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Social sciences are, in principle, obviously worth funding. Philosophy (Nietzsche was actually a professor of philology), archeology, digging texts out of archives and writing history rank the highest for me, but there's valuable work in a lot of fields. A lot of the best work in economics has directly affected the way we organize the economy and the way businesses do business.
90% of publicly funded 'social science' is not that. It's hundreds of millions of words of repetitive, uninspired analysis of history or literature, like the work of that Ally Louks who blew up on twitter. The thing wrong with her, contra all of RW twitter, isn't that she's too woke or too communist or anything. Michel Foucault was woke for his time, but is obviously worth reading, and thousands of leftist academics have written things worth reading across many different fields. Her work, and 90% of modern humanities academic work, just isn't. And not in the "only 10 experts could appreciate or even understand it" sense, like in research math, but in the sense that there's no interesting content in it at all. There are a hundred thousand academics at various colleges and universities who either aren't smart enough or aren't independent-minded enough to develop good taste about what to research, and are paid (although not paid very much) to write ... really anything, so long as it's topical and isn't too embarassing, and can get published in a junk journal or turned into a book chapter or something.
Now the most valuable work is very valuable, and if you had to choose all or nothing (which you don't!), the best history and economics is still worth funding the garbage. (The money isn't counterfactually going to whatever you think is valuable, it's probably going to more welfare.) Or that's what I'd say in America, but New Zealand probably has a lot less than 5% of the global top 5%, so whatever.
The obvious answer would be to cut 90% of it and only keep the high quality stuff, but the entire problem is that there's no reasonable metric to measure how impactful research actually is without waiting 200 years. And all the ones that people have hacked together are gamed so the useless stuff is actually on top rather than on the bottom.
Going for economic value isn't the worst you could do really. Universities went to shit when States figured out they were important and tried to keep them afloat with free money. What really needs to happen is that universities have skin in the game again and actually have to maintain relevance instead of coasting on their established reputation. Only the fear of death can push institutions to shrink instead of grow. And sometimes not even that.
Disagree. You can't precisely measure quality, but smart generalists can separate bad articles like "How Young People Portrayed Their Experiences in Therapeutic Residential Care in Portugal: A Mixed Methods Study" and "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction" from the kinds of humanities academic work you might want published. One can tell the difference between 'this might be valuable' and 'this definitely isn't'. The problem is the people funding this stuff aren't doing that.
You can't do this at scale because power can't be destroyed.
The day you pick someone to do this is the day that person goes on the road to the corruption that led us here.
Academia was once run by people who were good at detecting bullshit. And then people got free money for producing garbage that follows the theme set by the State.
Remove the free money and stop using the results of academia to prop up the running class. No less than that will fix it.
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