Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
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Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#2What a shitty article. I hit "back" when the article went to the trouble of putting up an entire chart to show: "spending on R&D has essentially been flat since 2011 across several countries including the U.S."
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#3I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in this country.
But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected.
People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something.
EDIT: just to be clear, because a couple of the comments sound like maybe think I'm making the opposite point: I think the metric of "18%" considering to leave is a silly metric. I think that at any given time, even when research is "good" or "better than now", you're probably somewhere near that number, especially (as one of the commenters pointed out) a lot of people who do research in this country are from other countries. The only way we could actually derive meaning from this statistic would be to have a time-based reference (i.e. compare what percentage plan to leave this year vs. 5 vs. 10 years ago), or to switch the metric - measure how many people actually left last year vs. 5 years ago.
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#4I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in this country. But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected. People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something. EDIT…
I agree. We should invest more in science and the metric's kind of insane. I bet more than 18% of people in ANY industry consider leaving the country for various reasons... Maybe the 18% referenced in article will leave the country with the fed-up 99% of the rest of the country...
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#5The remaining 4/5 of self-claimed scientists will stay because they must keep denying climate change and defending intelligent design.
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#6I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in this country. But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected. People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something. EDIT…
Except for the fact that, you know, a move by a scientist would likely be a career move, and not through some misguided knee-jerk reaction.
I work at a national lab. Half my coworkers, maybe more, are foreign. If we all got laid off, you could easily bet they'd go back to europe. If I got laid off, I'd either look for a different industry or look to Europe. I know several places I could drop into in Europe with a better success rate than trying to switch to a different lab in the US.
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#7What a shitty article. I hit "back" when the article went to the trouble of putting up an entire chart to show: "spending on R&D has essentially been flat since 2011 across several countries including the U.S."
The article's shitty but the original report from the Huffington post has a downloadable copy of the report, which is worth reading: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/sequestration-scien...
To a lesser extent, so is this editorial, notwithstanding the awful headline and axe-grindey nature of the argument: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114329/republican-budget-...
My general worry is that 'investment' has become too financialized, and political hostility to any sort of industrial policy is hampering economic development. I note that China is planning a lunar landing later this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/29/world/asia/china-plans-fir...) in preparation for a manned mission. I don't have a very high opinion of the Chinese space program but I really feel we need another Sputnik moment.
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#8[deleted]
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#9I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in this country. But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected. People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something. EDIT…
Scientists have much more portable skills than many other professions, they're very used to working in multinational teams, and a large number of scientists in the US come from other countries to begin with.
Re: Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S.
#10What a shitty article. I hit "back" when the article went to the trouble of putting up an entire chart to show: "spending on R&D has essentially been flat since 2011 across several countries including the U.S."
Well, remember that the chart was "change in percentage of GDP". GDP is fairly large, and scientific funding is fairly small relative to that, so the change in the percentage of GDP is going to be a fairly small value. The US's GDP is $14.99 trillion; so a -.05% change in scientific funding represents a change of about $7.5 billion, while in the meantime, China had an increase in scientific funding of close to the same amount (.1% of their GDP is $7.3B).
Now, they don't say how much that is relative to what the US or China spend overall on science. But still, that's a fairly big change either way.
If you take a look at the linked report http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Re..., it's even worse if you expand the time scale. Between 2010 and the estimated spending for 2013, there's a drop of more than $20B in scientific funding, from nearly $160B to less than $140B. That's a noticeable change; and based on the percent GDP figure, it's not just because the economy has been down, it's gone down more than the economy as a whole.
In fact, in constant dollars, taking inflation into account, funding has been declining since 2004, as funding levels were stagnant for a while and not keeping up with inflation. Now they are actively declining.