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How the U.S. became a science superpower

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Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#241

Post by psyklic »

monero-xmr wrote: post #237
patagurbon wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

In everything, there is some low-hanging fruit that yields an impactful outcome for minimal spending.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#242

Post by consumer451 »

charlie90 wrote: post #238
consumer451 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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.

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.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#243

Post by brokeAstronomer »

fallingknife wrote: post #190
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#244

Post by saulpw »

fallingknife wrote: post #170
saulpw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pers…

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.

Perception is politics.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#245

Post by sapphicsnail »

didgetmaster wrote: post #232
linksnapzz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#246

Post by AnthonyMouse »

XorNot wrote: post #191
nostrademons wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

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.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#247

Post by [deleted] »

jack_h wrote: post #117
Retric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dramaticall…

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;…

[deleted]

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#248

Post by consumer451 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #212
consumer451 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

> 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 price…

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

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#249

Post by einpoklum »

jack_h wrote: post #52
cs702 wrote: post #7

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 decent…

> 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 secon…

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.

Re: How the U.S. became a science superpower

#250

Post by chewbacha »

wskinner wrote: post #140
tw04 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.

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.

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