The ISRF runs several lines of internal research, mostly in pilot mode, looking for research questions on which we might run larger-scale projects in the future. Four of these were set back – let’s say, “clarified” – by Trump’s recent re-election.

Trump is the guy who resets the odometer back to zero. You get him out of office, put a few plans in motion to address glaringly obvious problems – like the climate crisis – go a ways down the road and put a few kilometres on the odometer. 

And then Trump returns. He pushes the button and everything returns to zero. While he’s in office, the odometer runs in reverse. 

One of the ISRF’s projects explores alternatives to Green Finance. Governments globally are expecting private capital to do most of the work of investing in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Private finance accounts for around half of all climate finance, but it is mostly directed toward wealthy countries. 60% comes in the form of debt. 

Private investors also steer green investment towards delivering maximum financial returns rather than meeting the greatest climate needs. These standard investment incentives often backfire. For example, private equity investment made the UK’s water infrastructure less, rather than more, resilient and effective.

Trump doesn’t care about green investments. He will further encourage everyone to use return on investment as the only standard for deploying capital, regardless of social cost.

He will thus intensify a status quo that has already failed to deal with the global issue. In fact, “failed” understates the problem. The Financial Times’ stoical centrist columnist, Martin Wolf, described COP29 as somewhere between failure and disaster. If we are to keep global warming to 1.5C, we have just six years left in the carbon budget.

Source: Financial Times

Current commitments predict a temperature rise of 2.8C. The situation calls for emergency construction of green global state capacity, in five-alarm fire mode. This urgent capacity-building is not happening in industry or government.

On the other hand, much of academia is doing its part. For example, the macroeconomist Daniela Gabor will be working with us in 2025 on a project whose informal title is “The Big Green State”. Many other ISRF-affiliated scholars belong to a growing community of economists who are theorizing national and international structures that will steer funds around the financial system, and its extravagant costs, into direct investment. 

President Biden’s Green semi-New Deal was a step in this direction. But it was embattled politically, and stayed too small and too focused on subsidizing private firms with public funds. It violated industrial policy requirements that the state keep control over outcomes. A lot of great academic work has been done. But not enough of it was put into practice in time.

Whatever the Biden administration did, Trump is likely to dismantle most of it and crony-ize the rest. He will accelerate US oil production. If anyone can make greenhouse gas emissions great again, it’s Trump.

If the state and finance will not do their parts to address climate change, we should invest massively in academia, which has been doing its part. But the ISRF’s second stream of internal research, which studies UK university research funding, has not revealed this kind of investment. Instead, research is now subject to a relentless cram-down thanks to insufficient government funding for universities. 

UK university research generally runs at a loss of about 25 pence on the pound. The result, as I discussed in July’s Note, is that the sector lost £5 billion doing research in 2021-22. That £5 billion shortfall must be covered by university budgets. Arguably most of that comes from international student fees, which are now falling. How are universities supposed to fund the full range of research? The UK’s Labour government has no plan at all for dealing with this, or even correctly posing the question.

In November, the Office for Students updated its financial sustainability report. In May 2024, it had expected 40% of higher education providers to be in deficit in two years’ time. Six months later, it raised that estimate. It now expects 72% of higher education providers to be in deficit in two years’ time. Again, the Labour government has no plan for addressing this.

Science and engineering research has a decent chance of negotiating a government rescue package. The government considers it to be economically essential. That is not the case with the arts, humanities, and social sciences, with their high, non-pecuniary benefits – social, cultural, cognitive – and their lower or non-quantifiable pecuniary outcomes. I consider all of these fields to be in danger under the Labour government. 

Our ISRF research hasn’t yet been able to separate research funding by field. But I have done this for various universities in the United States. 

The basic situation is similar. Outside sponsors of research do not do full costings of research. Universities are expected to pick up a large share – one-quarter is a decent guess on average. Universities then cross-subsidize these costs, mainly from funds from state allocations or student fees. These funds are directed to various disciplines, but in very different amounts.

Here are two charts that are likely to reflect the situation in the UK as well. (I am previewing these from a forthcoming paper called “How Humanities Funding Works.”)

Higher education R&D expenditures in non-science and engineering fields, ranked by all FY 2022 non-S&E fields: FYs 2020–22 and by subfield for FY 2022, Tables 28 & 58 https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/higher-education-research-development/2022#data       

Blue is funding from governments; green bundles together funding from non-governmental sources (foundations and corporations among others); grey indicates the university’s own institutional funds that they spend on research. 

Large US research universities spend enormous amounts of their own money supporting research – $210 million in 2022 at Berkeley; $169 million at Stanford; and an incredible $612 million of institutional funds at Michigan. More than a third of Michigan’s research funding is out of pocket. 

Given these large amounts of internal spending on research, one might assume that there’d be plenty of internal money for non-STEM fields. So how do non-STEM fields and the humanities fare? Here are the same institutions again.

The grey bars here represent overall institutional spending on research, moved from the grey band in the previous figure. The shorter, coloured bars to the left of them represent non-STEM funding. Orange represents the humanities disciplines. The social sciences are spread across the other colour categories.

You’ll notice that the right-hand bar for each institution is much taller than the left-hand bar. Universities spend much more of their own funds on research, STEM and non-STEM together, than they spend on non-STEM research from all sources. 

In short, institutional funds are used mainly to support STEM research.

And this is a deeper point than it might seem. Universities spend (much) more of their institutional funds supporting the research that, almost always, already has extramural funding than they spend on the research that almost always lacks extramural funding. 

We can’t yet confirm that the typical situation in the UK is similar. But as universities approach or tip into deficit, their already limited support for the arts, humanities, and social sciences will likely shrink further. As internal funds shrink (when international student numbers fall, national insurance costs increase, etc.), pressure will build to redirect the small share that went to non-STEM fields into science and engineering fields. 

This result would be a catastrophe for research in all the social and cultural fields that the ISRF covers. The Labour government has no plan for this problem either. I doubt they’re even aware of it. 

But the Trump government does have a plan. And it is to further discredit the sector as another enemy of the people while also reducing research funding, starting with health, which will produce domino pressure on everything else. Strike two for our ISRF research streams.

The ISRF’s third research stream involves the impact of AI on cognition and attention. Here, Trump’s election will encourage deregulation of the digital economy, starting with crypto currencies and AI. Other parts of the world may step up regulation, but the US is likely to be pulling in the opposite direction. 

Meanwhile, our fourth stream, on political affect, includes a sub-study on authoritarian drift. Why does economic crisis push so many people to the political right rather than to the political left? Trump’s victory places this issue front and centre yet again. His campaign put white male hysteria on parade, and this seemed to make his capacity for positive action more rather than less convincing to 75 million voters. Why? 

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that the problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the colour line. That’s also true of the 21^st century. It has been joined by the problem of the democracy line, where democracy increasingly divides opinion We urgently need to understand this better, so authoritarianism doesn’t become naturalized as a fact of human nature.

How do I feel about Trump’s election? Disgusted. It’s a major setback for the solutions to all of the world’s major problems. And I’m also deeply interested in understanding the spread of negative affects as a controlling force in world events today.

I feel very badly for people in the many sectors of society and in the many countries that he despises and that his administration will try to harm. But I also have confidence that there will be worldwide resistance to him. 

I also feel enthusiastic determination to make research and teaching more important to society than ever before. Universities are wonders of the world. They are utterly essential institutions. Their researchers – in the company of independent researchers, NGO scholars, social movements – have been doing as much as any other group to keep the world focused on its real problems, on real answers, on real modes of making things less horrible now and much better eventually. At ISRF, we will do everything in our power to support researchers in their work in 2025 and beyond. 

All our best wishes for peaceful and restful holidays – and for sustained success next year for the work we share.