Someone once told me that if a golfer tries imagines the hole is larger, he will putt better. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the National Science Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000 to find out. The study was inconclusive, which means two things: we still can’t putt very well, and Purdue needs more research money.
A U.S. government that once famously spent $2.6 million to encourage Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly is capable of almost anything. Members of Congress often use these stories about absurd taxpayer-funded studies to make fun of the bureaucracy. Instead of just mocking silly studies, maybe they should put a stop to them.
They could start with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which pays for some of the nuttiest imaginable research. One grant gave a Boston research hospital $1.5 million to find out why three-fourths of American lesbians are overweight when most gay males are not. NIH also paid researchers $400,000 to find out why men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior while drunk, and $442,000 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam. The same agency paid for a $593,000 study to figure out why chimpanzees throw their poop, gave the University of Kentucky $176,000 to determine whether quail are more likely to procreate when high on cocaine, and paid $666,900 for a study on the benefits of watching TV reruns. You would feel good about this if you were a New Zealand White rabbit – NIH spent $387,000 giving eighteen of them Swedish massages after exercise, to see if they felt better.
Funding bizarre studies is not unique to NIH, of course. My own favorites are at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), maybe because my connection to the Palisade peach business convinces me how much better agricultural research dollars could be spent. After all, USDA spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar produced in Idaho, $50,000 to help pay for the annual Hawaiian Chocolate Festival, and $30,000 to farmers developing a database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations.”
During the last government shutdown, both USDA and the National Park Service spent money creating new websites to tell visitors that they didn’t have enough money or manpower to maintain their usual websites. Yet USDA can afford to give the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.
Some of the promotional efforts of federal grants are no doubt useful to the communities or industries that benefit. You wouldn’t mind the government grant of $505,000 “to promote specialty hair and beauty products for cats and dogs” if you were in that business. A $75,000 grant to promote awareness of Michigan Christmas trees and poinsettias is probably helpful to the local producers. But are taxpayers in Western Colorado really responsible for the neon sign museum in Las Vegas ($1.8 million), the magic museum in Marshall, Michigan ($147,000), or the Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia ($123,050)?
How is life on the Western Slope enhanced by knowing that the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers (the U.S. Air Force spent $300,000 on a study to find that out), or that monkeys like to gamble (National Science Foundation, $171,000)? One pundit suggested that if scientists wanted to see a bunch of dumb primates gamble with money that wasn’t theirs, they could have just gone to a congressional appropriations committee meeting!
For a fraction of the cost of these studies, many of us could actually answer the government’s burning questions. One such study ($331,000) gave hungry spouses voodoo dolls to stab, representing their partners, and concluded that apparently people get irritable when they get hungry. Another allocated $500 million to find out why 5-year-old children can’t sit still in kindergarten. And yet another spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions.”
Just to make sure others didn’t make the same mistake, we spent over $400,000 on a program to train politicians in India how to communicate with their constituents. For that price, will they do a better job of communicating than the politicians in America who funded the training?
I will not claim to have the exact answer to that complicated question, but I am certain there could be a new government-funded scientific study at a major research university to find out. You may think money can’t buy happiness, but it certainly can pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the issue.
(A version of this column originally appeared in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel March 4, 2016)
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