Is knowledge an optional extra, worthwhile only when resources are flush? Or is knowledge necessary, at least as important in difficult times as prosperous ones? The questions are not just abstract as budgets for science, research, and higher education are cut around the world.

The Greek National Council for Research and Technology has issued an appeal for the solidarity of global colleagues as austerity programs bring draconian cuts to budgets for research and higher education. Greece faces one of the most extreme fiscal crises today but is hardly the only state where both the direct impacts of the continuing financial crisis and the implications of the attempted solutions are leading public officials to look for expenses they can eliminate. We should be clear that this is not only the result of previous Greek spending that exceeded revenues, but of fraud and recklessness in the global banking and finance system. And cutting budgets for research is not just necessary belt-tightening but a decision not to treat the production and sharing of knowledge as basic public goods.

This connects the situation in Greece to deep and often aggressive budget cuts across Europe. If external financial markets are partially forcing the hand of Greece’s government, this is less the case in Britain where the governing coalition has chosen to impose what amounts to “structural adjustment” on itself. This is reducing access to higher education and shifting costs away from the government to private payers, speeding up a process already underway for decades. It will likely lead to the privatization of many of Britain’s leading universities and to sharper differentiations in the quality of education available to different parts of the population.

The crises of public funding in both Greece and Britain should remind Americans of the cuts that have damaged the University of California system, perhaps the world’s greatest public institution of higher education – or at least it once was. Here the shortfalls in public revenues have come at a provincial rather than national level, but the impacts are similar. So is the crucial point that budgets always reveal what is considered more or less valuable. In California as in Greece and Britain, budgets for research and education compete with budgets for other public expenses. For decades, thus, investments in higher education have failed to keep pace with investments in prisons.

Debates about what governments can afford and what the public budget should fund are both appropriate. But many of the cuts are taking place with minimal public debate or even awareness. They are deceptively presented as mere responses to necessity when they in fact reflect choices about which costs are worthwhile, which are not. The government of the US, for example, clearly feels wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are more valuable than scientific research: its budgets say so, as California’s budget implicitly says that sending young people to prison is a better investment than sending them to college. Amid genuine financial pressures, budget cuts are used to pursue policy agendas that have nothing to do with those pressures.

The current years of fiscal austerity are thus being used to promote privatization and to welcome the inequality that comes with it. Leaving research to private funding is not just a matter of pursuing efficiency, it is a decision to leave choices about what research should be pursued to businesses, wealthy individuals, and the private foundations created by businesses and wealthy individuals. Business investment can finance important research – but it is overwhelmingly restricted to research that can potentially make money relatively quickly for corporations. Wealthy individuals and foundations often give money for valuable purposes, including what they consider to be good for the public. But it is important also to fund research directly to meet public needs, as publically assessed, and also on the basis of scientific review of intellectual quality. Moreover, when investment decisions are left to those who control private wealth, they tend to go to the richest universities, doing good work but increasing inequality. This reinforces a vicious circle. Policies like deindustrialization, low taxes on capital gains, and weakly regulated financial markets all increase inequality; they produce high numbers of millionaires and billionaires while limiting opportunities and security for the rest of the population. And greater inequality in higher education keeps this inequality in place across generations.

Social scientists should take special note of these issues. Not only do they involve major social policies shaping social futures. They also directly affect the funding for social science and what kinds of social science will be produced. This isn’t just a matter of research grants. Most social scientists, along with most humanists, are enabled to do research mainly by having teaching jobs. Research grants are extras. Revenues from tuition fees or state-budgets pay their salaries. And as students are charged higher fees and sometimes turned away from classes they need (not in the rich private universities of course), allocating time to research becomes harder to justify. Of course in the long run research shapes what knowledge exists to be taught, but in the short run it can look like an optional extra. It clearly becomes an optional extra for the growing number of teachers who don’t have the chance at permanent positions but must become part of an academic precariate, keeping afloat from term to term as adjunct and temporary faculty.

In this context it is important to acknowledge that there is plenty of unexciting, repetitive research that doesn’t greatly advance the public good – and also that competition for individual and institutional prestige is often a more basic driver of research than the public good. But there is also wonderful and important research that can be especially valuable because of how it can inform public discussion and public decisions in times of upheaval and deep transformation – like the present. And here there is a final point to keep in mind. These are not just times of financial crisis. They are times of social upheaval and major, challenging social movements. Social science has not just seemed optional to many policy makers who care more about marketable intellectual property rights if they care about knowledge at all. It has seemed a threat to those who prefer there to be less inquiry into social inequality, abuses in the financial markets, long-term unemployment, the conditions for democracy and the failures of existing institutions.

Ironically, thus, at the very point when many social scientists are calling for research agendas that make our research contribute more effectively to the public, there is a widespread pattern of caps or cuts in public funding. Complaining won’t help this much. Using the tools of social science analysis to understand changes, choices, and possible futures may be more promising.

The situation in Greece is representative of a wider European crisis of both finance and governance. The Euro was introduced without needed institutional mechanisms for collective decisions. Not only in Europe, but also in North America and Japan, financial problems also reflect political failures. Moreover, many rich countries now must struggle to cope with declining economic dominance. But these issues have echoes in rapidly growing countries – for example in the priorities China and India set as they build new universities. They bear on how and whether knowledge may inform democracy in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. They demand attention from citizens because they raise questions about whether knowledge will be approached as a public good, and from social scientists because they reflect major shifts in the way key social institutions work.