Comment by ModernMech
Comment by ModernMech 5 hours ago
That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programming languages research gets funding is planning the economy.
I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.
The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics.
Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.