the Evil Line

Tyler Cowen has a book, The Great Stagnation, which complains of a slowdown in innovation. His solution (to drastically over simplify) is to raise the status of scientists. Today, he has a blog post titled "The status of scientists" that links to a New York Times piece about scientists organizing to get involved in politics.

I'm all for raising the status of scientists. I might even be for getting scientists more involved in politics. But the two are completely unrelated - have you seen the approval numbers for politicians lately? That's not status. Take a quick look at the Google trends for today, or the popular Bing searches or whatever. There are no scientists. But there are no politicians, either.

Another thing. In the NYT piece you can take a quiz to see if you can correctly identify ten scientists - I scored 6/10, for what it's worth. But you're supposed to recognize these scientists by their pictures.