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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

It's just memetic in many ways. The bar for statistical relevance is low across all fields hard and soft, it used to be you could parade Cyril Burt out but we're well beyond a point where he's different to any discipline, social or not.

I should have resisted the temptation to repeat the slur.

Demographics couldn't be more important in a world dominated by millions of refugees. Or, for example, we'll be arguing about vaccines forever and having people who study why that is, is important. I think social sciences should be funded properly.

I think NZ will regret this, just like the UK lived to regret Thatcher de-funding Russian studies, only to fail to seize advantages in the end of the cold war: insufficient people with skills facing Russia.

I'm a computer scientist (which isn't a science)

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I'm a Kiwi, but living abroad now. I have mixed views on this announcement, I do agree with the basic sentiment that NZ is broke and has been for a long time. That means 'decisions' on public spending need to be in the national interest, for the current govt, that translates into 'fiscal interest'. That said, cutting "all" govt funding to social sciences is not the right call. I would have though that a smaller budget and stricter set of criteria for funding would have been a better approach. NZ has always had a 'fringe element' looking for funding for dubious research of limited value, but de-funding everything that is not of economic value feels like the wrong approach.

I just can't find any reference to Thatcher cutting Russia studies, it's quite a strange thing to imagine given that she presided over the peak of the cold war. Could you help? I know that Blair closed great chunks of the foreign office and that has seriously impacted the UK's ability to represent its interested abroad, but that's not just Russia.

I find it hard to imagine what the UK could have done in terms of taking advantage at the end of the cold war. I mean maybe if we had all moved to Germany then we would have been well placed to get the benefits that those folks got. On the other hand we did, eventually, get to shut down the British Army of the Rhine which saved a lot of money, and a bunch of skilled labour from eastern europe migrated to the UK as well. What potential benefits from a Russian engagment could the UK have realised?

Possibly this was a slur against her made at the time but I was told this as a young student at uni in 79-82 window.havw a read of https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/the-rise-and-fall-of-sov... for context.

During the initial rapprochement years British banking was nothing like as present in the Russian denationalisation and the emergence of the oligarch kleptocracy. The decision of the Russian elites to invest in London came much much later.

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