the Research and Related Activities account, so that SBE and the other Directorates can continue to fund researchers seeking scientific breakthroughs that respond to the many challenges posed by society and its people. We are delighted with the proposed 20 percent increase for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate (SBE). This reflects the fact that an increasing amount of our society's problems are falling within the domain of SBE. The increase will provide enhanced support of the fundamental research that social, behavioral, and economic scientists need to conduct to help create better lives for people and the societies in which they live.
The successes of SBE sponsored research are demonstrated every day by something that is generally taken for granted by many. Undeniably, economics research has provided a better understanding of the performance of the U.S. economy. NSF supported basic research in economics has helped develop new methodologies and principles, such as game theory and experiments, that provide the underpinning to such things as the auctioning of Personal Communication System licenses and electric power. Results from economic studies have protected our savings, fostered efficient production, led to deregulation of industries, and provided answers to complex relations that have had an impact on health financing and consumer protection. Other studies of monetary and fiscal policy, labor markets, environmental systems, and the regulation of transportation, communication. and energy have, by influencing public policy, contributed to economic growth.
As we embark on the new millennium, there continues to be a tremendous need to improve the infrastructure of the SBE sciences. NSF Director Colwell has repeatedly pointed out that the social and behavioral sciences need to harness the new technological tools of science to their research. The Directorate took a small step in this direction with its recent awards to six groups of social and behavioral scientists (out of over 100 proposals) to support new database collections, collaboratories, and web-based survey research to improve the capabilities of social/behavioral scientists to conduct advanced and complex research. The new projects will: provide a common database of brain images from studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; link job, household and census data from the U.S. and Europe for use by researchers; create a public-use demographic database with census data from seven countries; develop computational tools for linguistic analysis of transcripts in the Child Language Data Exchange system; promote social science use of Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing data; and improve user services at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the major social science data archive. The Directorate has just issued a solicitation for another competition to enhance infrastructure, but the resources remain limited. SBE Infrastructure needs are great and the proposed increase would allow for more funding for this important need.
Aside from taking advantage of the new technology and tools to advance their own research, through digital libraries, and new multidisciplinary research and computational techniques, the SBE sciences, have an important role to play in the Information Technology (IT) research initiative. No great technological revolution has ever avoided unintended consequences and social, economic and political changes. The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) recognized this and recommended significant funding for research on socio-economic issues of IT. It asked for studies on: transformations of social institutions, governance, electronic commerce research, social and economic simulation and modeling, sustainable use of large information infrastructures, electronic groups and communities research, barriers to information technology diffusion, human interaction and communications laboratories, and digital government. This last topic has taken on added significance given the recent experiment with Internet voting in the Arizona primary. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act (H.R. 2086) also has provisions recognizing that these changes need examination. The Directorate's programs including Science and Technology Studies, Ethics and Values in Science and Technology, Decision Risk and Management Sciences, Anthropology, Economics, and Sociology are already supporting research in this arena, but more needs to be done. We strongly urge the Subcommittee to support this important research.
Another new area with enormous scientific opportunity and the need for enhanced funds in FY 2001 will take advantage of the new breakthroughs in neuroimaging noted above. These techniques have provided exciting opportunities for uncovering how it is that the human brain accomplishes basic cognitive and perceptual activities. SBE's Behavioral and Cognitive Division hopes to invest a significant part of the budget increase for basic research on cognitive processing and brain function that will produce new insight into learning and education from infancy through adulthood, on human and machine performance in complex tasks, and on social/attitudes, stereotypes, social perceptions, and social interaction.
A consensus has developed that the country needs to spend more on education research. We are all concerned about the nation's education system and its future workforce. NSF has stepped up its support for studies in both these areas. The SBE directorate has an important role to play in sponsoring basic research on the cognitive and social processes, as well as the impact of families, schools, and communities, on students and their teachers. As Bennett Bertenthal, former Assistant Director for SBE, told the House Science Committee earlier this year: "Like other complex problems, [education] requires large amounts of data that are densely sampled and extensively mined for valid interpretations." He continued: "Although there is still much to be learned, fundamental research by developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, and economists, is revealing a wealth of data about how children think and learn and how these processes are mediated by family demographics, community politics, and the structure of the schools."
Therefore, COSSA strongly supports the requested funding for the Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI), a collaboration among the NSF, Department of Education, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The 2000 competition is in progress. NSF is running the competition and supplying the bulk of the funds. The IERI seeks to provide significant support over a period of time to conduct meaningful studies of factors affecting student achievement and to seek and disseminate answers to how we can improve. The IERI needs and deserves the support of the Subcommittee for its funding request in FY 2000. COSSA also supports collaborative efforts among the SBE directorate and the Education and Human Resources Directorate to examine learning and teaching and to disseminate the results to classrooms.
Social and behavioral scientists have a significant role to play in the Biocomplexity in the Environment initiative. SBE has long provided funding for studies of the Human Dimensions of Global Change. It currently supports two centers on this topic at Indiana University and Carnegie Mellon University. At each center multidisciplinary teams of collaborators, not only carry out research, but help to create improved methodologies and databases for investigating and analyzing these issues. The Indiana Center has developed a framework for a set of comparative studies regarding how different land-ownership arrangements (government, private, and communal ownership) affect three different kinds of biomes (tropical dry forests, tropical moist and rain forests, and temperate mid-latitude deciduous forests). Its researchers have also discovered a theoretically and practically important revision of prevailing collective action theories. They find that people adopt a far greater number and more complex set of rules concerning common-pool resource management than previously recognized. Together, these findings have direct and profound implications for the relationships between individuals and their government in many environmental policy settings that have become politically and socially volatile, but these findings indicate, needn't be.
Research in the SBE sciences continues to examine the ever more complex and important human dimensions of issues and generates new knowledge and insights to help us understand human commonalities and human differences. Basic research in these disciplines also develops information that policymakers can use later to formulate solutions to individual and societal problems. The research portfolio is diverse and supports science of enormous intellectual excitement and substantial societal importance. Some recent examples of SBE supported research findings suggest the breadth, scientific excitement and societal importance of this work.
The National Consortium on Violence Research (NCOVR) conducts research on the causes of violent behavior and disseminates research results to policy makers and practitioners. The Consortium is an exciting endeavor, both to address issues of one of our most troubling national problems — interpersonal violence - but also to find ways to use modern telecommunications and computer technology to enable the best researchers in the field, wherever their home institution may be, to work together on these problems. NCOVR has established a Web accessible data center to facilitate that collaboration. This has given rise to important findings in the area of domestic violence, violence in public housing, the interaction between youth violence and drug markets, the role of gangs, and other factors that distinguish individual situations and places likely to generate violence compared from those that do not.
Entrepreneurship is driving the new economy. SBE supported research by Patricia Greene and her colleagues at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, have examined the relationship between race, gender, and business start-ups. Recent data reveal, contrary to common perception, that Blacks are approximately twice as likely as Whites to be new entrepreneurs. Also, approximately two-thirds of all new businesses are housed in the residence of one of the proprietors. The data also show that new entrepreneurs tend not to be unemployed people who are inaugurating a new commercial activity. Instead, they are busy, employed persons who are taking on another activity to add to their already full schedule. These findings would focus research and policy attention on a group (Black entrepreneurs) considerably larger in number, and potentially larger in importance, than thought.
Everyone knows (or thinks they know) that negotiation is an art. However, it is also influenced by a number of factors that can be studied scientifically. Research performed under a Presidential Young Investigator Grant by Leigh Thompson, now at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, has investigated several of these factors. For instance, one might think that a party to a negotiation would know whether or not the other party's interests are compatible or incompatible with their own. But, in fact, when interests are indeed compatible, parties to a negotiation are far less likely than are nonpartisan observers to recognize that compatibility. In her recent book, The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, Thompson utilizes this and other experimental results to present a comprehensive guide to successful negotiation. These findings can improve both process and outcome of negotiations at all levels from international relations to family disagreements.
The end of the cold war ushered in by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the prolonged period of economic prosperity in the United States, should not deflect attention from political conflicts and economic problems that have considerable potential to undermine citizen well-being and community health in many countries. Such conflicts are, and will continue to be, associated with the challenges mounted to national governments by "forces from above," that is, supranational governing organizations, and "forces from below" that are generated by inter-ethnic, racial, linguistic, gender, and/or religious differences. SBE grants to David Laitin, James Fearon and T. Robert Gurr, " 'Minorities at Risk' Database and Explaining Ethnic Violence" and Allan Stam and Scott Bennett, "Collaborative Research and The Expected Utility Theory of War" are identifying the mechanisms that propel ethnic groups and states from conflict to violence, and the causes and consequences of international conflict.
Recent controversy over the death penalty has raised again the question of the fair administration of the most severe sanction any system of law can apply. The results from scientific research are troubling. Capital juries tend to "tilt" toward death in their deliberations. With NSF support, William J. Bowers of Northeastern University queried jurors about the decision process. Many report beginning to decide what the punishment should be before a judge instructs them on the relevant standards to apply. They tend to misunderstand the relevant guidelines when they do hear them, 4 out of 10 believing that they would be required to impose the death penalty for certain types of crimes. Jurors also tend to assume that if they do not impose death, the defendant will soon be released from prison, which is not true. These results have significant implications for law reform.
In this age of multidisciplinary science one of the most difficult situations is to get scientists from different disciplines to communicate in ways to understand and cooperate with each other. Robert Kling at Indiana University has been examining "Scientific Communication and the Shaping of Knowledge Networks." This project has documented that significant experimentation in communications - via meetings, data archives, and documents - is going on now, with different disciplines taking very different approaches. This research compares the changes between 1970 and 1999 in communication structures and procedures across six scientific fields, drawing data from published and on-line sources, as well as from extensive interviews with editors, forum organizers and active scientists. This research is providing findings that can support useful variations in practices while avoiding wasted resources through needless experimentation or a "one size fits all" approach.
COSSA also supports increased funding for the Graduate Research Fellows program. It is time to provide the funds that will increase the stipends to make them competitive with other federal agencies graduate fellows, and also to make them compatible with NSF's new GK-12 program. Increasing the stipends should not occur as a trade off with the number of fellowships available. The stipends should be increased without a corresponding reduction in the number of these prestigious, portable, student controlled support for graduate training.
NSF remains an important source of federal support for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. It provides close to one-third of all federal support for these disciplines; over 60 percent of the support for academically-based basic research in the social sciences; and over 90 percent in such areas as archaeology, linguistics, and political science.
We urge the Subcommittee to significantly enhance the support for the National Science Foundation. With this increased funding the Social, Behavioral and Economic Science Directorate can boost its ability to meet the needs of the country and the world for answers to the complex problems affecting us all.
Significant investments must be made to explain the behaviors of human beings as they interact with each other and with their social, political, economic, and technological environment. Technology will not solve our "people" and "societal" problems. All technological advances are accompanied by upheavals in human relations and societal relations. Thus, to maintain the United States as a world leader in science, economic prosperity, and as the beacon of democracy, enhanced resources devoted to gaining increased knowledge about humans and their communities must be a priority.
In 2000, the National Science Foundation, the leading federal agency supporting fundamental scientific and engineering research across all fields, turns 50. This momentous occasion should be celebrated by Congress with a large increase to the NSF budget. NSF deserves a hearty birthday present, at least a $675 million increase for FY 2001!
Thank you for the opportunity to present our views.