The Cost of Clinging to What Increasingly Looks Like Failure
Channel: New America
Date: 24/05/2012

The Cost of Clinging to What Increasingly Looks Like Failure


Science and technology in America have been guided by the same set of ideas for more than half a century. The conventional wisdom is that if we feed more money and more scientists into our existing "knowledge enterprise" complex, society will derive proportionately more benefits. In the face of the global economic downturn, political disarray at the national level, and protracted challenges to the nation's public health, environmental quality, industrial base, and energy system, this simplistic assumption is long overdue for a reckoning. Today's challenges demand new ways of thinking about science and technology, and the government's role in advancing them. The problem, any honest inquiry will suggest, isn't always money, or the number of scientists, but the very way we do science.

Stephen Trachtenberg - @GWtweets
President Emeritus and Professor of Public Service, George Washington University

George Poste - @ASU
Chief Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative, Arizona State University
Founder and former Director, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University

Andy Revkin - @Revkin                                                                              
Senior Fellow, Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies, Pace University
"Dot Earth" Writer, The New York Times

Moderator
Deborah Blum - @deborahblum  
Author, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Winner of 1992 Pulitzer Prize for The Monkey Wars series in the Sacramento Bee

http://www.newamerica.net/events/2012/america_s_knowledge_enterprise