Not In Our Stars

So Gregg Easterbrook, whose brother is teaching me advanced securities regulation, has a piece in Slate on NASA's funding priorities. He argues that NASA wastes billions on manned missions and esoteric science at the expense of valuable earth-oriented projects like climate monitoring. By and large I agree with him, although some of his priorities are a bit arbitrary (he doesn't want to spend money investigating the Big Bang but likes the Terrestrial Planet Finder project, which locates earth-like planets in the Milky Way).

As a quick side note, I hadn't heard about the Webb telescope, which he discusses briefly. The Webb telescope is apparently the "successor" to the Hubble telescope. To see the humor in this, you have to know that Webb Hubbel was a Clinton friend and associate attorney general before being jailed and then caught up in the Whitewater investigation. His daughter was in one of my classes in grade school, I seem to remember. Vince Foster's widow taught me algebra, too. Small world.

Anyway, to me this illustrates several of the shortcomings of big government projects that have the potential to do a lot of good. First, the public just doesn't pay attention to the way NASA spends its money. The public only tunes in for the dramatic landings or disasters. This means that not only can NASA pursue its own agenda without much accountability, it has an active incentive to privilege the dramatic and photogenic over the useful and prudent.

Second, NASA has long-term relationships with private aerospace contractors. Easterbrook believes that this has led to something like "regulatory capture," in which regulators end up serving the interests of the regulated industry. Similarly, many of NASA's projects seem to accomplish little other than entertaining the public and providing lots of money for contractors.

Finally, NASA seems to be short-sighted or insufficiently sensitive to small risks of catastrophe. This is part of Judge Posner's theory, elaborated in his book Catastrophe, that government agents have poor incentives to deal with high-cost, low-probability events. In this case, the risk of an impact from an asteroid might be disturbingly high, and it's hard to imagine that we benefit more from manned flights than we would from billions more spent detecting and learning to destroy incoming asteroids.

And yet... And yet only the government can marshal the resources necessary for massive projects like our space program. Long-term relationships with contractors are simply inevitable, and the public's attention is inherently scarce and mercurial. To the extent that NASA's problems are inevitable for a government agency, they are probably acceptable given the good things NASA has accomplished. Ideally we could set better priorities and avoid lots of the costs, and hopefully people will pay attention to Easterbrook (as they should have when he presciently criticized the shuttle program). A lot is at stake.