Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.
That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.
The amount of money we are talking about for research is so small in comparison to the debt that it’s a red herring to even bring up the current debt level. As you’ve noted, even the largest parts of the budget are dwarfed by the total deficit. Researching is a rounding error.
There’s this thing called taxes. We’ve had thirty years of tax hawks intentionally creating this situation that we find ourselves in, because they’ve cut taxes without any sense of responsibility for its impact on the debt/deficit. In fact that’s been their plan all along, to “starve the beast”, cause a crisis, and force cuts to popular programs that they wouldn’t get political support for otherwise.
How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Britain was at a point where without massive aid from the US huge numbers of people would die of cold or starvation. The US has huge surpluses of food and energy.
The idea that we're in such a crisis that we have to eat our own seed corn (massive cuts to science research which is one of the main drivers of US economic growth) is crazy.
Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.
If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.
US research funding is not what you want to cut though. It is among the most productive funding possible and there is evidence aplenty that it pays for itself many times over.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
It's important to remember that government debt doesn't ever need to be repaid, sort of how an immortal man could indefinitely refinance loans. That he'd have to borrow again to repay the old loans (while maintaining the debt) is part of the mechanism. Such an immortal could have his debt grow indefinitely and still be fine as long as lenders believe he'll be able to afford paying the interest and that other lenders will be willing to refinance the loans when they expire.
That's not to say that government debt couldn't become a problem, even a serious one, but as long as the economy grows fast enough to support the interest payments, it's not an "existential problem". The danger isn't so much the debt itself but in the confidence in the US economy falling below the level required to sustain that debt.
I loan the US government money by buying treasury bills because I trust that when they mature, others would be willing to lend the US money. When this trust in the health of the US economy declines, then there's a problem with the debt, but then there are also other big problems. What you'll see is rising interest rates that is likely combined with an unpromising economy, and yeah, that's a serious problem. A high debt could definitely exacerbate it (and that's why it's helpful to slow down the growth of the debt or even reduce it if possible), but it's not its cause.
The idea that cutting research will make a dent in the budget is a fantasy. NSF has a budget of 10 billion. Stop rationalizing gutting crucial programs because of “the deficit” Medicare, social security and the military are the main costs in the US budget. Sure universities are bloated, tackle that problem separately then.
> Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars.
And, yet, they're doing nothing to tax the wealth at the top and are actively trying to reduce their tax revenue streams.
America doesn't need to cut every service they have to be OK. They're the most powerful country in the world.. or they were 90 days ago.
Until the US actually looks hard at the wealth disparity and accumulation of the >0.1%, it's hard to take it seriously that they care about their debt. Likewise, in their current approach to MORE military spending, tariffs (crashing the economy tends to REDUCE tax Rev and increase deficits), and immigration campaign (you don't tackle the deficit by killing your workforce).
The most obvious is that social security money somehow disappears into a black hole. Of course it doesn't. All of that money is spent on something - usually useful things produced and sold by businesses.
The subtext with complaints about government spending is usually that this money is being handed out to the morally undeserving, and this - by some bizarre alchemy - is the direct cause of a weaker dollar.
In reality the deficit is the difference between money collected in taxes and money spent. Failing to close that gap by raising taxation on those who hoard wealth offshore, spend it on unproductive toys, and buy up key assets like property is an ideological choice, not an economic necessity.
The deficit is a direct result of unproductive wealth hoarding facilitated by unnecessary tax cuts, not of public spending.
But it's hard to get this point across in a country where "Why should I pay taxes to subsidise my neghbour's health care?" is taken seriously as a talking point, but "Why are corporations bankrupting half a million people year instead of paying out for health insurance as contracted?" is considered ideological extremism.
As for the rest - the US was clearly at its strongest and most innovative and productive when taxes were high and the government was funding original R&D before handing it over to the private sector for marketing and commercial development.
The funding part including training generations of PhDs.
That's literally how the computer industry started.
The idea that an ideologically pure private sector can do this on its own without getting stuck in the usual tar pits of quarterly short-termism, cranky narcissistic mismanagement, and toxic oligopoly is a pipe dream.
US corporate culture can't do long-term strategy. It's always going to aim for the nearest short-term maximum while missing bigger rewards that are years or even decades out.
Tax revenue as percentage of GDP right now 17%. You can pick random countries and compare. China 26%, Sweden 41%, Japan 32% etc. Do you see the issue? When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we were at 20%.
I guess what is your point though? The current administration has absolutely no plans to reduce debt as a part of these funding cuts. They plan on INCREASING debt by issuing massive tax breaks that no amount of cutting will fund. It’s right there in their own budget.
If anything they’re taking the worst of all worlds by sacrificing future revenue (by way of new technology that can be sold) to give money to people who don’t need it right now. If you think the US is going to remain the center of the western world’s economic universe, or that any of our allies are going to remain on a dollar standard when we can’t be relied upon militarily or otherwise, I think you’re in for a very rude awakening.
US research funding still drives a positive return on investment for tax dollars because of the economic growth it drives, so ending research funding would expedite the debt crisis.
So your argument is that the U.S. is currently like wartime Britain, and that science funding specifically must be sacrificed despite the fact that is has created an economic boon that would help to pay down the debt: We just desperately need the money now for else the country could cease to exist, and we’ll sort out how to restore a science driven economy once the crisis is over?
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
Really...? Until Liberation Day the other week, I would doubt this. The whole world holds the US dollar, if the USA fails (side-glare at Donald and Elon), the whole world goes into chaos. If President Harris had said "OK world, we need to borrow x more dollars to keep this country running", people (private creditors and nations) would say "I'm pretty sure the USA will still be a solid economy in 10 (or 30 years), x% ROI if I lend them money? Sure!".
> Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services.
This is just very much not the case. The government can always spend to meet obligations unless it chooses not to, whether that's interest on unnecessary bonds or social security benefits. Any restriction on the arbitrary total "debt" is a self-imposed farce and should all stop playing along.
Presenting a problem of tension for dollars is a tool used to justify withholding delivering services people want and need. It's a choice, when really the only scarcity is resources.
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
1. No, it isn't. And if you think the finances of the US in 2025 are remotely similar to the finances and the world position of the British Empire in 1945, you are staggeringly wrong about either the past, or the present, or both.
2. And if it were, there's a million lower-ROI things that could be cut. Does an isolationist America really need eleven carrier groups, in a world where there are zero non-American ones?
Don't mix up the deficit and the debt (and the internal and external debt).
US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.
I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.
Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).
As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
It is not existential except for the financial markets, because they need safe securities: remove US bonds and modern finance grinds to halt.
US debt is high just because the US government decided in the 80s that they will start borrowing money from the rich instead of taxing them. The money exists, and it doesn't have to be borrowed just because Laffer draw a cute curve on a restaurant napkin.
I'm genuinely curious what you think the "right" level of debt is, and how you justify your answer. The U.S. has only been debt-free once in its history, so obviously "zero" isn't the answer. And it seems self-evident that you are correct that there is a level where it becomes untenable. But what amount, and why that amount?
The way they math is presented is off. The US is deficit spending this year, yet you present the interest payment as something separate from the military. Obviously that interest is partially from the military spending the US makes this year that it has not paid for, military payments from last year it has not paid for etc. The billions sent to Israel, the Ukraine and the hundreds of military bases the US has spanning the globe are not cheap.
Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.
If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out
A lot of our deficit is because of Trump's 10 year tax cuts, which Republicans are about to re-extend. Trump does not care about debt, he just wants to destroy government institutions.
Where does government subsidized loans to banks (eg Fed, Fannie, Freddie) sit in your list? The government is a monetary sovereign - it cannot run out of dollars to use. The actual constraint is that creating too much new money creates too much price inflation. But for the past decades most monetary inflation has been flowing into the financial sector and bidding up the asset bubbles, with the "fiscal responsibility" political narrative merely being a dishonest cover to keep that gravy train flowing.
The problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to tax billionaires. We just passed even more tax cuts for rich people and are scheduled to add more to the debt. Just tax rich people, it's not complicated.
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
I think a lot of the decentralization also correlated up with a wide range of directions, with decisions to pursue activity made at much lower levels than happens today.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.
It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.
I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.
The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.
Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.
I think the particular method probably pales in comparison to the fact that the US simply had so much more money and resources. The UK is an island nation that lost its empire and was playing second fiddle.
Such a “simple” solution. Wonder why doing a PhD in the majority of european countries is equal to a poor monthly income. Just pay them more. I guess countries don’t like long term solutions.
I was curious how much of a gap there is, and landed on about 100k in the US[0] vs 85k[1] USD in France for instance, in average.
That sounds on par with most other professions where the US salary is about a third higher, with a cost of living (health, housing etc) eating most of the difference.
Perhaps I'm also not buying that the US has a fundamentally better system, and not just a dominant position to begin with, with tons of money to invest and raise an army of researchers. Comparing to China could be a more interesting exercise, as it's also flooded with money now and is getting competitive in research.
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
There are orders of magnitude more patents in the private sector, but most are either not licensed or are licensed as part of huge 'pools' as private sector patenting is driven by the arms race between companies to have a large enough patent portfolio to retaliate if sued (there is a lot of patent 'slop'). And that's not even counting fake (troll) innovators. Whereas uni patents are probably more likely to be licensed out on an individual basis. So it's really hard to know the significance of counts alone. You'd have to look at a random sample of uni Vs private patents and assess each one.
We have to dispense with the silliness of comparing the US with countries a tenth its size. If you want to compare Britain to the US, pick a state of comparable size and do so. Otherwise you’re comparing apples to much larger apples.
I wonder if the analogy might be more like comparing an apple tree evolving in a forest vs breeding varieties of apples on a farm.
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
This strikes as starting from the conclusion you want to reach (current funding cuts are bad) and then trying to build a narrative to prove it.
Post-WWII the US had already become the superpower in science and technology and Europe was struggling to rebuild after the war (e.g. rationing ended in the UK only in 1954).
The brain drain started before the war, was amplified by the war, and continued after the war because the US were so rich generally. This has continued since. I don't think that what Trump is doing will have an impact because it may not last and the US will still overall much more attractive than, say, Europe.
One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain.
Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people.
While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding probably helped a lot. Bringing in the Von Neumanns and Erdos of the world couldn't have hurt.
This started when George Washington went to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island to speak to them promoting the 2nd of the 12 amendments to the Constitution, 10 of which became the Bill of Rights. Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution and this trip was to garner support to ratify the Bill of Rights which was to safeguard individual freedoms and limit the power of the federal government. Many of the Jews who first arrived in the United States did so in New Amsterdam whose families had pervious settled in Amsterdam after the Spanish Inquisition where they were forced to either leave Spain, convert to Catholicism, or be put to death.
Reiterating what the Hebrew congregation write to Washington he responded:
> For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [0]
It is a paradox that people living the United States with its freedoms can only continue doing so as long as they equally protect the freedoms of everyone else without bigotry or persecution.
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
Yep, some of the first things Hitler did when he took power was to reverse the ridiculous large brain drain from most of the world into Germany, and stall most research by the chilling effect of censoring random topics and fighting institutions that harbored people he didn't like.
Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire.
The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war:
Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
It kicked off a feedback loop. The best scientists and engineers wanted to work on the projects that were 10 years ahead. As a result US companies were at the forefront of new technology and developments… attracting the next generation of the best scientists and engineers.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
Science and progress are not a one off thing.
The scientist are not used up after 10 years.
They keep working and keep the advantages going.
The advantage attracts even more intelligent people from every corner of the world.
Bretton Woods is not a 10-year advantage.
US had enjoyed pretty much free money until Vietnam, point at which had to kill the gold standard to enjoy free money some more.
The US provided billions in aid and resources under the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and especially Japan after the war. And provided billions again to Korea after the Korean War. Japan and South Korea obviously made the most of it with their massive science and technology industries in the post-war era.
Also, being far enough from Europe that a huge amount of talent decided the U.S. was a better bet for getting away from the Nazis. And then taking a large number of former Nazi scientist's post-war as well.
The article mentions but underrates the fact that post-war the British shot themselves in the foot economically.
As far as I'm aware, the article is kind of wrong that there wasn't a successful British computing industry post war, or at least it's not obvious that it's eventual failure has much to do with differences in basic research structure. There was a successful British computing industry at first, and it failed a few decades later.
I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.
Yes, including surrounded and forcibly brought them into US camps. But yeah, the Soviets did the same and we had the nuclear bomb race, the space race and the Cold War.
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.
A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
>> Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.
Citation needed.
The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on.
This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every other early-mid 20th century chemist or physicist did all or some of their training in Europe, Now, at least until recently, it's been Europe (and the rest of the world) flocking to our universities.
The US would be even higher were it not for the South bringing down the average. Not really a surprise: America has always been a highly educated and highly skilled country.
It also didn't hurt that a certain European science superpower started purging academics based on ideology, said academics being more than welcome in the USA. Wait a minute...
I'm pretty sure you need to start looking at what they're doing (selecting for obedience over competence) than what they're saying (DEI is the root of all problems).
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay:
“I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
dunno if it is this plain.. the regulatory capture in the last 30 years is not null. Especially in very niche, very profitable sub-corners of big-S Science.
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
Readit News
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.
There’s this thing called taxes. We’ve had thirty years of tax hawks intentionally creating this situation that we find ourselves in, because they’ve cut taxes without any sense of responsibility for its impact on the debt/deficit. In fact that’s been their plan all along, to “starve the beast”, cause a crisis, and force cuts to popular programs that they wouldn’t get political support for otherwise.
Britain was at a point where without massive aid from the US huge numbers of people would die of cold or starvation. The US has huge surpluses of food and energy.
The idea that we're in such a crisis that we have to eat our own seed corn (massive cuts to science research which is one of the main drivers of US economic growth) is crazy.
If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
That's not to say that government debt couldn't become a problem, even a serious one, but as long as the economy grows fast enough to support the interest payments, it's not an "existential problem". The danger isn't so much the debt itself but in the confidence in the US economy falling below the level required to sustain that debt.
I loan the US government money by buying treasury bills because I trust that when they mature, others would be willing to lend the US money. When this trust in the health of the US economy declines, then there's a problem with the debt, but then there are also other big problems. What you'll see is rising interest rates that is likely combined with an unpromising economy, and yeah, that's a serious problem. A high debt could definitely exacerbate it (and that's why it's helpful to slow down the growth of the debt or even reduce it if possible), but it's not its cause.
The deficit just means the US government should collect more taxes and cut spending. Efficiency efforts should have gone towards neutering nimbys.
Now with Republicans in power, we can expect tax revenue to take a huge hit, and economic recession, and the deficit to blow out.
In the last 25 years, Republicans have consistently taken positive trends in gdp, unemployment, and deficits and tanked the economy.
And, yet, they're doing nothing to tax the wealth at the top and are actively trying to reduce their tax revenue streams.
America doesn't need to cut every service they have to be OK. They're the most powerful country in the world.. or they were 90 days ago.
Until the US actually looks hard at the wealth disparity and accumulation of the >0.1%, it's hard to take it seriously that they care about their debt. Likewise, in their current approach to MORE military spending, tariffs (crashing the economy tends to REDUCE tax Rev and increase deficits), and immigration campaign (you don't tackle the deficit by killing your workforce).
The most obvious is that social security money somehow disappears into a black hole. Of course it doesn't. All of that money is spent on something - usually useful things produced and sold by businesses.
The subtext with complaints about government spending is usually that this money is being handed out to the morally undeserving, and this - by some bizarre alchemy - is the direct cause of a weaker dollar.
In reality the deficit is the difference between money collected in taxes and money spent. Failing to close that gap by raising taxation on those who hoard wealth offshore, spend it on unproductive toys, and buy up key assets like property is an ideological choice, not an economic necessity.
The deficit is a direct result of unproductive wealth hoarding facilitated by unnecessary tax cuts, not of public spending.
But it's hard to get this point across in a country where "Why should I pay taxes to subsidise my neghbour's health care?" is taken seriously as a talking point, but "Why are corporations bankrupting half a million people year instead of paying out for health insurance as contracted?" is considered ideological extremism.
As for the rest - the US was clearly at its strongest and most innovative and productive when taxes were high and the government was funding original R&D before handing it over to the private sector for marketing and commercial development.
The funding part including training generations of PhDs.
That's literally how the computer industry started.
The idea that an ideologically pure private sector can do this on its own without getting stuck in the usual tar pits of quarterly short-termism, cranky narcissistic mismanagement, and toxic oligopoly is a pipe dream.
US corporate culture can't do long-term strategy. It's always going to aim for the nearest short-term maximum while missing bigger rewards that are years or even decades out.
If anything they’re taking the worst of all worlds by sacrificing future revenue (by way of new technology that can be sold) to give money to people who don’t need it right now. If you think the US is going to remain the center of the western world’s economic universe, or that any of our allies are going to remain on a dollar standard when we can’t be relied upon militarily or otherwise, I think you’re in for a very rude awakening.
Really...? Until Liberation Day the other week, I would doubt this. The whole world holds the US dollar, if the USA fails (side-glare at Donald and Elon), the whole world goes into chaos. If President Harris had said "OK world, we need to borrow x more dollars to keep this country running", people (private creditors and nations) would say "I'm pretty sure the USA will still be a solid economy in 10 (or 30 years), x% ROI if I lend them money? Sure!".
And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina": https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-u-s-...
This is just very much not the case. The government can always spend to meet obligations unless it chooses not to, whether that's interest on unnecessary bonds or social security benefits. Any restriction on the arbitrary total "debt" is a self-imposed farce and should all stop playing along.
Presenting a problem of tension for dollars is a tool used to justify withholding delivering services people want and need. It's a choice, when really the only scarcity is resources.
ha ha. you mean like in 2008 and 2009, the great recession (1), the subprime mortgage crisis (2), etc., and then things like:
(1) the great recession
(2) the subprime mortgage crisis
TARP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Progra...
terms floating around at that time, like:
"privatize profits, socialize losses"
"too big to fail"
etc.?
1. No, it isn't. And if you think the finances of the US in 2025 are remotely similar to the finances and the world position of the British Empire in 1945, you are staggeringly wrong about either the past, or the present, or both.
2. And if it were, there's a million lower-ROI things that could be cut. Does an isolationist America really need eleven carrier groups, in a world where there are zero non-American ones?
US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.
I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.
Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).
As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
It is not existential except for the financial markets, because they need safe securities: remove US bonds and modern finance grinds to halt.
US debt is high just because the US government decided in the 80s that they will start borrowing money from the rich instead of taxing them. The money exists, and it doesn't have to be borrowed just because Laffer draw a cute curve on a restaurant napkin.
Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.
If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.
Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.
That sounds on par with most other professions where the US salary is about a third higher, with a cost of living (health, housing etc) eating most of the difference.
Perhaps I'm also not buying that the US has a fundamentally better system, and not just a dominant position to begin with, with tons of money to invest and raise an army of researchers. Comparing to China could be a more interesting exercise, as it's also flooded with money now and is getting competitive in research.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Phd-Researcher-Salary
[1] https://publication.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/F...
So that could be a political stance...
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
That's harder on the scale of a small country.
Deleted Comment
Post-WWII the US had already become the superpower in science and technology and Europe was struggling to rebuild after the war (e.g. rationing ended in the UK only in 1954).
The brain drain started before the war, was amplified by the war, and continued after the war because the US were so rich generally. This has continued since. I don't think that what Trump is doing will have an impact because it may not last and the US will still overall much more attractive than, say, Europe.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain.
Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people.
While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding probably helped a lot. Bringing in the Von Neumanns and Erdos of the world couldn't have hurt.
Reiterating what the Hebrew congregation write to Washington he responded:
> For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [0]
It is a paradox that people living the United States with its freedoms can only continue doing so as long as they equally protect the freedoms of everyone else without bigotry or persecution.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...
Dead Comment
Per capita? The US had a larger population.
Invented and developed in the UK.
> Microwave communication
Lion's share of pre-war advances and development were in various European countries.
> Synthetic Rubber
Developed by Fritz hoffman at the Bayer Laboratory in Germany, 1906
Frankly, your comment is a massive self-own.
Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
Dead Comment
https://miwi-institut.de/archives/2898
The article mentions but underrates the fact that post-war the British shot themselves in the foot economically.
As far as I'm aware, the article is kind of wrong that there wasn't a successful British computing industry post war, or at least it's not obvious that it's eventual failure has much to do with differences in basic research structure. There was a successful British computing industry at first, and it failed a few decades later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
Citation needed. The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on. This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
US: 6134 UK: 5983 GER: 5544
The US would be even higher were it not for the South bringing down the average. Not really a surprise: America has always been a highly educated and highly skilled country.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
Dead Comment
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay: “I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
That is the tragedy of the American empire- instead of improving the lives of its citizens all the money went to tax cuts.
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.