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nt organizations grow because of societal need or government mandate for example as new compounds emitted by human activities are classified as pollutants government scientists are needed to monitor and develop mitigation strategies government agencies grow and this growth can be functional meeting regulatory or societal needs or it could be expansionist growing for growths sake without improving mission delivery these models of growth can be distinguished from one another whether growth has been balanced between those who deliver the mission e g researchers in a science agency and those who administer the organization versus massive growth in bureaucratic staff without growth in mission oriented staff and accompanied by a reduction in efficiency as you can probably tell i am not opposed to organizational reviews that evaluate efficiency and effectiveness in delivering core missions and to reallocate resources to ensure this efficiency and effectiveness moreover if cuts are required the first and primary focus should be on bureaucratic and administrative structure government science cuts do harm simply cutting research staff in government agencies whether motivated by financial or philosophical reasons will have negative consequences these cuts reduce the capacity of governments to obtain facts and understanding that can be instrumental for developing policy and management strategies and for addressing crises to be able to dismiss the potential negative consequences of research cuts there are only two possible positions one can take the first is that academic and private research has the capacity to provide necessary information and so that government research is largely redundant the second is that data and facts are of little value for government policies government science is unique academic researchers like me have the unique privilege to pursue topics and questions that interest them these research topics are usually informed by some combination of personal interest and curiosity the state of knowledge within a particular field availability of funds and a desire to make the world better academic research doesn t have strong constraints on how theoretical or practical research is and both can be impactful researchers working in the private sector usually have clear deliverables and short timelines they are constrained by a company s research and development schedule and the need to add value to a product or service government science contains elements of both academic and industry science in that government scientists usually have more latitude and time than industry researchers but are more constrained by deliverables and practical outcomes than academics academics are often motivated by fame and glory and industry scientists by profitability government science is uniquely focused on providing data and information to inform the public governments and the decisions they make neither academia nor industry provide sufficient motivation to fill this role unless the government is willing to pay the important contribution of government scientists is to test and monitor they test impacts say of potential pollutants outcomes like restoration success and scenarios they also monitor systems and evaluate against government guidelines as christine bishop retired canadian research scientist points out only government scientists are tasked with monitoring the accumulation movement and fate of environmental contaminants through food webs no one else does this in a comprehensive and standardized way and this information is absolutely needed for management and enforcement further we cannot rely on industry to monitor itself especially when it comes to evaluating the potential long term health and environmental risks of new products if our governments have created environmental and industry regulations but no one is monitoring can these policies be effective maybe governments don t need information perhaps governments don t need all this information if governments don t care or use this information then why collect it as the epa administrator lee zeldin makes clear the massive cuts to his agency are all about saving money and to reign in an out of control leftist agenda setting aside the fact that mr zeldin has no qualifications to evaluate the science the epa does which is not uncommon for government leaders to not understand the details of what their agencies actually do but this lack of qualification seems especially true for the current us administration from health to education to environment these are not sufficient or defensible reasons to cut research and can only be done with the bravado of ignorance the current us government or any government slashing research might feel confident in ideology as a premise for policy but the unfortunate reality is that ideology doesn t solve problems evidence based solutions solve problems future governments will face crises and will not have sufficient data and understanding to prevent mitigate or recover from these crises the slashing governments seldom face the consequences of their cuts but society does over the long term so what then sometimes financial constraints require austerity there is a larger conversation about the financial systems we ve invented and whether they need to be re invented in a way that actually benefits all people if this is the case there are ways to do this that protect agency missions and the generation of information needed for enforcement and policy government research serves an invaluable role in governance and cutting it in haphazard ways will have long term negative consequences for nature and people posted by marc cadotte at 2 14 2026 09 16 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels cuts government monitoring policy research thursday september 11 2025 are evidence based policies and pro science governmental agendas dependent on happiness there are a lot of problems in the world from the effects of climate change emerging zoonotic diseases strife and war and more but we also need to recognize that humanity has never had it so good today most of us expect access to food medicine and education we expect to live to old age and we expect our children to outlive us expectations that only emerged in the last century for most of human history people expected famine and half of all children to die before the age of five we are not very good at comparing our lives with those of past generations but we are very good at comparing ourselves to wealthier people or to dreams of lavish living happier countries are those where people trust one another feel fortunate and genuinely want others to succeed my sense with many assumptions and caveats is that happier societies tend to be governed by more rational less ideological governments ones that place greater value on science and evidence based policymaking in the u s it seems fair to say that the republican party has grown more hostile to science favoring ideology over evidence on issues like climate change and vaccines this is a broad generalization but evidence suggests that democratic administrations more often support and consult science i say this not as partisan advocacy i am generally anti party politics my goal here is to explore how happiness connects to political outcomes measuring happiness and politics happiness is not easy to measure here i use a happiness ranking of us states based on 30 different metrics including life expectancy commute times economic well being and leisure i then turned this ranking into an index where happier states had higher scores and compared that to each state s political leaning to determine political control i looked at six elected offices the 2024 presidential vote governor state senate state house both u s senate seats and the u s house delegation if one party held five or six of these i classified the state as either republican or democratic if neither party held at least five i classified it as mixed the results were clear states that voted more often for democrats were happier on average slope 0 867 f1 48 7 57 p 0 008 when grouped by party control republican led states were less happy f2 47 3 11 p 0 05 these findings suggest that happier states tend to elect a government more inclined to value evidence and science correlation not causation this is not likely a causal relationship instead in places with lower literacy weaker schools fewer economic opportunities and less job satisfaction people are more drawn to simple and emotional political narratives these often take the form of an us versus them story where the us are righteous and the them are blamed for hardship and unfair control of the political system this may explain why republican voters tend to be less trustful of democracy it is important to highlight the caveat that these indices do not actually measure happiness which is a complex thing to quantify these indices are composites built from socio economic indicators but there is strong evidence that these conditions shape how people feel about their place in society their sense of fairness and whether they believe they are receiving the rewards they deserve why happiness matters for evidence based policy if we want governments to ground decisions in evidence rather than ideology we need to ensure that voters are happy that requires investment in education which drives innovation and economic growth along with infrastructure health care and a high quality of life raising the standard of living in places like alabama and mississippi should be a priority regardless of political outcomes people there deserve the same world class education and health care as those in new york or california but as a side effect happier citizens are also more likely to support rational leaders who value science and that leads to better outcomes for everyone political parties by their very nature in both their objectives and methods will try to subvert democracy and bias it in their favour i want to see a world without parties see first footnote in https evol eco blogspot com 2020 12 politics and biodiversity crisis call html edn1 absolute max happiness rank state happiness rank 1 posted by marc cadotte at 9 11 2025 10 22 00 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels education government policy politics friday january 3 2025 recentring the research and teaching mission of universities the horror of tracking my work hours for years i keep telling people that i need to work a lot in order to stay on top of things gone are the days of the professor sitting in their office thinking or only showing up to teach after spending hours in a smoky coffee shop reading and writing no the 21 st century professor is more of a small business owner dealing with immense administrative burdens like hiring and time sheets reimbursements purchasing health and safety scheduling exams financial reporting teaching assistant duty forms and so on the thing is none of these responsibilities has much to do with a professor delivering the teaching and research missing of the university but more on this later i had a very busy several months last semester i taught two courses one of them new with a lab which i built from scratch and grant proposals research travels all alongside graduate student mentoring and performing research i decided to track my work hours for a month and the outcome was shocking i kept a spreadsheet open on my computer and marked an x in an hour slot if i performed work activities for more than 30 minutes i did travel for one week which is not abnormal for me i travel for work about 25 of the time i also had covid for a week which slowed me down a little but basically worked slept worked slept for a couple of days i worked a total of 253 hours in the month of october put another way i worked more than 63 hours per week on average that s more than 50 more than what a regular work week should be fortunately i m not a very good sleeper i m not arguing for more money though i wouldn t say no professors earn a decent salary but what is clear more support is needed i d argue that i shouldn t be doing about 30 of the tasks i spend my time on why i work so much i love what i do doing research is my jam i also really enjoy teaching and put a lot into my courses because of these loves i do work a lot on research and teaching these are what i consider productive work where i fulfill the core responsibilities of my job for the university however the administrative side of my job has increased substantially over the past 15 years to the point where i work a 10 hour day and have done no productive work instead doing busy work why this increase in administrative work part of the answer is increasing oversight and regulation from the provincial government the other part is what the late david graeber calls bullshit jobs i don t mean to denigrate perfectly well meaning individuals who also work hard but the massive growth in the bureaucratic staff in universities has resulted in more busy work for everyone the bureaucracy of a university includes those that do not directly deliver a university s mission but have power to institute procedures and policies that affect those that provide the mission bureaucratic units according to graeber gain power and momentum by growing in size creating more procedures and making themselves necessary beyond this are the emails oh the emails i get 150 230 emails a day as i write this post i have 8 411 unread emails and this is after i marked all emails as read that were received before last november i get daily review requests queries from prospective graduate students and journals asking me to write manuscripts for them my university also does most of its paperwork by emailing pdfs which has a high error rate e g students not getting paid visa letters not being sent to visiting researchers etc requiring more time to fix things so my solution is to basically ignore many emails it would take at least half of every workday to simply reply to the emails sent to me what are the solutions obviously this workload is not sustainable but what can be done well i m not willing to reduce my commitment to teaching and research so either i continue to work 60 hours a week or i try to cut back on other demands but i already say no daily institutionally the university can do much better my job contract specifies 40 teaching 40 research and 20 administration but i work more like 40 40 50 one solution is that i track my administrative hours and my department charges bureaucratic units for my time beyond the 20 which should be 8 hours a week this money could then be used to hire administrative support for professors regardless of the mechanism more support needs to be provided to professors i recently travelled to germany for a research meeting and not once did the professor deal with any logis...
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