[HN Gopher] How the U.S. became a science superpower
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How the U.S. became a science superpower
Author : groseje
Score : 431 points
Date : 2025-04-15 13:24 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| b_emery wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| What is the evidence of the connection between indirect cost
| reimbursement and outcomes? This is just blatant propaganda to
| justify public money being used to pay university
| administrators.
| arunabha wrote:
| The GP post explicitly mentioned the growth of Chinese
| research capability that they directly saw. It's no secret
| that China has explicitly and deliberately invested in
| ramping up R&D.
|
| Also, requiring absolute proof in a system as vast and
| complex as R&D at the scale of the US leads to complete
| paralysis. It's a bit like cutting off your fingers because
| you want to lose weight.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It would be interesting to see some discussion of how the
| Chinese research funding system actually works.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That makes the opposite point since Chinese indirect costs
| are 5-25%. e.g. this grant is at 25% https://www.nsfc.gov.c
| n/publish/portal0/tab434/info94303.htm
| nxobject wrote:
| What "outcome" would meet your standards for justifiable
| research spending? Is a 26% cap on the percentage that
| indirects can go to all administration - all staff apart from
| researcher hours directly dedicated to the project - a
| sufficient "outcome"?
| rayiner wrote:
| I'm talking about the part where he talks about the
| government funding indirects specifically, not the research
| funding in general.
|
| > A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the
| genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system
| natebc wrote:
| Without the university infrastructure around these Labs
| they'd EACH have to each employ their own construction,
| maintenance, housekeeping, legal, bookkeeping, HR, IT,
| compliance (and more) staff.
|
| There will still be some research done if the cuts to the
| indirects survive the courts but it will be drastically
| reduced in scope as the labs staff will have to cover any
| functions no longer provided by the host university.
|
| And you probably know this but this money isn't getting
| stuffed in to university presidents pockets or anything. It's
| paying (some) of the salaries of ordinary people working at
| jobs that pay about 20% (or more) less than they'd make in
| the private sector.
| Fomite wrote:
| Things indirect cost reimbursements fund at my institution:
|
| - The research animal facilities - HPC staff, upgrades, etc.
| - Our BSL-3 facilities (the only ones for a long way) -
| Various and sundry research cores - New faculty startup funds
|
| Those are all pretty tightly correlated with success, and
| very difficult to support via single grants.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I don't know that I'd rely too heavily on midterms in 26.
| Gerrymandering and all that.
| sirbutters wrote:
| I don't know why this is getting shadowed. You're absolutely
| right. Gerrymandering is a threat.
| Redoubts wrote:
| Illinois and Maryland look pretty secure on that front.
| Perhaps the Democrats can try to gerrymander NYS again,
| without getting slapped down by the courts
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| 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.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I do not believe that sharing costs of facilities and
| equipment is so difficult that research universities can't
| handle it while every condo association in the US somehow
| manages to pull it off. I do not believe you that this is
| aggressively negotiated down by the government because
| private research grants come with much lower indirect costs
| percentages.
|
| > Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads
| be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to
| happen is absurd.
|
| Well I guess we just have to pay for endlessly expanding
| bureaucracy then, because apparently expecting research
| universities to be somewhat efficient with their resources
| is "absurd."
|
| > If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations.
|
| Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on
| overhead. Oh, wait...
| mrtesthah wrote:
| > _Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend
| on overhead. Oh, wait..._
|
| Sure, that's Congress' job. The executive branch's
| current attempts to reduce it via executive order have no
| basis in law and therefore are not valid.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| You're clearly not involved even remotely in academia and
| are just parroting bullshit you saw on your news outlet.
| What's even the point when you can just declare "no, it's
| totally a problem and they can just magically make money
| appear and I'm totally aware of the negotiation process
| for grants". Good Lord.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I can see I've hit a nerve here. But it's ok. I
| understand that the fact that private research grants
| contain indirect percentages less than half of the
| federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse
| them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.
| It's understandable that you would resort to appeals to
| authority and ad hominems when you can't present a
| logical argument.
| brokeAstronomer wrote:
| There are fixed costs associated with running research
| labs and facilities. Just because private funding can
| (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads
| doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without
| the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research
| money is public not private.
|
| While I will happily concede that there is always room
| for improvement with how we fund research, your
| suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap
| existing efforts.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I guess the problem is that I just don't trust them. It's
| a bunch of university administrators and government
| bureaucrats (two groups I trust on the level of used car
| dealers) spending other people's money. I think the
| solution to this is transparency. If these universities
| want to continue getting tax exempt status and generous
| overhead allocations out of taxpayer funds, then they
| should be required to release their budgets to the
| public. It they are actually spending all that money on
| reasonable research costs, then fine, but I want to see
| the receipts.
| lompad wrote:
| You are fundamentally misunderstanding the balance of
| power here.
|
| In your mind it seems to be "those people come pleading
| for money so they can do research, giving it is
| essentially charity"- but it couldn't be further from the
| truth.
|
| Most top-tier researchers can do their science anywhere.
| If you don't make stuff easy and comfortable enough to
| hold them, they'll just leave the country. A significant
| chunk of science spending is an attempt to bribe
| researchers to stay. Drop that and other countries are
| going to get those invaluable people.
|
| I can tell you that several major EU universities have
| started massive outreach programs and are starting to
| snatch all the top researchers from the US. The damage
| this will cause to the US' scientific leadership is not
| even quantifiable, it's completely insane.
|
| Shooting your own foot because you "don't trust
| bureaucrats". Oh well.
|
| Anyway, at my university the first few top researchers
| already arrived, this is going to be exciting in european
| research. If you guys don't want this massive advantage,
| we'll gladly take it.
| stavros wrote:
| Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends
| will come back and do research here instead of in the US.
|
| One of my friends, who is a tenured professor in a top 10
| US university, already switched our Signal messages to
| expire after 24h the other day. I asked him why, and he
| said "you never know what the current administration
| might use against you".
|
| So yes, I'm all for having our people back if the US
| voted that they don't want them.
| nxobject wrote:
| > I understand that the fact that private research grants
| contain indirect percentages less than half of the
| federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse
| them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.
|
| Here's an easy approach to a counterargument.
|
| Private foundation grants account for less than 10% of
| all research funding in the sciences [1]. The fact that
| researchers apply for and receive private grants has
| _nothing_ to do with whether their funding restrictions
| would be sustainable when scaled up.
|
| https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24332
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| There it is again. Private research grants are often
| taken at loss, subsidized by the _actual_ scientific
| funding infrastructure that has made the US the world
| superpower of science.
| Fomite wrote:
| A couple things:
|
| 1) We refuse them when we can. Like if you have a lower
| indirect rate, my institution's policy is that has to be
| located somewhere that's documented, you can't just do
| it. I did have one where the sponsored programs folks
| just said no.
|
| 2) As mentioned, they're sort of a drop in the bucket,
| and also important to junior faculty, so they're a little
| bit accepted as loss leaders.
|
| 3) At _several_ institutions, it was made clear to me
| that if you relied on these, and not "full fat" grants,
| by the time you came up for tenure, things would be bad.
|
| The great irony is every research administrator I know
| (and I know a lot) sort of hates these. If they had
| wanted to, "You cannot charge a private organization a
| indirect rate lower than your negotiated federal rate of
| the same type" (there are different rates depending on
| the nature of the project) would probably have been met
| with "Yeah, that tracks."
|
| Instead, they're trying to use it as an excuse to
| absolutely gut research.
| Fomite wrote:
| > Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend
| on overhead. Oh, wait...
|
| These rates are negotiated with the federal government.
| There's already a mechanism for this.
| bfrink wrote:
| Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for
| the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate?
| I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about
| the underlying drivers here.
| csa wrote:
| > 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.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role
| of rapid communications, but for important results it will
| always be in English due to their "trophy culture".
| blululu wrote:
| That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in
| the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as
| prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility
| politics/rankings but in an active field both are more
| meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige
| publications like nature. I imagine these journals will
| retain their function as markers of prestige even as most
| of the community's research output happens in more
| informal channels.
| stavros wrote:
| > Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western
| ones.
|
| In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have
| English as a native language, and many US researchers were
| born in other countries?
| blululu wrote:
| Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of
| the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere
| speak a few languages.
| thrance wrote:
| *Chinese academics are far more bilingual than _English-
| speaking_ ones.
|
| Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a
| lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of
| what they write is in English, or at the very least
| translated into it.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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?!
| 1auralynn wrote:
| We are killing the golden goose
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| 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.
| fifilura wrote:
| Impossible since that would mean extreme left wing radical
| socialism. And communism.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Sigh.
|
| Unfortunately, your implications are spot on.
|
| We, the people, are our own worst enemies.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| You have to attribute some blame to the elite who run an
| ongoing propaganda campaign for voters to work against
| their own interests.
| apercu wrote:
| Really? Is that your honest take? It's either late stage
| unfettered capitalism, regulatory capture and oligarchy OR
| communism?
|
| Edit: I forgot theocracy.
| fifilura wrote:
| Yeah, sarcasm does not work on internet, I know. I tried
| to paraphrase the ruler in chief.
| apercu wrote:
| Ah, thank you. I was so terribly disappointed to see that
| take on here.
| glial wrote:
| I think the comment was tongue-in-cheek.
| neogodless wrote:
| Unless there could be a less black and white option in the
| middle?
|
| Like a bit more taxes on the wealthiest, a bit more social
| safety nets for the neediest?
| fifilura wrote:
| Yeah obviously.
|
| I am not from USA, but maybe you'll need to figure this
| out on state level? Country level seems rather blocked at
| the moment.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Can't do it, individual states can't print money and
| freedom of movement means the free rider problem will pop
| up quickly.
| fifilura wrote:
| > can't print money
|
| But can they raise taxes?
|
| > freedom of movement
|
| EU also has freedom of movement, but vastly different
| social security systems.
|
| Language is of course an extra barrier, but how much
| people will move is overrated. And maybe you could
| restrict supposed benefits to people who have lived there
| in a few years.
|
| Obviously IANAL, but i am thinking - seems like you
| generally hate your government no matter who it is, so
| maybe states should be a bit more independent.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > But can they raise taxes?
|
| Sure, but the math doesn't work out. Vermont and
| California have both tried in various forms.
|
| > EU also has freedom of movement, blah blah blah
|
| They also coordinated the laws between the member
| countries. That's exactly what the federal government
| would need to do in this case, very good! The EU system
| doesn't work particularly well either, because it's
| loosely confederated. The US government has far more
| ability to coordinate the States.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Sarcasm detector has to be pretty high to catch this one ;)
|
| But you've touched on the problem: any attempt to reform is
| immediately cast as "communism" (also without really
| understanding communism and equating it with soviet
| authoritarianism, but that's another topic).
| fifilura wrote:
| Yeah, cultural difference.
|
| Coming from Europe I think the sarcasm was pretty
| obvious. More like "duh".
| fallingknife wrote:
| Inequality isn't the cause of our problems in the US. It's
| basically the same as it was in the 90s
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
|
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our
| problems.
|
| But killing the golden goose will not help solve the
| inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more
| expensive and difficult to get into universities with top
| research programs.
| saulpw wrote:
| You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the
| same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill
| Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of
| $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100
| billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only
| 2.5x.
|
| The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more
| wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the
| richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively
| leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes, your anecdote about one person out of 300 million
| has convinced me that the statistics compiled by the
| Federal Reserve about the entire population are clearly
| incorrect.
| saulpw wrote:
| Perception is politics.
| ckw wrote:
| 'An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most
| fatal ailment of all republics.'
|
| Plutarch
| itsmek wrote:
| Gini coefficient may be the most commonly used statistic
| but it is not sensitive to current conditions in the US
| (https://www.investopedia.com/news/measuring-inequality-
| forge...). The palma ratio does indeed show increasing
| inequality since the 90s
| (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/palma-
| ratio-s90s40-ratio?...). Also wealth inequality is another
| place to be looking, especially if you're familiar with
| Piketty's body of work which points at it specifically
| (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-
| amer...).
|
| You know what they say about lies and statistics.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| They could have voted socialist at any point in time.
| Americans could have had healthcare, 36 hour work week and a
| pension system.
|
| That is the tragedy of the American empire- instead of
| improving the lives of its citizens all the money went to tax
| cuts.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Could we have though? Last I checked neither majir party
| has seriously persued this. So how are the american people
| to vote for it?
| tsol wrote:
| So is democracy not real? I find it funny that when
| things do right it's because of our superior system of
| people choosing their leaders, and when things go wrong
| it's because people don't have any choice.
| defrost wrote:
| Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor
| flawed example.
|
| Despite the founders being anti-party politics and
| wanting a spectrum of representatives each representing a
| block of the broader population and hammering out
| consensual deals that most can live with, the US has
| devolved into a two party system in which neither party
| especially represents 50% of the population despite both
| butting up against the median of actual voters.
|
| This is the doom spiral of iterative FPTP and Hotelling's
| 'law'.
|
| Other democracies have many parties, larger parties mixed
| with smaller parties, greater voter engagement, various
| forms of proportional voting systems (there are several),
| etc.
|
| US democracy is just one example of many global
| democracies.
| itsmek wrote:
| Yes. If you are genuinely unaware and not just asking a
| rhetorical question, yes socialized medicine is a major
| goal of the progressive left. We came close in 2010 but
| the votes in congress weren't quite there. The only
| reason major parties don't pursue it is because
| progressivism doesn't have the votes. You can definitely
| vote for it though especially if you participate in
| primaries.
| csomar wrote:
| > They could have voted socialist at any point in time.
|
| > Lest the poorly educated masses of people
| linguae wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| How? Money.
|
| There is one problem with the current US system: it overproduces
| talent. When the US system was growing rapidly, the people could
| build a long-term career in the US. But nothing can grow forever
| at an exponential pace. The US continues to pour plenty of money
| into STEM, but it can't keep up with the pace of grad student
| production.
|
| People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas
| for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
| anon291 wrote:
| > People are making smart, individual decisions to head
| overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
|
| Wait what? I know that many Chinese students are staying in
| China, but this is the first I've heard of a substantial
| demographic immigrating to China to work there, esp from the
| US. Do you have data?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's not widespread. But China has made an effort to offer
| obscene amounts of money to attract smart professors and
| researchers to switch to Chinese universities as they've
| tried to build up their top-tier beyond Beida and Tsinghua.
| nextos wrote:
| One annecdata. When I handed in my doctoral thesis in
| Oxbridge, I was contacted by a recruiter from PRC that
| offered me generous startup funds ($600k-1M) and salary to
| bootstrap my own academic lab at Tsinghua, Fudan, or other
| top universities. It'd take me 4-6 years to get an equivalent
| offer in UK or EU where experience and connections are much
| more important than talent.
|
| I am European and I do basic research in science. They seem
| to be very interested in fundamental science and investing
| heavily in lots of subfields. As discussed in other comments,
| the improvement in their research quality during the last
| decade is nothing short of impressive.
| anon291 wrote:
| Interesting
| nextos wrote:
| I didn't even reply, as I didn't want to taint my
| profile. But it looked very interesting and serious.
|
| Plus, from this one can infer they are clearly scouting
| researchers in a systematic way.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It overproduces credentialed morons. Giving someone a degree
| doesn't confer talent. And when you insist on an ever
| increasing percentage of the population attend college, the
| result is exactly as you would expect.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Gonna state the obvious: freedom and peace. People mention money
| but money followed technological boom. And, yes, peace derived
| from military.
| pphysch wrote:
| You might clarify "domestic peace". America has been one of the
| most secure nations in history from large-scale domestic
| invasion (it's essentially never happened: Pearl Harbor,
| isolated terrorist attacks, and "open borders" don't come
| close). That said, it has virtually always been actively
| involved in foreign conflicts and shadow wars during its 250
| year history.
|
| And yes, it's domestic security that enables long-term
| investment in science.
| lvl155 wrote:
| I would clarify it as relative peace. People simply left
| other parts of the world to pursue their dreams. If Europe
| weren't basically war torn every couple of decades all the
| way up to the end of WWII, America might not have made it
| this far. And that's why I don't believe China will ever be
| that great until they reject pseudo-communist regime.
| cs702 wrote:
| 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._
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| dv_dt wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| Decentralization overcomes the local knowledge problem.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge
| breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures
| that later, and unpredictably, come together.
| ptsneves wrote:
| There is a veritassium YouTube video describing the story
| of the electron microscope. At some point somebody even
| proved mathematically that any improvement was a dead
| end. Then a group of scientists whose research was mostly
| shunned, and almost at the point of losing their funding,
| found a way around the limitations and improved the
| electron microscope to measure atomic level fields, with
| great impact on science including materials.
|
| PS: veritassium is just amazing. Yesterday I learned that
| conservation of energy is a local phenomenon and a
| geometric consequence, not a law of the universe at all.
| I am 36 with an engineering background and conservation
| laws were close to sacred laws of the universe. It turns
| out, not really and it has to do with the universe
| expanding. Veritassium just drops it like that, with a
| nice story.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 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.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Why? Britain was considered a larger power in the world until
| around WWII.
| soperj wrote:
| Because it was, it had a bigger population than the US does
| currently. Then all those countries under it's thumb
| declared independence, and that changed things
| considerably.
| thenobsta wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's harder on the scale of a small country.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I don't disagree which is why I encourage comparing the EU
| to the US as a whole.
| jack_h wrote:
| > 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| jack_h wrote:
| Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that
| doesn't mean this system optimally allocates resources.
|
| The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to
| demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is
| projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within
| the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund
| those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their
| operating costs though; I agree with that.
| Retric wrote:
| Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains
| mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than
| they first appear.
|
| People are worried about automation driving people out of
| the workplace while others are worried about a lack of
| workers due to changing demographics. What's going to
| happen is the result of a bunch of different forces,
| simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to
| prove accurate.
| generativenoise wrote:
| It is insane that people think we need a growing
| population to make this perfect population pyramid, to
| make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It
| really does ignore so many of the other forces as you
| mention.
|
| The picture looks radically different if you focus on
| real resources and allocation. In fact a growing
| population could make things very economically tenuous in
| real terms, depending on how a few key environmental
| factors play out over the coming centuries.
| monknomo wrote:
| I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement
| rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy,
| attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate
| isn't a problem when you let more folks in
| consumer451 wrote:
| I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept
| a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many
| people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but
| look at Japan or South Korea, for example.
|
| To me, the really interesting question is how to stop
| what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+
| years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth
| rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help
| here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are
| hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
|
| The reason that I find this important is that even though
| I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing,
| in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the
| immigration solution, there is an end state where all
| societies and countries are economically advanced, and
| have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan,
| I have ideas about post-scarcity.
| exe34 wrote:
| > when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates
| drop to tragic levels.
|
| heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American
| economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| You know NYC is already minority white right?
| consumer451 wrote:
| My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:
|
| The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in
| scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person
| in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out
| group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US
| immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is
| technically no such thing as being white, there is only
| passing for white. The definition of white entirety
| depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish,
| Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently.
| It's a silly word that really means nothing.
|
| If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the
| minority more and more due to their economic advancement,
| clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries
| with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only
| moral way to even things out!
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > The definition of white entirety depends on the day,
| and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not
| "white" until very recently.
|
| Indeed, in some parts of Russia, white supremacists do
| not consider Caucasians to be white. It really does
| depend on who and when you ask.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates
| drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here
| involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard
| to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
|
| There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented
| to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to
| become affluent enough to own property does so and then
| lobbies for policies that increase home prices. These
| policies create housing scarcity both for homes and
| rental units.
|
| That saddles later generations with unreasonably high
| housing costs and makes them unable to afford to start a
| family, so the fertility rate drops. If you want more
| kids, build more housing.
| consumer451 wrote:
| As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be
| one of the most interesting problems of our time.
|
| > There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented
| to reduce the fertility rate:
|
| If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this
| documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would
| love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699799
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There are numerous studies showing that higher housing
| costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.:
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572
| consumer451 wrote:
| Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we
| fix this in the future.
| monknomo wrote:
| My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is
| mandatory national service.
|
| This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to
| how widespread military service in wwii did. It would
| promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they
| personally can make the government useful. And it could
| be made such that we have our national service corp just
| build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could
| provide similar benefits to folks that go through
| national service as the military - healthcare, payment
| for college, etc.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| one possible answer is removing property taxes and
| replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes
| dicensentivize development while land value taxes
| incentive it.
| Retric wrote:
| I think you need to consider history if you think this is
| a new thing. People literally paid for indentured
| servants, even outside of the slave trade.
|
| Importing cheap labor has been a constant throughout the
| countries history, look at camps of people building the
| railroads you'll see lots of Chinese people etc.
| consumer451 wrote:
| But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out
| of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't
| just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.
|
| How do we solve the issue of the end state, where all
| economies have reached our current level of advancement?
|
| I assume we solve it, or we go extinct, and that would be
| an odd reason to do so after millions of years, wouldn't
| it?
| Retric wrote:
| Countries are just arbitrary here. What happens long term
| is there's massive selective pressure because children of
| people that reproduce in wealthy economies are the only
| people to be around in 200+ years.
|
| The USA as a whole has 1.7 births per woman which is
| really close to the ~2.1 needed. However that isn't
| evenly distributed ethic Native Hawaiian and Pacific
| Islander's living in the US actually sit just above
| replacement rate. Give it 200 years and that may very
| well increase.
|
| Really 3 kids needs to be seen as normal long term
| because some people just aren't going to have any.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction? It
| just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an
| extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
| patagurbon wrote:
| The US was very good for a very long time at integrating
| immigrants. It should continue that tradition and work
| even harder at it.
|
| I believe it was some Republican president who said
| something to the effect of "if you move to Germany you
| may be a citizen but you are not a German... But if you
| move to America and become a citizen _you are an
| American_ ".
|
| It's worth noting that not all advanced societies have
| fared as badly as Korea and Japan. Scandinavia for
| instance is below replacement but not nearly as
| catastrophically as Korea. It's possible that a bit more
| policy tweaking and more productivity=>leisure time could
| get them back to a replacement rate.
| int_19h wrote:
| The US was historically rather hostile towards new waves
| of immigrants in practice, treating them very much like
| second class citizens (Irish, Italians, Latinos etc),
| effectively pressuring them to assimilate by becoming
| "more American than Americans" to avoid such attitudes.
| One can argue that the system kinda sorta worked in the
| long run, but I don't think it makes it worthy of
| emulation.
| charlie90 wrote:
| I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will
| just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything
| wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like
| paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it
| was just assumed that people would do it on their own,
| but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to
| get people to do it.
| consumer451 wrote:
| This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly
| evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we
| wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the
| super-not-weak anthropic principle?
|
| We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior
| to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those
| kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think
| that creating their children is the best thing they ever
| did, generally speaking.
|
| Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a
| really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all
| of that!
|
| Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of
| the most interesting problems in my mind.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent
| except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there.
| Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-
| term.
|
| I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a
| vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either
| geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and
| say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They
| protect their children at the expense of their elders,
| basically. It won't be national borders either: the
| fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there
| are certain regions where people still raise children.
| XorNot wrote:
| Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other
| countries though.
|
| The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and
| can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it
| wants to. It's so good at this that it actually _has_ and
| those people pay taxes but don 't get government
| benefits.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There is no "other countries", it's a global economy.
| Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year.
| When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of
| those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now
| that their fertility rate is below the population
| replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their
| country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that
| $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are
| busy filling the existing jobs in the US.
|
| Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with
| fertility rates below population replacement _and_ net
| out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to
| willingly cause that to happen, even without considering
| the consequences to the US of that level of desperation
| spreading through the rest of the world?
|
| The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back
| to the population replacement rate.
| Retric wrote:
| Assuming current trends are unchanged we're still talking
| about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On
| that kind of timescale we might see significant life
| extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic
| engineering.
|
| Some countries like South Korea are going to face major
| challenges far sooner, but frankly having the most
| extreme examples collapse means the average stays higher.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Assuming current trends are unchanged we're still
| talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of
| years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant
| life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic
| engineering.
|
| The absolute number of humans isn't the issue. It's that
| people expect to retire at 65, but are now living into
| their 80s and 90s. Retirees have to be supported by
| working people, i.e. younger people. If the _ratio_ of
| younger people to older people gets out of kilter, there
| 's huge problems. Life extension makes this worse rather
| than better.
| vuurmot wrote:
| You make it sound like the US is a parasite that takes
| the young of other countries to endow itself, never mind
| what happens about other countries. Maybe it is?
| Retric wrote:
| It's not just regions you find differences based on
| culture, and guess what natural selection is going to do
| with less fertile cultures.
|
| Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
| barry-cotter wrote:
| This doesn't fix your problem if the people you let in
| cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example
| the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large
| net negative contributors and their children are no
| better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf
|
| Similar results apply in Denmark.
| https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf
|
| EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a
| billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status
| with easy family reunification means immigration is a
| large net negative fiscal contributor.
| throwaway473825 wrote:
| They might still create more value than they cost. For
| example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but
| has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
| simianwords wrote:
| On average you are paid according to your value so this
| doesn't track.
| garfield_light wrote:
| So a top TikTok influencer is more valuable than a
| surgeon?
| simianwords wrote:
| Yes. They provide a scaled entertainment. You are
| forgetting the reach that this person has.
|
| Compared to a surgeon who's impact is more local, they
| might help a few patients in a week.
|
| Do you think a combat soldier is more important than a VP
| of Google?
| garfield_light wrote:
| You have the delusion that true value is the same as a
| fungible one dimensional number, that externalities
| (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect
| information and local minima aren't real.
|
| The original example is that certain economic activities
| are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good
| job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10
| minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day
| to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain
| services possible, which in turn boost productivity.
|
| The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we
| don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout
| exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs
| beyond the directly measured by dollars.
|
| Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but
| bad, correct?
|
| A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace
| equivalents could've existed and surely the generated
| value would be higher.
| simianwords wrote:
| if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then
| he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not
| the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Where are you getting this from? The value you provide
| sets a kind of ceiling on what you can be paid. But you
| are paid based on how easy it is to replace you.
| tw04 wrote:
| Have you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company?
| I'm assuming not or you'd know "inefficient allocation of
| resources" isn't a government issue, it's a large
| organization issue that's as bad if not worse in the
| private sector.
| wskinner wrote:
| There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for
| corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient
| government agencies can last much longer.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| There was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
| FredPret wrote:
| While true, you overstate the problem. Look up the
| companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50.
| There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long
| term survivors.
| Retric wrote:
| That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy
| the old companies in their entirety.
|
| Instead it's the same kind of shakeups you regularly see
| in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA
| is a merger of the Health Services Administration
| (1973-1982) and Health Resources Administration
| (1973-1982). However currently one of its major functions
| is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed
| up in 1990.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There is a LOT more personnel churn in private sector
| than federal government.
| Retric wrote:
| That really depends on what you mean by churn. Lower
| levels of government are less stable than major
| corporations. Walmart stores don't regularly all randomly
| shut down for a few weeks due to someone being unable to
| decide on a budget etc.
|
| I'll grant you it's really different kinds of instability
| though.
| lenkite wrote:
| Yea, the "too big to fail" principle needs to just go.
| Corporations should be prevented from becoming so big in
| the first place. There must be a limit on the revenue
| generation - once you cross a number, you should be
| broken up.
|
| Humongous companies just become national-level power
| brokers adversely affecting both the government and the
| free market.
| chewbacha wrote:
| Monopolies have a bone to pick with you. They aren't
| generally garbage collected as their wealth becomes self-
| perpetuating even in the face of inefficiencies as they
| can continue to raise prices and push others out.
|
| This was true during the gilded age and it's become true
| again. It took systematic regulations, unions, welfare,
| and the Sherman antitrust act.
|
| If it wasn't for a democratic government the oligarchs
| would still have been in control. They are corrupting the
| current institutions thought the DOGE coup. You see this
| in the self dealing of the billionaires such as Musks
| contracts as well as the tariff exemption grift.
|
| So please don't flaunt a free market as a natural
| solution to inefficient systems, not even Adam Smith
| believed that.
| jasonhong wrote:
| Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any
| large program, government or corporate, that is
| "optimal".
|
| Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion
| dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The
| return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning
| out into companies is enormous.
|
| While the system could use some tuning, it also works
| pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of
| the good.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _that doesn't mean this system optimally allocates
| resources._
|
| When's the last time someone in the Trump administration
| "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't
| "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?
| linksnapzz wrote:
| As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal
| budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to
| NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is
| morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly
| by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails
| really, really close.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by
| a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a
| few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady
| stream of them over time can do the trick.
|
| As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt
| didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of
| bloated programs; it really adds up.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does
| nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the
| people in the comments are arguing that the money spent
| on research is very little and that it ends up bringing
| in more money for the government than the initial
| investment. It would be like looking at an investment
| someone made that had a great return and arguing that
| they could save money by not investing the money in the
| first place. They could be wasting money on other things
| but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save
| them money.
| chewbacha wrote:
| Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the
| government more than they are saving and the biggest
| savings have been contracts that never existed in the
| first place. They also keep revising down their saving
| projections. Now it's down to 150 billion from 4
| trillion.
|
| They are operating a coup and if you don't see it you are
| lying to yourself.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| > They are operating a coup
|
| Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance?
| Which elected officials have they fired?
|
| If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very
| first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden
| on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a
| coup.
| patagurbon wrote:
| No system will optimally allocate resources. However
| projects are typically funded under competitive grants
| and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but
| methodically in the right direction.
|
| Even when it doesn't, it is training researchers who can
| enter systems which have different incentives like
| private research and development. That is a massive
| positive externality.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| The solution is a straightforward but painful increasing
| of the retirement age to like at least 70.
| philwelch wrote:
| > US government funding of science isn't a net cost due to
| taxes on the long term economic productivity that results.
|
| There's an assumption here that deserves some closer
| examination. If we are taking this as a justification for
| federal science spending, we would have to also support a
| policy of awarding research grants on the basis of expected
| long term return on investment, which is not the criteria
| applied now. Furthermore, we would have to justify this
| spending in competition with whatever economic investments
| the government could make elsewhere, or that the American
| taxpayers would make if we let them keep their money in the
| first place. From the standpoint of scientific research I
| don't think this is necessarily what we want, but even if
| it was we would have some hard questions about the last few
| decades of federal research funding.
| jasonhong wrote:
| First, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific
| discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green
| Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others
| eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA
| vaccines, most recently featured in COVID-19 vaccine,
| which also recently won a Nobel Prize.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
|
| Second, while there are always improvements to be made,
| the system _as is_ (or was) worked pretty well in
| practice without knowing what the expected ROI was. The
| PageRank algorithm which led to Google was funded in part
| by an NSF grant on Digital Libraries. The ROI on that
| single invention just from taxes, jobs, and increased
| productivity likely exceeds NSF 's annual budget.
| DataBricks and Duolingo are also based in part on NSF
| research.
|
| Yeah, the system is imperfect, _as all human-oriented
| systems are_ , but for the most part it works pretty well
| in practice and has been a linchpin in the US economic
| growth and national security.
| philwelch wrote:
| If we're going to count the COVID-19 vaccine as a benefit
| of federal research funding, surely we need to also count
| COVID-19 itself as a cost, given the strong evidence that
| the virus was a product of US-funded gain of function
| research.
| HeyImAlex wrote:
| Consensus is that the evidence supporting that is not
| strong.
| philwelch wrote:
| It's not conclusive, but it's strong enough that
| President Biden (or rather, someone with control of
| President Biden's autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket
| pardon backdated to 2014.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > President Biden (or rather, someone with control of
| President Biden's autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket
| pardon backdated to 2014.
|
| This merely proved that President Biden believed that
| President Trump will prosecute and imprison Dr Fauci if
| given the opportunity.
| roenxi wrote:
| To believe that, they would have to believe he had done
| something that a prosecutor would object to and that was
| serious enough to get Fauci imprisoned. Which is to say,
| that he had committed a crime. If we're expecting it to
| be an arbitrary act of legal harassment, Trump's team
| could concoct something based on Fauci's work in 2013.
| Corruption isn't limited to a 2014-2025 window; unless
| they are basing it on facts.
| ripe wrote:
| As we have seen, Trump can hire prosecutors who will
| prosecute anybody he points his little finger at. He
| always hires lackeys, so it was easy to predict he would
| harass Fauci.
| roenxi wrote:
| So how will the pardon help? If the assumption is that
| the prosecutors are going to fabricate crimes, the pardon
| will only help if they fabricate a crime that happened
| under certain conditions (see:
| https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/). If
| they're just making something up they can make something
| up and claim it happened in 2013.
|
| The pardon doesn't protect him from harassment, it only
| protects him if he specifically committed crimes from
| 2014-2025 or in several official capacities. If the Trump
| team is just going to pretend they can say he did
| something 25 years ago in a private capacity and the
| pardon does nothing. The pardon _only_ helps if he did
| something plausibly criminal recently (in which case
| there is a real question of why he got a pardon - they
| aren 't supposed to be preemptive method of putting
| people above the law without even knowing what they did).
|
| A charitable interpretation for Fauci is it is there to
| distract people from the numerous Biden-family pardons
| the same day and to stop people asking what they did
| (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-
| president-jos... if anyone wants to look - C-f "Biden" &
| I count 4 that day + Hunter). But there are probably
| other things going on.
| ripe wrote:
| None of your links show any indications of crimes. I
| don't get the obsession with Fauci when there's an actual
| criminal using the Oval Office to harass innocent people
| every day.
|
| This conversation is pointless. Have a nice day.
| kergonath wrote:
| I don't think that is the point. The argument is usually
| that we cannot predict what will be "high impact" 20
| years from now but the current system works well enough
| that it is a net benefit despite a lot of research not
| being directly applicable in the end.
| hedora wrote:
| So, the current system generates net income for the
| government, but you're claiming it needs to be changed in
| order to do so?
| philwelch wrote:
| I would actually question the assumption that it still
| does. It's not obvious whether it does or doesn't,
| because the payoff horizon is in the very long term.
| hedora wrote:
| Well, last year it generated more than the sum of all the
| money speant since what, WWII?
|
| Research funding is really cheap compared to everything
| else the government does.
| rsfern wrote:
| NSF has actually been experimenting with this sort of
| funding model for a couple years through its new (as of
| 2019) convergence accelerator program, which I think is
| awesome. It's explicitly a multi-sector program where
| academics partner with companies to do some proof of
| concept research in a phase 1 award and translate that
| into a viable commercial product or innovation in a phase
| 2 award. Potential for long term return on investment is
| explicitly part of the review criteria, which target this
| sort of historically underfunded middle ground between
| basic research and technology development
|
| https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/convergence-
| accelera...
| 9283409232 wrote:
| 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.
| jack_h wrote:
| The economic projections I've seen have shown taxing the
| rich will increase tax revenue by around 1.5% of GDP. We're
| slated to borrow 7.3%. That math doesn't work. To be fair,
| the republican math with cuts (assuming no tax cuts) _also_
| doesn't work. Neither side is serious about this issue.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Taxing billionaires is just one of many necessary steps
| but it is the most important and vital step in my
| opinion. There are fundamental problems with how the US
| is run down to the local level but it starts with taxing
| billionaires and getting money out of politics.
| jack_h wrote:
| To be clear, I think raising taxes on _everyone_ is going
| to have to happen along with spending cuts.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| What does the ideal solution look like to you? Are you
| happy with what DOGE is doing and if not what would you
| change? I'm asking genuinely because I don't think enough
| people put forth ideas in their own right.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Why point at billionaires, anyone with more than a
| million is living a comfortable life, everybody should be
| doing their part.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Billionaires are the ones actively fucking the world and
| seeking tax cuts but you're right, there are plenty of
| multimillionaires that need to be paying their share.
| mola wrote:
| You can tax the rich, and then cut less of the good
| stuff. Or you can cut taxes and decimate everything.
| Guess what the billionaire class chose.
| jack_h wrote:
| I fully expect uncomfortable spending cuts with raising
| taxes while trying to balance economic growth in order to
| correct this problem. Im dissatisfied with what both
| sides of the isle are actually doing.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| How can there possibly be an answer to "how much will tax
| revenue increase if we tax the rich" without specifying
| _how much_ we tax the rich, and how we define the rich?
| fallingknife wrote:
| If you use a reasonable definition of rich like 150k for
| individuals then yes it could work. But that's not what
| people actually mean when they say it.
| jltsiren wrote:
| From their unwillingness to tax people. American tax
| revenue as a fraction of GDP is 6-7 percentage points lower
| than in the average OECD country. That gap is over $1.5
| trillion/year.
| philwelch wrote:
| False. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is
| about 6 trillion dollars. The US national debt is over 36
| trillion dollars.
| kbelder wrote:
| As the saying goes, Republicans can't do science, and
| Democrats can't do math.
|
| All this 'just tax the billionaires' is the latter.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| If you thought I, or anyone else thinks that by taxing
| billionaires we would pay off the entirety of the debt, I
| don't know what to tell you bud.
| philwelch wrote:
| Silly of me to take you at your word when you said, "the
| problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to
| tax billionaires".
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Silly you indeed. I have no idea how you read that and
| interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire
| debt." As I mentioned in another comment, taxing
| billionaires is crucial step but one of many needed.
| philwelch wrote:
| > I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as
| "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt."
|
| It's the direct, logical implication of the statement and
| you are obviously moving the goalposts after the fact.
| The truth is, any tax increases will have to affect just
| about everyone who pays taxes in order to make any real
| difference. There is no possible way that taxing
| billionaires more is even a significant chunk of the
| solution.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| I'm not moving goalpost, you just read my statement
| wrong. There are many steps to take but taxing
| billionaires is a crucial step to getting the funding to
| fix many of the other problems that cities don't have the
| money to tackle.
| 6510 wrote:
| The rich half of the US populus own about $156 trillion.
| Thus therefore as a conclusion therefrom you only have to
| take 23% from half the population. Lets make it
| progressive from 0% at average wealth to 52% at the top.
|
| Much less than Roosevelt's 94%
|
| But I'm neither democrat nor republican, it might not
| make sense to anyone :)
| 6510 wrote:
| To be sensible, you don't just pay 100% and be done with
| it. That would be silly. 1.3% for the top hoarders seems
| enough. It will grow back.
| netsharc wrote:
| > 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!".
|
| And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina":
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-
| u-s-...
| jack_h wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Trump beyond the fact that his
| plans could hasten how quickly this blows up. Bond rates
| were already going up before the election, the bond market
| was already nervous. Your indication that the world isn't
| starting to have doubts isn't born out by the bond market
| rates.
|
| > And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina"
|
| I never said that. China has been rolling US debt off of
| their books for a decade now and moving towards BRICS.
|
| If we make this a partisan issue, which you appear to be,
| we won't solve this problem. That would be a catastrophic
| mistake.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Bond rates were already going up before the election_
|
| Treasuries behaving like a risk asset is 100% Trump. And
| it has nothing to do with him blowing out our deficit,
| it's 100% about stagflation and money markets.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Are you saying that hastening the catastrophe is the
| right move?
| jack_h wrote:
| No.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Ok. You never know what you are going to hear on HN :)
| elcritch wrote:
| Fine I'll oblige. :P
|
| I believe hastening it (momentarily) has been good. Well
| the looming debt issue as I understand this subthread to
| be about.
|
| Like a patient getting indigestion and goes to the ER
| thinking it's a heat attack, only to find it's not but
| his cholesterol and BP is through the roof and he needs
| blood pressure meds asap.
|
| Trumps tactics has caused much more attention on the
| matter. Tariffs can be reduced, etc, but hopefully
| bringing a wake up call will help avoid catastrophe.
|
| No idea if that was part of Trumps plan or just bumbling,
| but I believe it'll be good long term.
|
| I've been reading lots of dystopian sci-fi fearing
| hyperinflation in the near future in the US and then
| Europe. Now it seems people are taking it a bit more
| seriously. Even this comment chain shows that.
|
| Then again I'm also encouraged by Argentina's response
| after 70-80 years of hyperinflation and stagnation.
| Javier Milei's policies appear to be working contrary to
| the prediction of most everyone beforehand.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| People have been predicting catastrophe since the 70s.
| Same with social security. Somehow we keep muddling
| along.
| vkou wrote:
| > Bond rates were already going up before the election,
|
| Do you think the fact that there was a 40-70% (and I'm
| being optimistic, here) chance that the election would
| elect Trump [1] had _anything at all_ to do with that?
|
| ---
|
| [1] Who made his plans for destroying both the American
| hegemony and global trade, and its domestic economy quite
| clear.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Not everyone is happy to depend on USD. BRICs were making
| plans to introduce their own alternative reserve currency.
| Trump once threatened 100% tariffs if they followed through
| with that.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/aggressive-
| tariffs-f...
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-
| threatens-100-...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-
| afr...
| hylaride wrote:
| That plan was DoA. They were never going to agree (Some
| being petro states, some being commodities exporters,
| some manufacturers etc) and half those countries lack
| proper rule of law to enforce contracts that turn out to
| be negative for said countries.
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if these plans have anything to do with the
| world's reserve currency being controlled by an entity
| that's sometimes erratic and assholey...
|
| In the utopia where the USA is actually a beacon of
| democracy, the people in the BRICs countries might be
| fans of it, and would vehemently support politicians who
| align themselves with it, weakening other political
| factions.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| It's not wrong.
|
| We were doing great in 2000.
|
| [EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which
| doesn't help matters, as those never do.
|
| Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two
| extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not
| necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea--I'd
| have argued that at the time, certainly).
|
| Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern
| political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance)
| usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for
| exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because
| we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very
| unwisely deep.
|
| Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats.
| Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign
| adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the
| budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least
| the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what _should
| be_ baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too
| deep in the red.
|
| Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.
|
| And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only
| we weren't already in awful territory with our budget...
| but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and
| _still_ seeing bad budget results due to a weakened
| economy, so, more spending it is, because _that is what you
| do_ in these cases, you 're just not supposed to start from
| such a poor position.
|
| Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a
| pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I
| have my complaints, but credit where it's due)
|
| Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to
| IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good
| reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.
|
| So yeah, we were on track to need _decades_ of very-careful
| policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without
| making big cuts. And we 'd _have to_ raise taxes back to
| late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.
|
| That many years of responsible management weren't gonna
| happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either.
| Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have
| to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the
| back half of this century.
|
| This administration appears to be moving that point many,
| many years earlier, though.
| regularization wrote:
| 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
| jack_h wrote:
| I have no idea what you're talking about honestly. The data
| for government spending can be seen in multiple places,
| here is the CBO numbers (this might be an older article or
| out of date, I don't have time or access to a laptop right
| now).
|
| https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61172
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What the GP is talking about is that there are differing
| opinions on what counts as "military spending" or
| "defense spending". The CBO has its definition, but that
| is not universally accepted, particularly by people who
| think that the USA spends far too much on its military.
|
| The question of whether or not e.g. veteran's health care
| should be considered part of military spending is not a
| stupid one, even if people may differ on their answers.
| jack_h wrote:
| I suppose that's fair, but kind of tangential. The point
| I was making was that if discretionary spending,
| approximately 25% of outlays, could be completely cut we
| would still have a deficit. I'm not suggesting this is
| even possible, I'm merely using it as a demonstration of
| the scale of the problem.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I'd still quibble with your whole framing though. For
| example:
|
| > This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to
| provide government services.
|
| I don't know if you have a mortgage, but assuming you do,
| is it useful to say of the interest payments you make on
| that "this is X dollars that cannot be used to buy food,
| heat, gas or streaming services" ? I suggest that it is
| not, and for reasons that apply to government too.
|
| Capital investments, and debt more broadly, comes in
| good, bad and indifferent varieties. Some portion of the
| US national debt arises from spending on "good" things,
| some on "bad" things and quite a bit on "indifferent"
| things. There's no point in (accurately) noting that a
| mortgage payer cannot use the money they pay in interest
| to pay for other things, because we (broadly) accept that
| borrowing money in order to own your own home is sensible
| and comes with lots of its own utility/value. Whatever
| portion of US national debt arises from "good" spending
| can be viewed in the same manner.
|
| Of course, how the actual apportionment between
| good/bad/indifferent spending is described will vary with
| political outlook and many other things, so there's no
| single answer to the question "how much of the national
| debt is a good thing". But it's certainly _some_ of it
| ...
| jack_h wrote:
| I think we're actually broadly in agreement. I'm
| unfortunately busy at work so I'm not articulating my
| position as well as I perhaps should, but I don't think
| all debt or deficit spending is bad. It absolutely has a
| place and should be utilized. I don't think this explains
| the US though. We've already hit 100% public debt to GDP
| (or 120% total debt to GDP) and I'm not seeing this
| slowing down. The last projections from the congressional
| budget going into reconciliation is a doubling of public
| debt in 10 years from what I remember.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| > I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to
| government too.
|
| I disagree, I think it is useful, and in fact important
| for young people to carefully consider the size of their
| mortgage and the interest they have to pay.
|
| A persons long term financial health can be greatly
| impacted by the size of their mortgage, and I would
| always recommend taking the smallest possible loan.
| Taking a mortgage only makes sense if you would otherwise
| have to pay rent.
|
| Same applies to governments.
|
| In fact, I go one step further and think its shocking
| that one generation of people would leave behind a
| massive debt for their children and grandchildren have to
| service.
|
| I don't agree with how DOGE is going about things, and
| I'm not a US citizen, but I strongly believe governments
| should be generating surpluses for their children to
| enjoy, not deficits for their children to pay off.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| contemporary343 wrote:
| 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.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Federally funded R&D was around 3.4% of the GDP in 2021:
| https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23339.
| tvier wrote:
| The chart in that link seems to indicate it was 0.6%, while
| _total_ R &D funding was 3.4%
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Up until you got to the rationing and coal shortages I
| think the parallels with the contemporary US are pretty
| obvious.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| No, not really. The fact that we import so much is a
| function of our wealth, not our poverty. We import food
| because we like to have a variety of produce year round
| and we like alcohol from foreign countries and we can
| afford it. Britain was importing food because otherwise
| there would be famine.
|
| These are not equivalent situations.
| philwelch wrote:
| It's true that the United States does not depend on food
| and energy imports. However, the growing fiscal situation
| and unsustainable costs of maintaining global hegemony
| are very similar to that of Britain in the 20th century,
| as is the declining competitiveness of American industry.
| You're never going to find any exact or perfect
| historical parallels but there are enough similarities to
| cause concern.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| No, it really, really isn't. The key difference is that
| the US can finance deficits and Britain couldn't. There's
| huge appetite all over the world to buy US government
| debt and to invest in the US. The UK needed massive
| foreign aid just to survive.
| philwelch wrote:
| As long as you can still find someone to lend you money,
| debt isn't a problem? Good to know.
| patagurbon wrote:
| The US is not really in trouble because of maintaining
| global hegemony. It's in trouble because of repeated tax
| cuts by Republicans that are too popular for Democrats to
| fully unravel, and deficit spending largely caused or
| enacted by Republican administrations. Maintaining global
| hegemony really isn't that costly to the US as a percent
| of GDP. It's foolishness like the Middle East wars that
| are costly.
| grafmax wrote:
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Im afraid you'd need to be pretty liberal with your
| definition of rich at this point to dig us out of this hole
| through taxes alone.
| hoseyor wrote:
| Not really. The top 1% item roughly $50 Trillion in
| assets. In 2010...15 years ago...that was only $15
| Trillion. If you look at the graph of the national debt
| and the graph of the money supply, i.e. money printing,
| you will find they basically overlap, correlate, track.
|
| I assume I don't have to point out that 50-36 is 15,
| i.e., basically the whole growth of assets has been
| roughly fueled by "money printing" fraud. (Yes, I'm
| simplifying a bit)
|
| What has basically occurred, is a fraud, what is not
| really different than loan fraud. The people in charge of
| the bank also wrote themselves loans they didn't have to
| pay back and left the bank with the $36 trillion debt as
| they pocketed the both the $36 Trillion in debt, as well
| as plundered all the assets, i.e., much of government
| spending not in excess of revenue.
|
| It's basically been a plundering operation that has only
| escalated over the last 25 years and is the greatest
| national security threat to the US and arguably the
| security of the whole planet's civilization. It's short
| sighted greed.
|
| And yes, this whole community is heavily involved and
| engaged in it as the VC money has flown like water for 20
| years now ... backed by fraudulent government "money
| printing" that has plundered regular people.
|
| It will have consequences, one way or another. The devil
| always comes to collect when you don't expect and in the
| worst way. That's not a superstition, it's a metaphor of
| human nature learned over unknown millennia of the same
| catastrophic patterns.
|
| Frankly, the only thing that could save anything is to
| constrain the and revalue currency by seizing the
| plundered assets of the roughly top 1%, maybe even 3%,
| and paying down the national debt. It would be painful
| like drug rehab, but the alternative is OD and death and
| far greater suffering.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Tax wealth somehow, not just income. It's clear the
| accumulation has become a generational problem. Your
| great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do
| nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the
| wealth his have.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Even with their preposterous salaries, NBA stars would
| have to work for _millenia_ without spending anything
| before getting Bezos-level wealth.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Everything about this sentence makes me sad lol
| libertine wrote:
| > Tax wealth somehow, not just income.
|
| This is a critical point - in my opinion, wealth can't be
| at the same time a collateral to acquire more assets or
| to buy cheap money, and something that can't be taxed.
|
| Either tax it or make credit/debt to be considered income
| after a certain net worth value, like 100 million would
| be more than enough.
| anonfordays wrote:
| >Tax wealth somehow
|
| I don't unserstand how you can tax something that varies
| in value by double digit percentages every week. If Elon
| got taxed when TSLA was $450 per share, and six months
| later it's now $250 per share... How much should he be
| taxed? Should he be provided a tax refund?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| He can't eat with his shares. He can use them as
| collateral for debt. Presently, that's how he dodges
| taxes. You'd close that loophole.
| anonfordays wrote:
| >He can't eat with his shares.
|
| You can't eat with your brokerage account either, what is
| the point?
|
| >He can use them as collateral for debt.
|
| Yes, you can use your brokerage account, house, etc. as
| collateral for loans, this is not new or unique.
|
| >Presently, that's how he dodges taxes.
|
| What does this even mean? Loans are not taxable as you
| have to pay them back.
|
| >You'd close that loophole.
|
| That's not a tax... This is what happens when you get
| your financial understanding from reddit comments.
| feoren wrote:
| We have computers in our pockets that can perform
| trillions of calculations per second; we have social
| media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per
| second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it
| boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth,
| that'd be too _complicated_! We 'd have to do _dozens_ of
| calculations per year! "
|
| You're imagining taxes as being one big annual chunk, but
| it doesn't have to be that way. It could be more like
| sales tax: baked directly into how these financial
| instruments work. You're also imagining taxes as
| computationally difficult, but they're absolute baby math
| compared to something like rendering a single 3D frame --
| they're only artificially difficult for people because
| Intuit lobbies to keep it that way.
|
| People get infinitely creative with financial instruments
| like collateralized debt obligations over mortgage-backed
| securities, but as soon as we suggest taxing wealth
| people throw up their hands and go "there's no _possible_
| way to do it! "
| anonfordays wrote:
| >We have computers in our pockets that can perform
| trillions of calculations per second; we have social
| media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per
| second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it
| boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth,
| that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of
| calculations per year!"
|
| No one is saying that it's "too complicated" to calculate
| someone's net wealth in basic securities. I did not make
| that claim. This is a poor strawman.
|
| >You're imagining taxes as being one big annual chunk
|
| No I'm not, you're talking to someone who pays taxes
| quarterly.
|
| >It could be more like sales tax: baked directly into how
| these financial instruments work.
|
| We already have that via capital gains and income taxes.
|
| >You're also imagining taxes as computationally
| difficult, but they're absolute baby math compared to
| something like rendering a single 3D frame -- they're
| only artificially difficult for people because Intuit
| lobbies to keep it that way.
|
| Again, I am not making that claim neither is anyone else.
| All the computation in the world doesn't solve for
| something that is inherently illogical.
|
| >People get infinitely creative with financial
| instruments like collateralized debt obligations over
| mortgage-backed securities
|
| These securities are logical to understand.
|
| >but as soon as we suggest taxing wealth people throw up
| their hands and go "there's no possible way to do it!"
|
| Again, do you get a tax refund if your tax liability went
| down due to depreciation? How do you levy wealth taxes on
| assets such as private businesses and ventures that do
| not have a clear appraisal value, or one at all? Most
| countries that levied wealth taxes has discarded them due
| to these difficulties, ones that compute can't solve.
| dhc02 wrote:
| Tax wealth above $100 million at ~90% upon death.
|
| In other words, make all the money you want, get as rich
| as you want, but it goes back to the commons when you die
| and can't use it any more.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Taxing the rich will have all sorts of positive knock-on
| effects that will also go a long way towards fixing these
| issues.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| No, you are just underestimating how rich the rich are.
| fooList wrote:
| Could you be overestimating how easy it is to take
| possession of their money given global free trade? In 10
| years, what are the odds you and others will have
| finally, after all these years, actually managed to have
| "taxed the rich" as has been proposed as the solution to
| current debt levels for many years now? If we cannot be
| certain of those tax revenues from finally "taxing the
| rich", then they cannot solve the debt problem and we
| therefore need to look for other solutions. Not that the
| wreckless and irresponsible cuts from DOGE are the
| solution. They are likely to increase the size and scope
| of the government in the long run, after impairing it's
| efficiency and operational capacity in the short.
| Hopefully the dems don't blow the opportunity this time.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The US government can (and regularly do) sanction entire
| countries, trade is only "global" and "free" to the
| extent permitted by Washington.
|
| Saying that the rich could somehow avoid the US
| government by moving abroad is a fallacy.
| sgregnt wrote:
| >The idea that the free market will self-correct and
| optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
|
| Could you share some sources to back this up? At least a
| sources to back up at least a few case studies would be
| curious. I'm interested in economics and never have been
| aware that free market self-correction is a well documented
| fantasy and would love to understand where is your claim
| coming from.
| woooooo wrote:
| Libertarians took over a town in NH and abolished town
| wide garbage collection. The free market produced a bunch
| of trash in people's yards, which attracted bears,
| causing havoc all around town. True story.
|
| That's not to say you can't solve a lot of problems with
| markets. It just means waving your hands at "the free
| market" like it's a magic talisman is a childish thing to
| do.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Why didn't they just shoot the bears? You'd figure
| libertarians would be all for that.
| generativenoise wrote:
| Because they couldn't reach a consensus with their
| governance mechanisms. There were people feeding and
| encouraging the bears. I guess they could have shot _all_
| the bears. Eliminating all the bears because a sensible
| consensus can 't be reached seems like a gross failure of
| humanity to coexist with the natural (uncontrolled)
| world.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Sounds like they just couldn't put their money where
| their mouths were and wanted daddy gov to manage the
| bears and couldn't agree on how. If the neighborhood has
| bears just store your stuff better and you won't have to
| shoot them causing problems with the neighbors. Easier
| than bickering and cheaper than paying for government to
| do it.
|
| Edit: I guess this works of thieves too.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It would have violated the NAP.
| bch wrote:
| > Libertarians took over a town in NH and abolished town
| wide garbage collection.
|
| Presumably this is the case you're citing:
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-
| state-...
| WalterBright wrote:
| That sounds like a case of "Tragedy of the Commons",
| which is not free market.
|
| Also, police is a requirement because libertarianism
| relies on government to protect peoples' rights. Gutting
| the police department is what anarchists do, not
| libertarians.
|
| If you want to know of a successful libertarian
| experiement, see the founding of the United States.
| (Excluding the slave states, of course. Slavery is
| antiethical to libertarianism.)
| conception wrote:
| You mean the Articles of Confederation that failed
| because the government wasn't strong enough?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| No true scotsman
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > The idea that the free market will self-correct and
| optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
|
| There are far too many documented instances of it actually
| working to call it a fantasy.
|
| > Markets don't account for externalities
|
| Markets aren't expected to account for externalities.
| Externalities are the things you're _supposed_ to tax.
|
| > they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power)
|
| You're describing regulatory capture. This is why
| governments are supposed to have limited powers. To keep
| them from passing rules that enrich cronies and entrench
| incumbents.
|
| > they routinely underprovide merit goods like education,
| healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society
| broadly but aren't immediately profitable)
|
| Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those
| things. There are plenty of high quality private schools,
| high quality private medical facilities and high quality
| private research labs.
|
| The real problem here is that some people can't _afford_
| those things. But now you 're making the case for a UBI so
| people can afford those things when they otherwise
| couldn't, not for having the government actually operate
| the doctor's office.
|
| > As for how to address budget issues, the solution is
| simple: tax the rich.
|
| Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the US is
| 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California). The
| highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
|
| Meanwhile most of what the rich own are investment
| securities like stocks and US treasuries. What happens if
| you increase their taxes? They have less to invest. The
| stocks then go to someone not being taxed, i.e. foreign
| investors, so more of the future returns of US companies
| leave the country. Fewer treasury buyers increase the
| interest rate the US pays on the debt. Fewer stock buyers
| lower stock prices, which reduce capital gains and
| therefore capital gains tax revenue. Fewer stock buyers
| make it harder for companies to raise money, which lowers
| employment and wages, and therefore tax revenue again.
| Increasing the proportion of tax revenue that comes from
| "the rich" causes an _extremely_ perverse incentive
| whenever you ask the Congressional Budget Office to do the
| numbers on how a policy that would transfer wealth from the
| rich to the middle class would affect tax revenue, and the
| policy correspondingly gets shelved.
|
| TANSTAAFL.
| brokeAstronomer wrote:
| >> There are far too many documented instances of it
| actually working to call it a fantasy.
|
| Markets are a tool which can work extremely well if
| deployed carefully and within a sensible regulatory
| framework. Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising,
| we can't eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have
| forever microplastics in us, I think it's fair to
| question some of our assumptions.
|
| >> Markets aren't expected to account for externalities.
| Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
|
| Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be
| working out in practice (in the US).
|
| >> You're describing regulatory capture. This is why
| governments are supposed to have limited powers.
|
| Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.
| Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller
| govenrment would just lead to further concentration of
| wealth and power within the private sector. We need a
| balanced system, not blind devotion.
|
| >> Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of
| those things... The real problem here is that some people
| can't afford those thing
|
| So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we
| want everyone to have an education not just the uber
| wealthy.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising, we can't
| eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have forever
| microplastics in us, I think it's fair to question some
| of our assumptions.
|
| "Idiots will dump mercury in the river if you let them"
| _is_ one of the assumptions.
|
| > Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to
| be working out in practice (in the US).
|
| It doesn't work if you don't actually do it.
|
| But notice the important distinction between "carbon tax
| which is fully refunded to the population as a divided"
| and "tax things that _aren 't_ carbon to subsidize
| cronies who waste money on questionable hydrogen cars and
| ineffective carbon capture nonsense."
|
| > Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.
|
| It's mostly regulatory capture. The primary driver of
| wealth inequality is corporate entity size. The
| billionaires are the early shareholders in megacorps.
|
| The main exception is corporations violating antitrust
| laws, but this is still a form of regulatory capture,
| i.e. capturing the government to enforce contracts in
| restraint of trade when the government ought not to be
| doing that.
|
| > So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly
| we want everyone to have an education not just the uber
| wealthy.
|
| You don't have to be uber-wealthy to afford school. Most
| of what pays for _public_ schools is the taxes paid by
| the parents of the students. Where this doesn 't work is
| for the poorest or orphans etc., and this was
| traditionally handled through charity and scholarships.
| Ironically things government policies have been
| decimating by propping up real estate costs so high
| people can't afford space to have private community
| organizations, taking the money they could have donated
| to charity as taxes and spending it on boondoggles and
| military adventurism and otherwise encouraging people to
| rely on national governments rather than local
| communities.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Wealth in a free market is not "concentrated", it is
| created.
|
| The total wealth in a free market country rises, which
| can only be explained by wealth being created rather than
| shifted around.
|
| > Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just
| the uber wealthy.
|
| Educational materials abound in this country, even for
| free. For example, I took some MIT courses that were on
| youtube, for free. I found my college textbook "Special
| Relativity" at a book sale for $.50. SAT prep books are
| available free at the library, and are often at thrift
| stores for a couple bucks.
|
| It's never been easier to get educated.
| kaishiro wrote:
| Speaking as someone who has been both a technical
| interviewer and an interviewee many times over the past
| 30 years, I find it a bit disingenuous to compare second
| hand bookstores to a formal primary or secondary
| education when it comes to their application in an active
| job market.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's the Khan Academy, too. Apparently a lot of home
| schoolers rely on it, and it is used by students who need
| extra help.
|
| It's true that what I wrote about is not _formal_
| education, but it is education nevertheless and freely
| available.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is not only about learning material being available.
| It is also about live circumstances of people. Think
| about when you are doing your learning. When do you have
| opportunity to learn. Think about what other people might
| be doing at that time, that prevents them from learning.
| Think about the mental framework you have, that enables
| you to learn and that others might not have.
|
| Many times when I see some idle shop keeper wasting their
| time at candy crush on their phone, I think something
| like:
|
| "Oh my, stop wasting your time! You could read something
| interesting or even learn a whole new subject!"
|
| But then I remind myself from what a position I am
| thinking these thoughts. From what kind of knowledge and
| background. Could people start using their time better?
| Sure. But it will be damn hard for them, in contrast to
| probably many people here, including yourself, and we
| should not forget that. What's more is, that even if
| those people learned a lot about some subject, let's say
| even computer programming, there is no accreditation for
| them. Where can they go, to claim certificates or
| whatever, for their new knowledge, to get any chance of
| employment?
| WalterBright wrote:
| My friend Eric Engstrom (yes, that guy) got a programming
| job at Microsoft despite having zero education beyond
| high school. He became a team leader for DirectX.
|
| I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, not software.
| Yet I got jobs as a software developer with zero
| certifications.
|
| At the D Language Foundation, we have never asked any of
| our participants for there certifications. Some have
| PhDs, some have high school diplomas. We only care about
| what they can do.
|
| You don't need to have any certifications whatsoever in
| order to start your own software business and do contract
| work.
|
| You cannot buy an education. It's necessary to put in the
| work to learn it one way or another. I learned that the
| hard way in college. No work, no pass.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| While what you say is true, I think it is a failure of
| generalization. A few special cases show it is possible,
| but what you don't mention is how extraordinary these
| cases are and at what time they happened and what
| background, including ideas, information, location, and
| motivation the people had.
|
| You can very much buy an education in many places. Money
| from parents pays for the best universities, no, actually
| schools already, the best teachers, the best
| atmosphere/setting for learning. While some children work
| on a farm, rich people's children will already be
| learning, simply because the parents can afford it.
|
| There are many places, where it doesn't work like in your
| extraordinary examples. Just because something is
| possible for a few, it doesn't mean, that it is
| generalizable and that it can be done for everyone.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| "One of the important ways we make use of donations is in
| awarding scholarships to highly skilled students. Each $5
| you donate contributes to approximately one hour of work
| by a talented graduate student" from the dlang website.
|
| I think it's good that scholarships are awarded, some
| money goes to graduate students doing work (even if I
| think the amount per hour is low), etc.
|
| But I can't square your implications that this type of
| education is equivalent to self-taught when your own
| foundation seems to put an emphasis on it. Or is it just
| marketing for an audience that might believe that they're
| not equivalent?
|
| Why is there this focus on people from formal education
| backgrounds or supporting people through scholarships to
| get a formal education when describing what a donation
| would go to?
|
| I want to re-iterate. It's not that I believe you can
| just go sit in a class without focusing and acquire an
| education. I also don't believe that someone can't learn
| outside of a formal setting or even that they can't get
| superior results!
|
| But, it seems to me that there's definitely some sort of
| difference between equally motivated people in a formal
| setting and in a self taught setting. And it seems to me
| that even the dlang foundation acknowledges that
| implicitly. Obviously there are lots of free resources
| provided by the foundation as well, so I can't argue
| there's a strong preference. But, if they were equivalent
| the foundation could just support one of them. And if a
| choice was to be made wouldn't the freely available
| resources be a more efficient allocation of donations?
| ModernMech wrote:
| This post is a great example of how very smart people can
| fall victim to their own biases.
|
| When you put the "all are welcome" sign on the door of
| your programming language organization, you're not
| sampling from "all" but just the people who are already
| interested in programming, and especially the design and
| construction of programming languages. These people are
| inherently motivated to learn and particularly _self_
| motivated.
|
| You know as well as anyone that languages in particular,
| far and away from all other projects in the area of
| computing, scratch the deepest itches that _good_
| developers have. Languages are a siren song for devs who
| have a burning desire to get to the bottom of computing
| machines.
|
| And so _of course_ this breed of dev is going to be great
| whether they have a PhD or not. They are the github-
| history all green every day crowd. You 're skimming the
| cream of the crop.
|
| But you can't build an entire economy out of the cream.
| The other people have to do things too. They can't just
| go to the flea market and pick up a book on "Special
| Relativity" and learn it. Heck, I got an BS degree in
| physics and I can't even do that. I _needed_ someone to
| explain it to me, and a lot of students do. They _need_
| the environment that is conducive to learning. I think
| COVID really proved that people can 't just sit on
| YouTube all day and learn from a screen.
| vladms wrote:
| I completely agree and would add that different people
| have different social needs. I love learning by myself. I
| don't need an example, I do it for fun. In the
| universities I studied, I have seen LOTS of people that
| were learning because everybody was learning. And they
| were smart, and capable, they just needed an environment
| and some structure.
|
| While I don't "get" their way of being, I have to
| acknowledge such people do exist, and it is wasteful to
| consider the people I "get". Otherwise the other "types"
| might gather around some stupid leaders that come with
| ideas like "science kills babies let's burn all
| scientists on a stake!" (exaggerating a bit, but similar
| things did happen)
| Nevermark wrote:
| Pointing to unusual people, then claiming that proves
| they exemplify what should be usual...
|
| That isn't an argument or solution for anything. That's
| state some fact, then state your desired conclusion,
| without even an attempt at reasoning in between.
|
| Show me any community that turns their success
| demographics around. Someone pointing at a few successful
| examples, and saying everyone should do that, won't be
| how they did it.
|
| People have suffered in disadvantaged demographics from
| the dawn of time. They are real. Nobody wants differences
| like that to exist, but they are pernicious. Context has
| a huge impact on people and bad contexts are often very
| self-reinforcing.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.
| Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller
| govenrment would just lead to further concentration of
| wealth and power within the private sector. We need a
| balanced system, not blind devotion.
|
| But there's the problem: The person you're replying to
| clearly thinks there's too much government. You seem to
| think there's not enough.
|
| If I had to pick a side of this to bet on, I would bet on
| it being "too much" rather than "too little" at this
| point, simply because in the trend has been for the US
| government to get larger over time, not smaller. The
| bigger it gets, the less likely it is that it's "not big
| enough". I understand that the responsibilities we've
| delegated to the government continue to increase in
| complexity, but complexity drives exponential growth,
| which I would also weigh against the "there's not enough
| government" argument.
|
| Also I'm really not convinced by the argument that
| "smaller government would just lead to further
| concentration of wealth and power". I think we agree that
| wealth is becoming increasingly more concentrated--but so
| too is the size of the government. There's simply more
| direct evidence that wealth concentration grows as
| government complexity grows, at least in the US, because
| that's literally what appears to be happening!
|
| I would wager that if I look into relative size of a
| country's government and its concentration on wealth, I'd
| find that they're not terribly correlated; or if they
| are, that the data indicates that increasingly government
| complexity drives increasingly wealth concentration. But
| I don't have a lot of confidence in that wager! But I
| also certainly don't buy the naive "markets fix
| everything" argument, either. People love to game
| markets, and if they're not controlled in some fashion,
| fraud tends to win out every time. Just look at crypto!
| vladms wrote:
| Too generic terms become an issue at some point.
| "Government" and "market" are not one thing that you can
| easily measure to "big" or "small" or "good" or "bad".
|
| To make a technical parallel can we really say "C is
| good, Java is bad"?
|
| I think focus should be much more on discussing actual
| policies and their impact - which can become quite
| complex - rather than stamp everything with "more/less
| government/market" and then use the predefined belief
| that one or the other is good. I personally favor various
| policies, and I can't put all of them at the same time in
| a box with a label of "more government" or "less
| government".
| mbesto wrote:
| > There are far too many documented instances of it
| actually working to call it a fantasy.
|
| There are no documented instances of a truly _free_
| market. The parent 's point I think has less to do with
| "it has been tried and it failed" and moreso that the
| idea that _truly_ free market can exist is pure fantasy.
|
| FWIW - Costa Rica is probably the greatest example of a
| Libertarian's dream of a free market. I would love to
| show any free market absolutionist the colossal amount of
| time it takes to just pave 500m of a road in that
| country.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There are no documented instances of a truly _free_
| market.
|
| But why is that interesting?
|
| If you enter into a contract to sell your car to someone
| and then instead of paying you they steal your car and
| kill you, that's crime, not a free market. Killing people
| by dumping mercury into the river is still just crime.
| Killing people by burning dirty coal is something that
| _should_ be crime, even if it officially isn 't.
|
| But this is different than banning things where each
| involved party is consenting, or imposing unfunded
| mandates or bureaucratic filing requirements. The less of
| those things there are, the freer the market is, and
| those places tend to do better than the places captured
| by central planners.
|
| Moreover, the main point is completely valid. If Palm's
| product isn't as good as an iPhone then you don't have to
| buy it and then they go away. If the DMV sucks, what are
| you going to do?
| mbesto wrote:
| > those places tend to do better than the places captured
| by central planners.
|
| There is no deterministic evidence for this and you
| cannot unilaterally say that. The problem here is that
| the market/service requires _context_. The main point
| made was that you can take any market and it will
| eventually self correct - this is simply untrue and we
| have countless examples of this.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There are no documented instances of a truly free
| market.
|
| There's no such thing as pure water, either. Nor is there
| any person who has not had impure thoughts. Nor can you
| ever cut a board to an exact length. Nor has anything
| created by man (or nature) been perfect.
|
| The historical reality is the more free a free market is,
| the better it performs.
|
| A free market does not have to be a "truly free market"
| in order to deliver the goods.
| Arainach wrote:
| >The historical reality is the more free a free market
| is, the better it performs.
|
| Citation VERY MUCH needed. A free market leads to
| monopoly and abuse. It does not lead to competition, it
| does not lead to better long-term results, it leads to
| corruption, market capture, and oppression.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It would be interesting to note how you define a free
| market in this context and what makes it "more free".
|
| Because a market can not be free unless there are rules
| and they are enforced.
|
| Without rules and government intervention when necessary,
| what you get is the law of the jungle, which is precisely
| the thing the last 12000 years of human history has been
| about escaping.
| mbesto wrote:
| > The historical reality is the more free a free market
| is, the better it performs.
|
| Performs for _whom_? The central idea of a free market is
| that is provides better goods and services and thus
| better outcomes for civilization. We have countless
| examples of innovations that have come through government
| intervention (internet, space grade goods and services,
| GPS, etc. just to name a few), so you simply cannot say
| in a deterministic way that a free market "performs
| better". This is simply NOT true.
|
| FWIW - I'm a free market advocate, but I recognize
| markets and areas where externalities cannot be
| controlled for and thus require a centralized body to
| regulate.
| anon7000 wrote:
| > Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the
| US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California).
| The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
|
| Sure. It's not simple. But you're missing a lot of the
| picture too. People with high wealth and ownership can
| leverage massive loopholes (like taking a loan with stock
| as collateral) which means they pay very little effective
| tax on their "income":
| https://www.profgalloway.com/earners-vs-owners-2/
|
| The solution is surely not the status quo.
| Brybry wrote:
| In the US, capital gains are taxed at a different rate
| from ordinary income, so taxing the "rich" (where the
| money is) doesn't necessarily have to destroy investing
| (not to mention a lot of retirement is tied up in
| investing, the rich aren't the only investors).
|
| Clinton's government balanced the budget and had a
| surplus by decreasing spending and increasing taxes. He
| backed off on some capital gains tax increases and still
| had the surplus.
|
| The fact of the matter is that if the US government is
| going to outlay X% of GDP then it needs to match X% of
| GDP in revenue: that's what Clinton's government did.
| Outlays dropped from 20.7% of GDP to 17.6% of GDP, tax
| revenue increased from 17.0% of GDP to 20.0% of GDP. [1]
|
| And that government did not defund Universities to do it
| (iirc they actually increased funding).
|
| Norway's tax revenue as a % of GDP in 2023 was 41.4%.
| United States was 25.2% [2]
|
| Your marginal rate comparison doesn't paint a fair
| comparison because a lot of their government revenue
| comes from VAT and a special very high petroleum tax (I
| couldn't find exact percentages). And I think they have
| fairly low income inequality[3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_
| Bill_Cl... (citing
| https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-
| congress-2015-...)
|
| [2] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications
| /report... [page 15]
|
| [3] https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/hfa-explorer/gini-
| coefficien...
| svara wrote:
| > Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the
| US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California).
| The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
|
| Marginal _income_ tax rate. People 's aggregate incomes
| are a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of wealth
| in the world.
|
| I'm mostly a fan of free markets, but the way we've set
| up the game around the Western world, we're moving back
| towards a sort of feudal system made up of an asset
| owning upper class and then everyone else who needs to
| work to survive.
|
| I think what we need is a 100% marginal estate tax. Maybe
| something along the lines of 1M$ tax free per child and
| spouse.
|
| Everyone should have the right to vast financial success
| through free enterprise, but no one should be able to
| build multi generational dynasties, since it destroys the
| fabric of democracy over time.
| atombender wrote:
| Norwegian here. It's not at all comparable. Norway has a
| wealth tax (about 1.09%), lots of consumption-level taxes
| (25% VAT, fees on gas, etc.), high capital gains tax
| (37.85% flat, no "qualified dividends" or tax-free bonds
| or Roth loopholes or anything like that).
| roenxi wrote:
| > Markets don't account for externalities
|
| But on net the externalities are just as likely to be doing
| more good than bad. I've yet to see anyone in the public
| debate tallying up the positive externalities of markets.
| "They have externalities!" is likely to be an argument in
| favour of free markets, without the positive externalities
| a free market generates we would be poorer and more
| uncomfortable - it doesn't take much looking to find a
| whole raft of spinoffs where free market activity generates
| positive externalities.
|
| Things like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease where
| through no action of their own actors and musicians get a
| lot more money than in medieval times purely to represent
| the alternatives the market offers them.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I mean, you can easily observe it. Look at Germany. Not
| investing sufficiently into education, public
| Infrastructure, hospitals, and probably more. Inefficient
| bureaucracy everywhere. Long term effects already visible
| and only becoming more pronounced. People have a 4y
| political memory and electing the same shit again.
|
| This apparently will continue until we hit rock bottom. I
| just hope others will be ready to face angry German mobs
| this time around.
|
| Of course there is also a chance that we will finally
| learn something as a society and prevent bad things from
| happening. An admittedly tiny chance, but it exists.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Blaming Germany's problems on the free market is a wild
| conclusion to make.
|
| Germany's underinvestment in public infrastructure is a
| combination of an obsession with minimising public debt
| at any cost, a wast and complicated bureaucracy that
| allows people to delay projects almost inevitably.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The money is there, it is being put into the wrong hands
| and into silly bureaucracy (for example by having to put
| out construction projects on the EU market, while local
| businesses collapse, ruining Germany's own economy).
|
| The market does not regulate that, and everyone who takes
| a look can see that, no matter how often some FDP or CDU
| wacko will claim otherwise. That is the point I am
| making. The market is very short sighted, oriented
| towards short term gain, at the cost of the general
| public. The general public needs to deal with the fallout
| of it all. Terrible train service, bad infrastructure,
| expensive public transport, too many cars, bad air
| quality, bad health, lacking education, the list goes on.
| All those matters are matters, where spending does not
| directly benefit some already wealthy group of people.
|
| It goes even further: The "market", consists also of
| lobbyists, who do everything they can to influence
| politicians and get policies implemented, that make
| people buy cars, even at the cost of worsening public
| infrastructure. They have delayed developing electric
| cars and are now clinging to the German market. They do
| not care about normal people having to get to work via
| public transport. Buy a frickin' car! Is their response.
| Instead of improving public transport, it gets noticeably
| worse every year. So the free market is not only
| responsible for not doing good things, it is also
| responsible for actively harming the population.
|
| Now it may be, that the free market also has its upsides.
| But the view that it will solve all the problems if we
| only let it is very naive and proven wrong again and
| again.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There aren't enough rich people to fund the government at
| the levels it spends.
| bgwalter wrote:
| According to
|
| https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/di
| str...
|
| the top 0.1% hold $22.14 trillion and the top 1% hold $54
| trillion.
|
| The total federal debt is around $35 trillion. So for
| sure the top 1% could pay off the debt in order to have a
| reset at least.
|
| I'm not saying it should be done, but it does not seem
| impossible.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| It's paper wealth. If you forced a sell off, the value
| would plummet. Look at revenue.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Maybe a direct transfer then. Don't have to worry about
| share prices when the tax is a % of shares owned.
| nurettin wrote:
| Tax the rich, the rich hike prices, inflation. Please find
| another magic wand, that one does not work.
| nottorp wrote:
| > will self-correct and optimize outcomes
|
| It does self-correct and optimize. But as you said it
| below, it optimizes towards
|
| > they concentrate wealth
|
| Monopolies or oligopolies.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > As for how to address budget issues, the solution is
| simple: tax the rich.
|
| The debt is so huge it does not even account for a fraction
| of it. People need to stop dreaming about easy solutions
| that fit on a piece of paper.
| kensai wrote:
| We should be thankful you did not write: eat the rich.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There are numerous errors in this.
|
| 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.
| guelo wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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?
| mlazos wrote:
| 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.
| patagurbon wrote:
| 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.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I hear this about everything. "Don't cut this thing because
| it's the most efficient and productive thing ever!" Food
| stamps, homeless funding, public transport, public schools.
| Supposedly every single thing is the most efficient thing
| ever and we can't possibly cut a dollar
| psyklic wrote:
| In everything, there is some low-hanging fruit that
| yields an impactful outcome for minimal spending.
| dweinus wrote:
| All of your examples put together would be a rounding
| error in the US Military budget
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly, if their goal was to actually look for fraud and
| waste, why are they starting with such small potatoes
| like science funding? You'd think they'd focus on areas
| that are spending many more zeros, where they could have
| much more impact...
|
| It's like me saying I'm going to cut down my spending,
| and instead of moving houses to reduce my rent by $1000,
| I instead focus right away on cutting out my $5/mo VPS
| hosting service.
| Fomite wrote:
| Echoing this as well - administration _for research_ is
| fairly thin in every institution I 've worked at.
|
| In my career, there's only one position I can definitely
| point to as "That shouldn't exist" - ironically, it's both
| one that played well with "The university should be more
| like a business" and was also, in effect, a retention move
| for their massively productive spouse.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >At least in the free market inefficient companies will
| eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more
| economically useful output.
|
| 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.?
| favflam wrote:
| The dollar was strong, interest rates low, inflation rate
| competitively low (compare with other countries).
|
| 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.
| adrr wrote:
| 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%.
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| > 17% ... When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we
| were at 20%.
|
| Where did you get these figures from? According to OECD,
| the US' tax revenue-to-GDP ratio was 27.6% in 2022 and
| 25.2% in 2023:
| https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-
| sub-i... It was 28.3% in 2000, when Clinton was still
| President.
| bfdm wrote:
| > 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.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| The free market gave you all these quality bathing spots:
| https://environment.data.gov.uk/bwq/profiles/
| pron wrote:
| 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.
| pron wrote:
| P.S.
|
| Another thing to remember is that government expenses are
| often _investments_. This doesn 't only apply to health,
| education, law enforcement, and transportation
| infrastructure but also to social security. If people think
| they'll be left penniless at retirement, they'll spend less
| and save more. Borrowing to finance investment is a wise
| policy when the resulting growth can pay for the interest
| and then some, even if it means a growing debt.
|
| If you invest well, leveraging your investment is exactly
| what you should do.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > 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).
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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.
| jt2190 wrote:
| 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?
| moomin wrote:
| I don't think your "existential problem" and Churchill's are
| in any way equivalent.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| jack_h wrote:
| I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is
| happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base
| is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion
| in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a
| rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a
| golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in
| the room and propose a solution to the problem with
| numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.
|
| We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red
| herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening
| in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on
| fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps
| telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will
| happen.
| comte7092 wrote:
| 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.
| thatcat wrote:
| Universities could pay for all of the research themselves
| theoretically considering they're the largest business in
| most states. Their portfolio income, the sports income, the
| donations, and the free real estate given to land grant
| universities that has been heavily monetized all add up. Of
| course I doubt they will allocate money to research, but
| they could if that was truely their purpose as an
| organization.
| oldprogrammer2 wrote:
| 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.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 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
| homieg33 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain
| of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same
| template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE
| isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Literally nothing about their approach resembles an
| attempt at efficiency. Efficiency is a ratio of input
| resources to output. No part of the DOGE program I've
| seen or heard of even considers that relationship. Simply
| firing people at best results in reduced output, or
| hiring more expensive contractors. And you've flushed
| institutional knowledge down the toilet. It's like
| turning a car off and pretending you've boosted its fuel
| efficiency because nothing is burning. Except that the
| car saved you time on other tasks, oops. Firing people
| and then immediately having to rehire them is hilariously
| inefficient. Rewriting legacy software like they're
| attempting at Social Security is a classically
| inefficient blunder.
|
| I don't know if it's all about revenge, but it's
| absolutely not about efficiency. It's an edgy teen's idea
| of tough governance. It's the epitome of penny wise,
| pound foolish. It's false economy all the way down.
| Fomite wrote:
| If for no other reason, if you terminate a grant for
| cause, you have to specify why.
| Fomite wrote:
| Echoing this. I've had two grants pulled in the last admin,
| and one in this one, and all of them were very sweeping -
| and _wildly_ inefficient, killing projects during the phase
| of ramping up, rather than productively working.
| prpl wrote:
| >>> 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start
| chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several
| people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior
| (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over.
| Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or
| marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to
| keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our
| system there is positive selection (in the 'natural
| selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.
|
| This should give you pause.
|
| Without claiming that any given administration is taking
| any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even
| more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a
| certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is
| net positive.
|
| I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground.
| Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of
| reproducibility right now.
| sokka_h2otribe wrote:
| You might think crisis of reproducibility means everyone
| is faking data. No, that does not mean that. There are
| many factors to a crisis of reproducibility. One is fake
| data. A bigger one is a lack of incentive and a lack of
| complete data gathering details on some metric. Generally
| even if there is a crisis is subjective.
|
| There's also usually a mismatch between what older
| scientists and younger scientists think are the right
| approach to studying something.
|
| But generally, science is pretty good. You're reading
| small slices and assuming it actually represents all of
| science. It doesn't. Please give me a better sense of
| what ground your ear is on. I don't think it's generally
| representative of most science fields. Science has a cool
| thing where you could post totally fake data, but there
| are enough actors that also would question it if it's
| entirely unreproducible. Most issues are small nudges or
| selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support
| your expectations), not blatant lies. The blatant lie
| stories you hear are not actually common and I'd love to
| hear where you think they are.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g,
| retesting when data doesn't support your expectations),
| not blatant lies.
|
| Yeah you missed it. When you do small nudges or
| selectively report data that's even worse than faking
| data. Not all villains twirl their mustaches. It's the
| ones that don't that are the most dangerous, these are
| the ones that are going to suck time and effort away from
| the collective endeavour the worst. Everyone knows that
| leclair can't do synthesis. But how certain are we that
| Phil Baran's Xenon oxidation _really_ worked?
| jordanpg wrote:
| OP, please grapple with this.
|
| This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out
| the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and
| condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no
| sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of
| hundreds of thousands proves the point!
|
| Of course it doesn't.
|
| Do _you_ understand that? If so, then why are you casually
| throwing around those talking points that are contributing
| to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human
| livelihoods? This isn 't a game.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.)
| fallingknife wrote:
| Why would the people paying for the research not control
| what it can be spent on? Letting the people who spend the
| money decide is typically not a good system.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| _typically_
|
| Pure science may not be a typical case, though, because
| the people who control the funds don't really have any
| idea whether the work they are funding is ultimately
| going to turn out productive or not. The work involved is
| far from routine and basically a jump into the unknown.
|
| I get the risk of fraud and nepotism, but in some other
| situations (Bell Labs etc.), "choose very good people and
| let them improvise within certain limits of a budget"
| turned out to be very efficient. The devil is in the
| "choose very good people" detail.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| ...Why would the people paying control what it's spent
| on...?
| jasonhong wrote:
| They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of
| compliance about how you can spend the money. For
| example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying
| rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it
| and then they had to make a rule about it), you have to
| fly US carriers where possible, etc.
|
| There are also reports you submit showing your progress
| and how you spent the money, to check that you are
| spending it on things you said you would.
|
| This thread (not just the person I'm replying to)
| demonstrates a lot of misconceptions about why we have
| research funding, how it works, and what the results have
| been in practice. Please, everyone, don't rely on
| stereotypes of how you think research funding works.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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!
| ajross wrote:
| > 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.
| goldchainposse wrote:
| 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_.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| numbers_guy wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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"
| yubblegum wrote:
| 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.
| ajb wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Phd-Researcher-
| Salary
|
| [1] https://publication.enseignementsup-
| recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/F...
| zipy124 wrote:
| Your ciation [1] shows the highest number as being
| approximately 70,000 USD a year, not 85k. That's 15,000
| dollars less than you claim. Your [0] citation is not a
| share-able link and just redirects to the home-page.
|
| In the UK (where I am based so I know the numbers well) a
| post doc is usually paid around 52,936 dollars a year, or a
| bit more if in london closer to 60,000 dollars a year. US
| postdocs seem to be somewehre between 60,000-90,000 dollars
| depending on institution, MIT [2] for example state a
| minimum of 69,000 and maximum of 90,000 dollars for a post-
| doc. This lines up well with your claim of a third higher,
| however the cost of living claim doesn't really check out,
| especially since tax rates are much higher in european
| countries than the US.
|
| If we take your numbers for example with 100k usd, after
| federal taxes and NY state taxes (the highest I believe)
| you're looking at close to a 25% marginal tax rate so a
| take-home of 75,000 USD. In France on 85000 USD you would
| have a marginal tax rate of 38% for a take home of 52,700
| USD. This is closer to a 43% difference not 33%, and does
| not include the fact that this is not disposable income.
| For instance my annual pay recently doubled, but my
| disposable income after council tax/bills/food/transport
| increased by about 900%, far above the 200% increase. Thus
| a 33% pay increase would be life-changing, not just some
| minor increase. (and the cost of living is really not that
| much higher in the US anyway, since VAT at 20% in europe is
| much higher than sales tax in most states, and health-care
| is included in many US jobs of the type we are talking
| about here, rent is the only thing largely more expensive
| in the US, but you guys actually have incredibly cheap
| property when normalised by size. In the us you are looking
| at a median of 2,500 USD per square meter for houses and
| somewhere around 5,000 for an apatment, whilst in france it
| is somewhere around 6750 (couldn't find a breakdown per
| type)).
|
| [2]: https://postdocs.mit.edu/postdoctoral-
| position/postdoctoral-...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Sorry, I must have added the extra bonuses on top of the
| gross salary that already included them. The 5 210EUR
| figure indeed matches 70k USD.
|
| The first link was ZipRecruiter survey with two peaks at
| 54k and 150k, leading to the average of 100k.
|
| On the cost of living, I see your point, and sure a
| straight 33% increase is nothing to sneeze at. The actual
| impact is more complicated depending on the personal
| situation, I'm not in the US so I was under the
| impression there's a lot more costs, especially with a
| family for instance, where EU countries tend to be costly
| for singles but easier to deal with with kids. But it
| also comes down to life style, and researchers might
| benefit as much of the social perks in general (overall
| I'm mostly in agreement)
| xphos wrote:
| Yeah, no PhDs in the US don't make 100K year. The stipend
| for an MIT PhD is about 50K a year half of what you're
| saying. Citing my wife who just finished their phd. MIT
| also makes it so everyone is paid the same as PhDs even if
| they bring in their own money like my wife did.
|
| You definitely could make 70K if you worked somewhere and
| also won a research fellowship, but that is the exception,
| not the rule. I think it's amazing how much science the US
| produces, considering how low the pay is. Maybe I'm spoiled
| in CS, but it's crazy how little people in science get
| paid, especially considering I think their work is often
| fundamentally more challenging. Granted is also much more
| risky and hard to monetize
| begueradj wrote:
| > 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.
|
| So that could be a political stance...
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| Arubis wrote:
| Being the sole western industrialized nation that hadn't just had
| most of their infrastructure bombed to rubble can't have hurt.
| apercu wrote:
| Absolutely, but what did that give the United States, a 10-year
| advantage?
|
| Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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).
| laughingcurve wrote:
| Schrodinger's politics
| bee_rider wrote:
| The hope is that the ambiguity will lead people to think
| about their general principles. If they agree or disagree
| strongly depending on how the variable is resolved, what
| does that say?
| mixermachine wrote:
| 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.
| frank20022 wrote:
| 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.
| Permit wrote:
| 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.
| klipt wrote:
| The USA's huge population and large internal free trade area
| give it better economies of scale.
| randunel wrote:
| Canada's population was 10mil, maybe less, when ww2 ended.
| someNameIG wrote:
| 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.
| femto wrote:
| We also emulated the British centralised model, with the
| Weapons Research Establishment. Like the British, Australia
| struggled to get research out of these centralised labs and
| into products: computing (CISRAC, 5th computer), satellites
| (WREsat, 7th nation in space), ...
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| The Marshall plan's effectiveness is more of a myth
|
| https://miwi-institut.de/archives/2898
| slowking2 wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| And yet here we are with Arm cores everywhere you look! :-D
| slowking2 wrote:
| Fair point! That's a great technical success; I didn't
| realize Arm was British.
|
| If the main failure of British companies is that they don't
| have U.S. company market caps, it seems more off base to
| blame this on government science funding policy instead of
| something else. In almost every part of the economy, U.S.
| companies are going to be larger.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| My understanding is that the British "Arm" is just a
| patent holder now. I don't think they actually make
| anything. Companies outside the UK are the ones that
| actually make the chips licensed from the Arm designs.
| pizzalife wrote:
| Sweden was not bombed.
| randunel wrote:
| But they were aligned with the nazis until close to the very
| end. It was easier to remember back then, but people have
| mostly forgotten nowadays.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Indeed, although Sweden was officially neutral, they most
| notoriously permitted German trains to roll through their
| country to Norway with soldiers and materials both during
| and after its invasion.
| dboreham wrote:
| Too many smart people doing smart stuff. Got to destroy that!
| Victory to the Idiocracy.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Soon we might need a summary of how they managed to fall from
| grace and others slowly surpassed them.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's stated as fact but what's the causative link for indirect
| cost administration being the key? If those costs were made
| direct by university labs having to compete with commercial labs
| by requiring researchers to explicitly rent facilities why would
| that break things?
|
| About the only argument I can see is transaction costs. And those
| are a factor but that incentivizes university labs because they
| have facilities for teaching as well so they can bring
| transaction costs low.
| ecshafer wrote:
| There are a couple fundamental flaws here:
|
| 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.
| reubenswartz wrote:
| Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days.
| We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research
| universities in the world... ;-(
| bamboozled wrote:
| Smart people are annoying and told us to wear masks though ?
| blululu wrote:
| 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).
| boxed wrote:
| > 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
|
| Per capita? The US had a larger population.
| blululu wrote:
| Being the leading power is about magnitude not intensity.
| The country that is twice as large and operates at a
| similar level of intensity will be the more dominant force
| (see also - China today). Per capita, I would bet on the
| Swiss (then and now) - though it will depend on the metric
| at that point and their output will be comparable to the
| Germans, British, French and the Americans.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Prior WW 2, the US had even no notion of quantum physics. How
| could it be the world power in science?
| blululu wrote:
| The US definitely had a notion of quantum physics prior to
| WWII. Feynman got his PhD at Princeton in 1942 in Quantum
| Physics so I would assume that John Wheeler had some
| familiarity with the topic back then. I would mention that
| the most significant result of quantum mechanics is solid
| state transistors, and Shockley was awarded a phd for
| quantum mechanical applications back in the 30s.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Michelson and his experiments on the aether not existing
| were enormously influential to theoretical physics. "No
| notion" is incorrect, they had numerous home grown talents
| in physics, on top of the huge influx of talent from 1930s
| immigration of European scientists.
|
| The USA being a beacon of hope and enlightenment in those
| days stands in stark contrast to the isolationist, anti-
| intellectual, anti-research, and frankly xenophobic
| policies pursued by the current admin, courts, and
| congress.
| timeon wrote:
| Someone was reading too much of Mobi Dick.
| JetSetWilly wrote:
| > Penicillin
|
| 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.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]
| https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related from same author earlier:
|
| _How the United States became a science superpower -- and how
| quickly it could crumble_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687118
| gigatexal wrote:
| And how the Trump admin is ruining it in very little time.
| zusammen wrote:
| "Indirect costs" were accepted on the theory that this would be
| used to create job security for professors who did useful work
| but were not able to secure direct funding.
|
| Spoiler alert: That job security doesn't exist anymore. A
| professor who isn't winning grants, even if tenured, is
| functionally dead. Research doesn't matter except as PR and
| teaching definitely doesn't matter; the ability to raise grants
| is the singular determinant of an academic's career.
|
| Consequently, most academics despise university overhead because
| it reduces the number of grants to go around and they get nothing
| for it.
|
| That does not, of course, mean they support Trump or Musk. Most
| do not.
| Fomite wrote:
| > "Indirect costs" were accepted on the theory that this would
| be used to create job security for professors who did useful
| work but were not able to secure direct funding.
|
| This is an argument that I have literally never heard, despite
| being in academia a long time.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Britain remained a leader in theoretical science and defense
| technology, but its socialist government economic policies led to
| its failure to commercialize wartime innovations.
|
| And the detriment of UK's auto industry, manufacturing industry,
| and etc. I really don't understand how people still fancy state-
| controlled economy.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Sorry but this is such a shallow comment. In what way is the US
| government directing public funding to academic institutions
| not state control? It's just a different organisational
| framework that appears to have been more successful.
| blululu wrote:
| >> 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.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| And now come back with per capita numbers.
| blululu wrote:
| A simple Google search would reveal: GDP:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-
| gdp... GPD Per Capita:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-
| gdp...
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Wouldn't everyone always be even higher if not for the low
| parts bringing down the average? That part of the comment
| sounds so biased that it makes me mistrust the rest of it.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| Depends how you measure it. I vaguely remember that Germany had
| most Nobel prizes before 1930s.
| casey2 wrote:
| Right from the first paragraph I know this is just nonsense that
| is only being posted because of currentpoliticalthing
|
| The US leapfroged the rest of the world in both science and
| engineering by it's civil war, this isn't disputable. It could
| only do that because of decade long tariffs that existed solely
| to protect it's nascent manufacturing industry.
|
| People have constructed so many myths about WW2 it's crazy.
|
| GDP: 1871 the US passes GB By 1900 the US economy was double GB's
| size. by 1910 they've already passed them by GDP per capita.
| INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT: Again 1870s. You can't really untie science
| from industrial output. Is there argument here that the US was
| behind scientifically because of Nobel prizes? If you narrowly
| define science as "things europeans liked to research" then I
| guess. But even by that definition Americans were discovering new
| drugs such as Actinomycin D as early as 1940, during, not after,
| WW2 and before they entered. So unless people like Waksman
| (educated in America) count as braindrain 30 years before the
| fact I don't think the argument is credible.
|
| The UK failed to mass produce penicillin. It's this industrial
| ineptitude that caused "brain drain".
| blululu wrote:
| Was it tarrifs or just a large, highly educated population with
| a unified market? The US has always been one of the leaders in
| education and scientific research on a per capita basis. Even
| in the 1770s you har people like Franklin working on cutting
| edge physics (the standard sign convention for charge is still
| flipped because of him). At some point it also just outgrew all
| the other countries in terms of size and it naturally became
| the global leader around that time.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Time for the EU to take the place of the US.
| Gigachad wrote:
| China is probably more likely to take over in science.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Not if the EU creates the conditions to attract the
| scientific talent wanting to leave the US.
| est wrote:
| EU slaps regulations
| sgt wrote:
| EU has a terrible track record. It's a gigantic
| bureaucratic papermill. They never promoted innovation, why
| would they start now?
|
| They'll probably _talk_ about starting to promote
| innovation. They kind of have to. But it 's a paradigm
| shift.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Don't forget: quite many innovations (most?) that supported
| the Covid vaccines were developed in the EU.
| ijidak wrote:
| > By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had
| blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years
|
| Was this written in 2030? The war ended in 1945.
|
| Just a minor nit... It was jarring to see a statement of
| questionable accuracy in the opening paragraph.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you read carefully, there is no strict implication that the
| 85 years of leading only begun after the end of the war. If it
| began 1940, the quoted sentence would still be correct.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Not for long.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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...
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the US is currently pushing for merit-based
| admission.
| lawn wrote:
| 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).
| asacrowflies wrote:
| You'd have to be a fool to believe that.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Read third bullet point
|
| https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-
| content/uploads/...
| Epa095 wrote:
| Yes, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is
| very democratic, it says so in their name!
| timeon wrote:
| North Korea is good example as there is absence of any
| Democracy. However boasting about Democracy, while having
| 2-party system, is also quite interesting.
| ruszki wrote:
| Fifth bullet point contradicts it. Also, it's not clear
| for me at all, what "viewpoint" means. Flat Earthers in
| geography departments? Or more Republicans? Or the same
| thing as DEI, since being black gives you different
| viewpoints?
| asacrowflies wrote:
| You'd have to be a fool to believe that.
| doener wrote:
| Next chapter under Trump is written right now: How the US lost
| its status as science superpower
| killjoywashere wrote:
| I've met Steve on a number of occasions, smart guy. I also work
| in this space and have definitely read a lot of the same books he
| has, along with many of his excellent articles. Alas, I'm pretty
| sure he would never read my articles, unless he got cancer, which
| I hope he doesn't.
|
| I do want to pick up where he left off: the interface between the
| US and China, and specifically look at how China has invested.
| I've spent some effort on this forum making the point that our
| system has left some critical vulnerabilities that the Chinese
| have leveraged, e.g. (1,2).
|
| It's worth understanding that Xi Jinping has been working hard on
| this problem set, along with his predecessors and many around him
| for a long time. To really understand his whole-of-economy
| approach, I highly recommend Hank Paulson's _Dealing with China_
| (3). He has and maintains a narrative of literally going from a
| boy in a cave to the leader of the largest nation on Earth. Much
| like the narrative arc Churchill maintained for himself (the Prof
| Blank mentions), Xi would see science as a component of the
| tapestry, but not the whole story.
|
| Xi is also using the Belt and Road Initiative for massive effect,
| see the maps in (4). The US has started to pay attention with
| renewed investments in the region, e.g. (5) but Xi has a decade
| head start and a political base that could be characterized as
| relatively stable compared to the current US administration.
|
| As my time is limited, I'm appending a reading list at the end
| for those interested (6 to end). Suffice to say, yes this is how
| we became a science superpower. But it ignores how our parochial
| incentives and belief in American exceptionalism morphed in the
| American narcissism (14) this is very likely to doom the American
| experiment without significant effort on the part of the American
| population to come together. Unfortunately, I fear the fracturing
| of the population is too far gone to remediate without major
| conflict, but major conflict in the present setting is likely far
| more serious than we could survive as a nation.
|
| As a final thought, the major conflict is obviously nuclear war.
| We will not survive that as a nation. Thus the Prisoner's
| Dilemma. We are all prisoners on Earth. Even Musk's species-level
| escape is far from escape. The physics of deep space travel or
| even intra-solar-system travel just don't work out in our favor.
| So, how do you survive the Prisoner's Dilemma? The math answer is
| "there are a lot of complicated answers" ref (15) but mainly, all
| parties need to work toward, and signal reliably that they are
| working toward, stable equilibrium. Being an unreliable partner
| must be met with brutality, even at the cost of everyone.
|
| (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655390
|
| (2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
|
| (3) Hank Paulson, Dealing with China. We, and specifically,
| Goldman Sachs, and specifically Hank Paulson, taught Xi how to
| win. https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-
| Superp...
|
| (4) https://merics.org/en/tracker/how-bri-shaping-global-
| trade-a...
|
| (5) https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/us-revives-wwii-era-pacific-
| ai...
|
| (6) Manchester. The Last Lion, the 3 volume definitive biography
| of Churchill, which puts the Prof's work in the largest possible
| context.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lion:_Winston_Spencer...
|
| (7) Jamie Holmes. 12 Seconds of Silence, the definitive story of
| the proximity fuse, a significant portio of Merle Tuve's unique
| contributions to the war, and the story of the founding of Johns
| Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory.
| https://www.amazon.com/Seconds-Silence-Inventors-Tinkerers-S...
|
| (8) Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Note Merle
| Tuve also plays a critical role in this narrative, not bad for
| one of those 'second rate' government labs.
| https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
|
| (9) Rocco Casagrande and the work of Gryphon Scientific, alas
| (but probably net good) acquired by Deloitte. Wayback has some of
| their reports:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240228103801/https://www.gryph...
|
| (10) Senior Colonel Ji-Wei Guo, and his theory of Merciful
| Conquest, audaciously published in the US's own Military Medicine
| journal https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19813351/ see also
| https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/weaponizing-bio...
|
| (11) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. This
| Berkeley professor uses innumerable real world examples to
| illustrate how dictators effectively control their populations
| https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
|
| (12) James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. UC Santa Cruz professor
| uses several extremely large examples the illustrate other ways
| governments control their resources. Spends a lot of time on the
| negative effects but certainly acknowledges the net upsides
| usually seem to outweigh the net downsides, but it would be good
| to learn how to avoid downsides when you can:
| https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
|
| (13) Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Most interesting passage to me
| was the dinner with Obama where Jobs told Obama the manufacturing
| jobs are never coming back. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-
| Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648...
|
| (14) H.R. McMaster https://www.twincities.com/2020/10/16/h-r-
| mcmaster-u-s-forei... also https://www.amazon.com/Battlegrounds-
| Fight-Defend-Free-World...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| A better title would be: "How _this one time_ the U.S. became a
| science superpower ".
|
| We all know the rule: Past performance is no guarantee of future
| results.
|
| Two significant and obvious difference come to mind. I'm sure
| there are others.
|
| 1) WWII did major physical damage to Europe and Japan, to say
| nothing of the underlying economic damage (e.g., Britain's war
| debt handcuffed them). Sans any serious competition, of course
| the US excelled.
|
| 2) Along the same lines, the US then didn't have the trillions in
| debt the US has now. Many of the universities seeing their grants
| cut are well into the black. On the other hand, Uncle Sam is
| drenched red ink.
|
| I understand the value of investing. But given the financial
| fitness of the universities, it feels more like subsidies.
| Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers. Yes, Sam
| can continue to buy success, but at what cost?
| thfuran wrote:
| >Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers
|
| Why do you think that?
| metrognome wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
| mberning wrote:
| Hard to overstate how much effort the US put into collecting
| all the best scientists in the post WWII world.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Haven't read the article yet but Imma guess Operation Paperclip
| has a lot to do with it.
| switch007 wrote:
| I feel most people have absolutely no idea that the US had its
| very large boot in the UK's face with our face in the mud for
| much of the post WW2 period, and still has. We had to dance
| exactly to their tune.
|
| It annoys me no end to read so many comments to the effect of
| "why didn't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?".
| Not that I'm saying there were not any economic failures by
| various British governments over the years.
|
| Honestly, so many Americans have no idea about their country's
| foreign policy. I guess you have to be on the receiving end of
| their short stick to understand
| ajb wrote:
| I'm glad to see this article because this topic is very much
| worth thinking about right now - by both sides of the Atlantic
| :-). But history is more difficult to do well than this. A lot of
| this article just assumes its conclusions. You need more than
| 'this is a difference and therefore it was causative', especially
| if it happens to align with current conventional beliefs.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Wasn't it obvious that the US, the richest country on earth,
| would become the science superpower? How could it have been
| different?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| It is worth noting that the the majority of money that Britain
| spent on war material went to the US. That might be one reason
| the US could continue spending and the UK couldn't!
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