科学经济 ECONOMICS OF SCIENCE.pdfVIP

ECONOMICS OF SCIENCE Abstract The importance of the economics of science is substantially due to the importance of science as a driver of technology and technology as a driver of productivity and growth. Believing that science matters, economists have attempted to understand the behavior of scientists and the operation of scientific institutions. One goal is to see how far science can be understood as a market, and how far the market for science and scientists can be understood as efficient. When inefficiency is found, a related goal is to propose changes in resource levels or incentives, to increase the speed of scientific advance. Introduction The economics of science aims to understand the impact of science on the advance of technology, to explain the behavior of scientists, and to understand the efficiency or inefficiency of scientific institutions. The first economics of science may have been Adam Smith’s idealistic, but sadly untrue, discussion in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976b 124) of Newton having been motivated purely by curiosity, rather than a desire to achieve fame and fortune. If Smith’s account was the beginning of a positive economics of science, then Charles Babbage’s argument (1830) for the inefficiency, and reform, of British scientific institutions, may count as one of the earliest instances of a mainly normative economics of science. Also usually mentioned as an early 1 founder of the normative economics of science is C.S. Peirce who advocated of the application of economic tools of analysis to decide which scientific projects to adopt (see: Wible, 1998). The “modern” economics of science grew out of three main issues. The first issue addressed how the advance of science contributed to the advance of technology, and hence productivity and growth. The second issue, which overlaps with concerns in history and philosophy of scie