Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!".
[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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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[1] Who made his plans for destroying both the American hegemony and global trade, and its domestic economy quite clear.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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).
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
I'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.
I think a lot of the decentralization also correlated up with a wide range of directions, with decisions to pursue activity made at much lower levels than happens today.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
How much more straightforwards do you need it to be? How about this?
> “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
You don't have to be paying that much attention to get the vibe that a lot of these guys do, in fact, enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Trump and Vance enjoy humiliating Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and insulting the entire country of Canada, threatening to annex them etc. They enjoy making heads of companies and nations come to them and beg (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1086367432957...)
Noticing these things isn't an "emotional crutch", it's understanding the actual reality of the situation.
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.
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
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.
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.
We have to dispense with the silliness of comparing the US with countries a tenth its size. If you want to compare Britain to the US, pick a state of comparable size and do so. Otherwise you’re comparing apples to much larger apples.
I wonder if the analogy might be more like comparing an apple tree evolving in a forest vs breeding varieties of apples on a farm.
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
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.
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.
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).
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
It kicked off a feedback loop. The best scientists and engineers wanted to work on the projects that were 10 years ahead. As a result US companies were at the forefront of new technology and developments… attracting the next generation of the best scientists and engineers.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
Science and progress are not a one off thing.
The scientist are not used up after 10 years.
They keep working and keep the advantages going.
The advantage attracts even more intelligent people from every corner of the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
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”.
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
> 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.
“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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
Why didn't they just shoot the bears? You'd figure libertarians would be all for that.
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.
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.
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.
There was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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...
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.
So, the current system generates net income for the government, but you’re claiming it needs to be changed in order to do so?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Federally funded R&D was around 3.4% of the GDP in 2021: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23339.
The chart in that link seems to indicate it was 0.6%, while total R&D funding was 3.4%
> 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-...
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.
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.
Are you saying that hastening the catastrophe is the right move?
No.
Ok. You never know what you are going to hear on HN :)
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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
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
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, I think raising taxes on everyone is going to have to happen along with spending cuts.
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.
Why point at billionaires, anyone with more than a million is living a comfortable life, everybody should be doing their part.
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.
False. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is about 6 trillion dollars. The US national debt is over 36 trillion dollars.
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 :)
As the saying goes, Republicans can't do science, and Democrats can't do math.
All this 'just tax the billionaires' is the latter.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
I'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.
I think a lot of the decentralization also correlated up with a wide range of directions, with decisions to pursue activity made at much lower levels than happens today.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
...Why would the people paying control what it's spent on...?
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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How much more straightforwards do you need it to be? How about this?
> “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
> “We want to put them in trauma.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
That's the current director of the Office of Management and Budget.
For the love of god dude, the White House posted a ICE deportation ASMR video. The House GOP posted this shit: https://x.com/HouseForeignGOP/status/1906008542382879094
You don't have to be paying that much attention to get the vibe that a lot of these guys do, in fact, enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Trump and Vance enjoy humiliating Zelenskiy in the Oval Office and insulting the entire country of Canada, threatening to annex them etc. They enjoy making heads of companies and nations come to them and beg (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1086367432957...)
Noticing these things isn't an "emotional crutch", it's understanding the actual reality of the situation.
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.
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
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.
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.
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We have to dispense with the silliness of comparing the US with countries a tenth its size. If you want to compare Britain to the US, pick a state of comparable size and do so. Otherwise you’re comparing apples to much larger apples.
I wonder if the analogy might be more like comparing an apple tree evolving in a forest vs breeding varieties of apples on a farm.
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
That's harder on the scale of a small country.
I don’t disagree which is why I encourage comparing the EU to the US as a whole.
Why? Britain was considered a larger power in the world until around WWII.
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.
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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.
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).
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
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Being the sole western industrialized nation that hadn't just had most of their infrastructure bombed to rubble can't have hurt.
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
The USA's huge population and large internal free trade area give it better economies of scale.
Canada's population was 10mil, maybe less, when ww2 ended.
Absolutely, but what did that give the United States, a 10-year advantage?
Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
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).
Schrödinger's politics
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.
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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.
And yet here we are with Arm cores everywhere you look! :-D
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.
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.
Sweden was not bombed.
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.
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.
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.
The Marshall plan’s effectiveness is more of a myth
https://miwi-institut.de/archives/2898
>> 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.
And now come back with per capita numbers.
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.
We are killing the golden goose
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.
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.
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.
Could we have though? Last I checked neither majir party has seriously persued this. So how are the american people to vote for it?
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.
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.
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.
‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’
Plutarch
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.
Impossible since that would mean extreme left wing radical socialism. And communism.
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?
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.
Can't do it, individual states can't print money and freedom of movement means the free rider problem will pop up quickly.
> 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.
> 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.
Sigh.
Unfortunately, your implications are spot on.
We, the people, are our own worst enemies.
You have to attribute some blame to the elite who run an ongoing propaganda campaign for voters to work against their own interests.
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).
Yeah, cultural difference.
Coming from Europe I think the sarcasm was pretty obvious. More like "duh".
Really? Is that your honest take? It's either late stage unfettered capitalism, regulatory capture and oligarchy OR communism?
Edit: I forgot theocracy.
Yeah, sarcasm does not work on internet, I know. I tried to paraphrase the ruler in chief.
Ah, thank you. I was so terribly disappointed to see that take on here.
I think the comment was tongue-in-cheek.
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.
Gonna state the obvious: freedom and peace. People mention money but money followed technological boom. And, yes, peace derived from military.
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.
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.
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...
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
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”.
I don't know that I'd rely too heavily on midterms in 26. Gerrymandering and all that.
I don't know why this is getting shadowed. You're absolutely right. Gerrymandering is a threat.
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
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...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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”?
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
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.
It would be interesting to see some discussion of how the Chinese research funding system actually works.
That makes the opposite point since Chinese indirect costs are 5-25%. e.g. this grant is at 25% https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/tab434/info94303.htm
Time for the EU to take the place of the US.
> 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.
Soon we might need a summary of how they managed to fall from grace and others slowly surpassed them.
Not for long.
> 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.
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
“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.
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.
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".
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.
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And how the Trump admin is ruining it in very little time.
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.
> 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?
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.
Interesting
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.
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.
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.
Too many smart people doing smart stuff. Got to destroy that! Victory to the Idiocracy.