The Secret Life of Science: How it Really Works and Why It Matters by Jeremy Baumberg won’t hold many surprises for economists working in academia. The increasing role of publication metrics in career prospects, even though everyone knows them to be counter-productive or even pernicious. The narrowing of scholarly horizons within disciplinary silos partly for this reason and partly (in the UK) because of the REF exercise. The creaking peer review system. The debate about open access and the monopoly power of certain journal publishers. I don’t know whether the same is true in the humanities and other social sciences, but the description of the systemic pressures and the way they make it ever harder to allow intellectual curiosity and boundary-crossing work free rein – for some very good reasons – makes this book a reflection on more than the natural sciences, but rather on the institutional framework for research as a whole, into which citizens pour a good deal of funding.

There are, however, additional issues in the sciences, not least the very high cost of equipment and facilities in some areas, and the failure of the funding system as a whole to be able to reflect on and implement societal priorities. Another difference is the institutional framework, with much scientific research (to varying degrees across countries – there are interesting figures in the book) occurring in the private sector. Baumberg also discusses the ever-rising number of scientific researchers, in what seems to be a sort of winner-takes-all dynamic of funding concentrating in elite groups and no signs of increasing diversity, producing seemingly ever-decreasing returns.

Although the issues may be familiar, the book usefully presents them all as a combined system challenge. It is pretty factual and even handed, but one ends with a strong sense of the need for some system-wide reforms. Baumberg has no silver bullet solution, and quite right too. He makes some suggestions such as introducing other kinds of metrics than citations, finding some ‘anarchic’ ways to fund science, creating better and different career structures for postdocs.

I read the book just after Richard Jones’s and James Wilsdon’s thought-provoking and trenchant report on ‘biomedical bubble’ in the UK. I doubt The Secret Life of Science will appeal to the general audience as it’s much more about the institutional framework than about the scientific research. But although researchers will already know – and live in their daily lives – the issues flagged up in the book, it’s a timely warning that the scientific endeavour that has brought our societies astonishingly greater prosperity and improvements in the quality of life is sclerotic and failing to deliver for the societies funding research. Hard as it may be for a young researcher struggling under all these pressures to regard herself as part of the despised ‘elite’, that’s the big issue facing scientific and other research. Time to tackle it.

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Now that I’m paddling at the edge of the inter-disciplinarity ocean – dangerous waters – I read – on the recommendation of esteemed colleagues – Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I gather it has been highly influential, and it was indeed stimulating read. However, I struggled with parts of the argument, which started brilliantly: we use metaphors, often informed by our bodies, in language and thought. ‘Up’ and ‘forward’ are powerful when incorporated in metaphors, because we stand up and walk forwards. I really enjoyed being prodded to think about the use of language and what it would mean to take metaphors seriously. Why does ‘ your argument has a solid structure’ work but ‘your argument is covered in gargoyles’ not? Why can we have raw facts and half baked ideas but not sautéed or poached data?

However, I struggled with the labelling of some ways of speaking as metaphors at all. I can see ‘argument as war’ is one. But is ‘inflation is an entity’? It’s an analytical construct for sure, but it isn’t exactly not a thing either. So is ‘inflation is lowering our standard of living’ really a metaphorical construction. Are ‘time is a resource’ and ‘labour is a resource’ metaphors at all? The further I got into the book, the less I was persuaded.

Evidently the book played into the objectivism vs relativism debate, and the authors sensibly accept that the ‘real world’ clearly constrains our conceptual system, although they are on the relativism end of the see-saw. As the title of chapter 27 puts it: “How metaphor reveals the limitations of the myth of objectivism.” They argue that the way we use language means objects (out there in the real world, as it were) are entities relative to our interaction with the world, and our projections onto it. Properties of objects are interactional rather than inherent, in their view. No doubt this is philosophically incoherent, but I’m not sure why there can’t be inherent properties as well as those we perceive through our interactions with the world and categorise, metaphorically or not.

The book ends with a paragraph on economics which is half spot on: “Political and economic ideologies are framed in mataphorical terms. Like all other metaphors, political and economic metaphors can hide aspects of reality. But in the area of politics and economics, metaphors matter more because they constrain our lives.” I think Deirdre McCloskey (The Rhetoric of Economics) or Albert Hirschman (The Rhetoric of Reaction) would agree. However, this coda seems half gibberish too, at least to this literal-minded economist: why is ‘labour is a resource’ a metaphor because it fails (as a metaphor) to distinguish meaningful from meaningless labour?

Anyway, among other reading, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel is marvellous. I laughed and I cried (literally, not metaphorically). I only quite enjoyed Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago. I read Cass Sunstein’s latest, The Cost Benefit Revolution, out in September – when I’ll review it. I’m spoilt for choice for my next one, as the in-pile is teetering at the moment. When I’m super-busy, as these at months have been, acquiring a new book seems to be a purchase of the implicit time to read it. If only!

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And the in-pile: