From the “Ideas” section:

Mirowski is an economist and historian of science at Notre Dame, and his new book, “Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science,” takes a hard look at the state of American science and finds it dismal. Scientists in the United States, he writes, are chronically underfunded, relentlessly micromanaged, and hamstrung by oppressive intellectual property rules. More research is being done overseas, and disillusioned young scientists are abandoning the lab to work in finance and business. If you care about useful new discoveries, he says, American science is actually getting worse.

While you’re there, check out Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who argues that climate change "skepticism is not "anti-science.’’

"In truth, global-warming alarmism is not science at all — not in the way that electromagnetic radiation or the laws of planetary motion or molecular biology is science. Catastrophic climate change is an interpretation of certain scientific data, an interpretation based on theories about the causes and effects of growing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not "denying science’’ to have doubts about the correctness of that interpretation any more than it is "denying economics’’ to have doubts about the efficacy of Kenyesian pump-priming.