Great crackpot ideas of the past

Some people collect train numbers, some collect beer mats. I collect ideas. The most prized items in my collection are the great crackpot ideas that have inspired men to gleefully slaughter each other over the past decades. We could order these into a top ten, ranking them by millions of deaths through war and starvation, but this would take more research than I have time for at present. So here’s one great crackpot idea to be going on with: The peoples of the world can be arranged into separate states, each of which should comprise a distinct nation.

The ‘nation-state’ is a great crackpot idea because the peoples of Europe and the rest of the World have not distributed themselves into neat geographical clusters. Of course, rulers have tried for centuries to make their subjects more homogeneous, usually by attempting to eliminate inconvenient groups that persisted in adhering to minority religions, languages or customs. The ‘nation-states’ which dominated Europe after 1918 sought even more vigorously to make reality fit the crackpot idea, with mass transfers of population, suppression of minority languages, and exterminations. The creation of the European Union is an admission by all but a few recalcitrant nationalists in Europe that the nation-state has been a catastrophe for the continent, and that a muddled unity is preferable.

There are lesser crackpot ideas too. These cause havoc and dismay but do not usually involve major loss of life. An example is the research assessment exercise (RAE) for allocating funds in British universities. This allocates about £2 billion/year, according to a grading of ‘research excellence’ across all disciplines. These grades are assigned by a series of expert panels based on their assessments of published research papers submitted by universities, and on various intangible fudge factors like ‘research impact’. RAE assessments are completed every few years. The total cost of this exercise has been estimated at £47 million, mainly in the time spent by university staff in preparing submissions for the expert panels.

What makes this a crackpot idea is not just the high transaction cost of the exercise, but the impossibility of grading all human knowledge from genetics to philosophy on a simple rating scale. Most academics could probably agree about the leading centres in their discipline, but there would be probably be little reliability in any ratings beyond that. To complicate matters, there is some excellent research in some mediocre university departments and vice-versa. Academics would also struggle to reliably rate research which crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries or which challenges dominant paradigms. Watson and Crick were lucky to have done their research before the RAE existed.

To make matters worse, the RAE grades past research, not current performance. Because of the long intervals between assessments and the delays in academic publishing, some of the research assessed may be based on laboratory or fieldwork almost a decade old. Panel ratings are therefore exercises in the history of knowledge. There is an interesting contrast when academics bid for funds to carry out new research projects. In this case, the research councils and the various charitable research funding agencies assess the academics’ recent performance and the prospect of a useful outcome from their proposed research project. Unfortunately, research funds are limited, and academic staff spend much of their time preparing research bids with limited chance of success.

The obvious solution to all this would be to close down the RAE, and transfer the funds to the research councils. This would also release the high transaction costs of the RAE. Why won’t this happen? The answer is that however crackpot an idea, it generates its winners and losers. The universities which gain most funds from the RAE worry they might lose by an alternative system. Besides funds, the RAE assigns esteem, and esteem counts for a lot in the competitive and hierarchical world of universities. Central government is also a winner: it can enforce regular changes in the formulas used to calculate the allocations of funds following the RAE, and thereby remind those working in higher education of their subordination to the state. There are important lessons of power here: use complicated rules to disguise the exercise of your power and to divide those you rule into squabbling factions. Get clever people to spend all their time in silly competitions, and they will pay less attention to the serious business of challenging your power.