Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi is taking a scalpel to a modern ritual: the way societies pretend they can price human value with the same confidence they price commodities. “Socio-economic worth” sounds neutral, even technocratic, but he calls it what it often is in practice: a “sham” - a story that flatters power by dressing inequality up as measurement. The bite lands because he doesn’t spare his own tribe. “We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do” is a quiet indictment of expertise-for-hire: the grant metrics, impact factors, consultancy culture, and policy dashboards that let numbers masquerade as moral judgment.

The subtext is about complicity. Scientists like to imagine their work floats above politics, but Polanyi points to how easily scientific authority becomes a legitimizing stamp for whatever a market, a ministry, or a university ranking already wants to reward. When “worth” gets defined by salaries, citations, patents, or GDP contribution, science can end up reinforcing a narrow, economized vision of the human - not because the data demands it, but because institutions do.

His pivot to “the criterion of quality” is not mere aestheticism; it’s a demand to restore a harder standard that can’t be reduced to spreadsheets. Quality implies judgment, peer responsibility, and the courage to say some work - and some lives - matter even when the payoff isn’t immediate or monetizable. Coming from a Nobel-winning chemist shaped by 20th-century upheavals and the long argument over scientific responsibility, the line reads like a warning: when scientists outsource values to markets, they don’t become neutral. They become useful.