How the U.S. became a science superpower

> 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.

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.

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.

I don’t disagree which is why I encourage comparing the EU to the US as a whole.

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.