Fra said:
Interesting rise indeed. I really don't have much of a serious clue but maybe the global crisis slightly setting people back and forcing them to reconsider what they are doing. Maybe the crisis makes look upon all the established structures with doubt and critisism, not only in society but also in science. since it becomes more clear that in times of limited resources, some extra thought may be needed and we can not afford to invest in the wrong questions.
Perhaps the critics, and questioning of - how have all the investments in ST made us more fit? - is even more relevant in the crisis days when it becomes more obvious that time and money is limited. We have to question how be choose to invest every single dollar. Ultimately it's self-preservation.
In think that type of reasoning is more likely to appear during bad times.
How was the pattern last summer? ie. could there be some summer/vacation phenomenon?
/Fredrik
This is an excellent post. I believe you are right that when economic crisis is constructed in one discourse, it spreads to others as a result of cognitive-emotional relations between people and their various distinct discourses.
Let's start by getting one thing straight, though. Choosing how to invest every single dollar is not self-preservation as much as it is hope of preserving economic status and systems that allow people to avoid doing labor that they don't want to do.
In one sense, science is a form of knowledge and it has its own economy of ideas and critique. On the other hand, academia involves organization various life activities of the human individuals practicing science, which is somewhat distinct from the actual practice of science itself.
To simplify some, first consider the lifestyle of some academic scientist you know. What do they own, eat, wear, drive, buy, sell, make, do, use, etc? Now trace the supply chains of any aspect of that lifestyle. When you arrive at some other individual who provides supplies and services for the academic scientist, ask yourself what would happen if that person practiced science.
If you can follow this example, you should be able to see that science can, at least in theory, be practiced by people working in non-academic situations.
Now, imagine all funding to science was eliminated and all scientists currently working in academia had to seek income in non-academic activities. If that was the case, the question is what would the right or wrong questions be to invest in, since economic productivity would be separate from scientific research.
So now you are probably saying, "yes but it's hardly possible to prepare and serve food to customers and clean up after them while doing good scientific research." This is where the relationship between economic crisis and academic investment really emerges.
The operative question is what is sacrificed economically in order for individuals to devote all their working hours to science or other academic endeavors? The answer depends on what each individual is capable of doing besides research and what economic demand pressures are pushing divestment in academia and why?
Cynically, I would say that many people have lost the ability to approach economy as a big picture, if they ever had that ability to start with. All such people know is that the squeeze is on them to generate money for someone else and they want money for themselves so they can spend it to get other people to do and make things for them.
In the bigger picture, though, the truth is that there is no scarcity of resources at all. In fact, prices fall and unemployment rises precisely because of overproduction and surplus. Nevertheless, people continue to want to make more money for reasons such as paying off debt and gaining more purchasing power.
Some people who want to make more money do it by investing in themselves and use their own labor to make goods or services to sell to others. Some of the same people, but also others, try to invest the money they have in others to make more money that way. Other people try to make money by convincing investors that they will be able to multiply their money if they pay them to do it. This is where it starts getting tricky.
Imagine I am in debt or just want to make some money and you are in the same position as me, but you have some money to invest. Neither of us really knows what is needed to produce for the economy, so I decide to come up with an idea for you to invest in, with the hope of making more money for both of us. But what if there is no more money to make?
So this is where the question becomes how far people are willing to go to try to squeeze more money out of the economy when there's none to squeeze. Presumably, every academic job could be eliminated until administrators and personnel emerged with reasons that their work will generate revenues for the institutions.
Then, as long as the revenue-plans aren't working, people are disciplined and fired to stoke the fire of getting them to generate revenues. It makes you wonder why no one comes forth with the big picture of how economy actually works and why it is not possible to make money under certain circumstances and how production and consumption is able to continue despite the economic crisis.
The reason why this big picture doesn't come out, I think, is because no one who sees economics purely in terms of generating more revenues and jobs wants to think about the fact that the revenues and jobs are nothing more than structuring mechanisms for producing the goods and services that are consumed.
If they did, they would realize that money becomes practically unnecessary in a free-market where significant abundance has been reached. Logically, supply-side competition drives prices down to levels so low that consumers and businesses become able to freely explore various production and consumption activities until new forms of scarcity emerge, which create new high prices which form an incentive for competition and production of these products and services.
Of course, this has happened in the form of growth of certain sectors, which are where jobs become available. These are mostly service jobs designed to cater to people who have nothing better to do than leisurely cruise around expending resources and money. If such people would conserve their spending, the amount of service labor to be done would decrease, and there would be more freedom to pursue free scientific activities.
"Great," you say, "why didn't he just say that in the first place?" Well, I'll leave you with the problem of what happens when the scientists and academics who are free from working in service jobs are the ones consuming the goods and services that generate those jobs.
Is it fair for academics to complain about funding-cuts, when the cause of those cuts in the first place is related to the fact that they are spending money on goods and services that require personnel to produce them? Maybe though it's less the will to consumption as it is the will to profit, tax revenues, and jobs/income that is driving the big squeeze, though.
) and my guess is that it will also do OK. This book applies LQG to cosmology (it is a "Loop quantum cosmology" book, presenting models and arguments for the "big bounce" conjecture.) In the Usa market there has not been an all-LQG book, so far. Only books which covered several different approaches to quantum gravity, including Loop. The new German book is more focused, which is what makes it different.