For an economist it would be inconceivable to think of the spread of ideas without thinking of the funding of ideas. Money acts as a magnet, directing research and ideas. The papers by Goodwin, Smith, and Newlon considered specific aspects of the explicit funding of ideas: through government, through think tanks, and through private foundations. In this paper I summarize some of the concerns that have been raised about the funding of economic ideas and relate those concerns to the final paper in this volume, which offers some ideas about changing the method of funding.

In thinking about the role of funding in directing ideas, it is important to consider implicit, as well as explicit, funding. Of all the sources of funding for economic research, the largest is probably the implicit funding that comes from 3–2 or 2–2 teaching loads at liberal arts schools and 1–1 or 1–2 teaching loads at graduate schools. At junior colleges where no research is required the teaching load is often 5–5, so the net amount of funding that comes from implicit funding is large. In 1987 a rough estimate of the implicit funding might be $250 million, assuming 20,000 economics professors receive one-third time off to conduct research. This would be approximately twenty times the funding provided by NSF in that year. This money is generally without strings, in the sense that institutions do not explicitly state what type of research a person must do. There are, of course, the indirect silken cords imposed by institutions and historical precedent that were discussed in Part I.