> 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.
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.
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
This is a critical point - in my opinion, wealth can't be at the same time a collateral to acquire more assets or to buy cheap money, and something that can't be taxed.
Either tax it or make credit/debt to be considered income after a certain net worth value, like 100 million would be more than enough.
This isn't a problem.
In the fairy farts world of the US stock markets, we don't often see mega corps trend down. That's why every American pension is piled into SP500... Which is really driven by the growth of like 10 companies, tops.
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Apex_fallacy (I know, I know, rationalwiki)
I don't unserstand how you can tax something that varies in value by double digit percentages every week. If Elon got taxed when TSLA was $450 per share, and six months later it's now $250 per share... How much should he be taxed? Should he be provided a tax refund?
You're imagining taxes as being one big annual chunk, but it doesn't have to be that way. It could be more like sales tax: baked directly into how these financial instruments work. You're also imagining taxes as computationally difficult, but they're absolute baby math compared to something like rendering a single 3D frame -- they're only artificially difficult for people because Intuit lobbies to keep it that way.
People get infinitely creative with financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations over mortgage-backed securities, but as soon as we suggest taxing wealth people throw up their hands and go "there's no possible way to do it!"
No one is saying that it's "too complicated" to calculate someone's net wealth in basic securities. I did not make that claim. This is a poor strawman.
>You're imagining taxes as being one big annual chunk
No I'm not, you're talking to someone who pays taxes quarterly.
>It could be more like sales tax: baked directly into how these financial instruments work.
We already have that via capital gains and income taxes.
>You're also imagining taxes as computationally difficult, but they're absolute baby math compared to something like rendering a single 3D frame -- they're only artificially difficult for people because Intuit lobbies to keep it that way.
Again, I am not making that claim neither is anyone else. All the computation in the world doesn't solve for something that is inherently illogical.
>People get infinitely creative with financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations over mortgage-backed securities
These securities are logical to understand.
>but as soon as we suggest taxing wealth people throw up their hands and go "there's no possible way to do it!"
Again, do you get a tax refund if your tax liability went down due to depreciation? How do you levy wealth taxes on assets such as private businesses and ventures that do not have a clear appraisal value, or one at all? Most countries that levied wealth taxes has discarded them due to these difficulties, ones that compute can't solve.
What's the threshold for obscene? That's an easy one, but still requires discussion.
Should a % of assets be frozen and redistributed after that threshold is reached?
Should we Logan's Run the top 10 richest and let the market adjust around that?
There's going to be some preposterous ideas! The answer won't be as simple as raise taxes. Regardless, these discussions need to take place so a good solution for the world can coalesce.
You also don't get taxed on your debts, e.g. a mortgage. You pay interest on your debt instead.
You can't eat with your brokerage account either, what is the point?
>He can use them as collateral for debt.
Yes, you can use your brokerage account, house, etc. as collateral for loans, this is not new or unique.
>Presently, that's how he dodges taxes.
What does this even mean? Loans are not taxable as you have to pay them back.
>You'd close that loophole.
That's not a tax... This is what happens when you get your financial understanding from reddit comments.
The key here is that you need enough wealth to keep borrowing for rest of your life without touching your principle.
>The stocks get a one-time relief from capital gains as it moves to the heir. This gives opportunity for the heirs (or the estate) to sell the stocks to pay back the loan. That is the loophole.
Yes, this step-up in basis happens because the estate is charged estate tax. Charging capital gains AND estate tax doesn't make sense, estate tax is typically higher than capital gains tax.
This is a key piece a lot of people don't understand.
They should be multiplicative. Everyone is supposed to pay capital gains. And everyone is supposed to pay the estate tax. They're both percentage taxes. It's not supposed to be "pick one".
That doesn't make any sense.
>Everyone is supposed to pay capital gains.
Not true. You don't pay if you have capital losses, nor do you pay if you have capital gains in tax sheltered accounts, etc.
>They're both percentage taxes.
No one claimed otherwise.
>It's not supposed to be "pick one".
That's exactly how it is in many cases, even income taxes have been that way for decades (though SALT deduction now limited). Read up on double taxation and why it's typically avoided.
Correct. The OP likely knows this. Or they're totally ignorant to it. The fact that they think joe blow can execute the aforementioned strategy is vexing.
Of course I know this.
>The fact that they think joe blow can execute the aforementioned strategy is vexing.
You don't understand the aforementioned strategy, nor do you understand wealth taxes vs estate taxes.
Yes, that estate/inheritance taxes need reworking. This is not a wealth tax as discussed, this is an estate/inheritance tax which is different.
>This gives opportunity for the heirs (or the estate) to sell the stocks to pay back the loan. That is the loophole.
The loans are made whole by the estate, no one is taxed on proceeds from a loan, nor should they be.
In other words, make all the money you want, get as rich as you want, but it goes back to the commons when you die and can't use it any more.
I assume I don’t have to point out that 50-36 is 15, i.e., basically the whole growth of assets has been roughly fueled by “money printing” fraud. (Yes, I’m simplifying a bit)
What has basically occurred, is a fraud, what is not really different than loan fraud. The people in charge of the bank also wrote themselves loans they didn’t have to pay back and left the bank with the $36 trillion debt as they pocketed the both the $36 Trillion in debt, as well as plundered all the assets, i.e., much of government spending not in excess of revenue.
It’s basically been a plundering operation that has only escalated over the last 25 years and is the greatest national security threat to the US and arguably the security of the whole planet’s civilization. It’s short sighted greed.
And yes, this whole community is heavily involved and engaged in it as the VC money has flown like water for 20 years now … backed by fraudulent government “money printing” that has plundered regular people.
It will have consequences, one way or another. The devil always comes to collect when you don’t expect and in the worst way. That’s not a superstition, it’s a metaphor of human nature learned over unknown millennia of the same catastrophic patterns.
Frankly, the only thing that could save anything is to constrain the and revalue currency by seizing the plundered assets of the roughly top 1%, maybe even 3%, and paying down the national debt. It would be painful like drug rehab, but the alternative is OD and death and far greater suffering.
This happens due to explicit government policy, one that has been relentlessly pushed all over the world since the 80s.
Saying that the rich could somehow avoid the US government by moving abroad is a fallacy.
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.
Markets are a tool which can work extremely well if deployed carefully and within a sensible regulatory framework. Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising, we can't eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have forever microplastics in us, I think it's fair to question some of our assumptions.
>> Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be working out in practice (in the US).
>> You're describing regulatory capture. This is why governments are supposed to have limited powers.
Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture. Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller govenrment would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power within the private sector. We need a balanced system, not blind devotion.
>> Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those things... The real problem here is that some people can't afford those thing
So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.
But there's the problem: The person you're replying to clearly thinks there's too much government. You seem to think there's not enough.
If I had to pick a side of this to bet on, I would bet on it being "too much" rather than "too little" at this point, simply because in the trend has been for the US government to get larger over time, not smaller. The bigger it gets, the less likely it is that it's "not big enough". I understand that the responsibilities we've delegated to the government continue to increase in complexity, but complexity drives exponential growth, which I would also weigh against the "there's not enough government" argument.
Also I'm really not convinced by the argument that "smaller government would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power". I think we agree that wealth is becoming increasingly more concentrated--but so too is the size of the government. There's simply more direct evidence that wealth concentration grows as government complexity grows, at least in the US, because that's literally what appears to be happening!
I would wager that if I look into relative size of a country's government and its concentration on wealth, I'd find that they're not terribly correlated; or if they are, that the data indicates that increasingly government complexity drives increasingly wealth concentration. But I don't have a lot of confidence in that wager! But I also certainly don't buy the naive "markets fix everything" argument, either. People love to game markets, and if they're not controlled in some fashion, fraud tends to win out every time. Just look at crypto!
To make a technical parallel can we really say "C is good, Java is bad"?
I think focus should be much more on discussing actual policies and their impact - which can become quite complex - rather than stamp everything with "more/less government/market" and then use the predefined belief that one or the other is good. I personally favor various policies, and I can't put all of them at the same time in a box with a label of "more government" or "less government".
"Idiots will dump mercury in the river if you let them" is one of the assumptions.
> Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be working out in practice (in the US).
It doesn't work if you don't actually do it.
But notice the important distinction between "carbon tax which is fully refunded to the population as a divided" and "tax things that aren't carbon to subsidize cronies who waste money on questionable hydrogen cars and ineffective carbon capture nonsense."
> Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.
It's mostly regulatory capture. The primary driver of wealth inequality is corporate entity size. The billionaires are the early shareholders in megacorps.
The main exception is corporations violating antitrust laws, but this is still a form of regulatory capture, i.e. capturing the government to enforce contracts in restraint of trade when the government ought not to be doing that.
> So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.
You don't have to be uber-wealthy to afford school. Most of what pays for public schools is the taxes paid by the parents of the students. Where this doesn't work is for the poorest or orphans etc., and this was traditionally handled through charity and scholarships. Ironically things government policies have been decimating by propping up real estate costs so high people can't afford space to have private community organizations, taking the money they could have donated to charity as taxes and spending it on boondoggles and military adventurism and otherwise encouraging people to rely on national governments rather than local communities.
The total wealth in a free market country rises, which can only be explained by wealth being created rather than shifted around.
> Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.
Educational materials abound in this country, even for free. For example, I took some MIT courses that were on youtube, for free. I found my college textbook "Special Relativity" at a book sale for $.50. SAT prep books are available free at the library, and are often at thrift stores for a couple bucks.
It's never been easier to get educated.
Many times when I see some idle shop keeper wasting their time at candy crush on their phone, I think something like:
"Oh my, stop wasting your time! You could read something interesting or even learn a whole new subject!"
But then I remind myself from what a position I am thinking these thoughts. From what kind of knowledge and background. Could people start using their time better? Sure. But it will be damn hard for them, in contrast to probably many people here, including yourself, and we should not forget that. What's more is, that even if those people learned a lot about some subject, let's say even computer programming, there is no accreditation for them. Where can they go, to claim certificates or whatever, for their new knowledge, to get any chance of employment?
I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, not software. Yet I got jobs as a software developer with zero certifications.
At the D Language Foundation, we have never asked any of our participants for there certifications. Some have PhDs, some have high school diplomas. We only care about what they can do.
You don't need to have any certifications whatsoever in order to start your own software business and do contract work.
You cannot buy an education. It's necessary to put in the work to learn it one way or another. I learned that the hard way in college. No work, no pass.
When you put the "all are welcome" sign on the door of your programming language organization, you're not sampling from "all" but just the people who are already interested in programming, and especially the design and construction of programming languages. These people are inherently motivated to learn and particularly self motivated.
You know as well as anyone that languages in particular, far and away from all other projects in the area of computing, scratch the deepest itches that good developers have. Languages are a siren song for devs who have a burning desire to get to the bottom of computing machines.
And so of course this breed of dev is going to be great whether they have a PhD or not. They are the github-history all green every day crowd. You're skimming the cream of the crop.
But you can't build an entire economy out of the cream. The other people have to do things too. They can't just go to the flea market and pick up a book on "Special Relativity" and learn it. Heck, I got an BS degree in physics and I can't even do that. I needed someone to explain it to me, and a lot of students do. They need the environment that is conducive to learning. I think COVID really proved that people can't just sit on YouTube all day and learn from a screen.
While I don't "get" their way of being, I have to acknowledge such people do exist, and it is wasteful to consider the people I "get". Otherwise the other "types" might gather around some stupid leaders that come with ideas like "science kills babies let's burn all scientists on a stake!" (exaggerating a bit, but similar things did happen)
That is what I responded to, especially the "any chance" aspect.
A young colleague of mine wanted a job at a FAANG company. He did not have a programming degree or cert. He knew he'd be faced with the dreaded leetcode interview, and wanted to know how to proceed. I suggested to him to get the leetcode books, and study them for 3 weeks or so. He balked at that, and I said the 3 weeks would be the best investment of time he'd likely ever make. He got the point, and studied for 3 weeks. He aced the leetcode interview and got the well-into-6-figures job.
The people with get-up-and-go are going to find a way get what they want.
P.S. The people who are members of the D Language Foundation are all self-selected get-up-and-go types. I enjoy watching them grow into first class programmers.
BTW, here in Seattle we have a monthly "D Coffee Haus" meeting, where we talk about programming and airplanes. It's been going for a year now, and I should have thought of starting that a long time ago.
But the example was about a shop keeper playing candy crush on their phone, and you're relating it to experience with your highly motivated and bright colleagues working at your programming language organization, people I'm assuming you associate with based on their programming aptitude and innate interest in programming languages. How many shop keepers (the kind OP is referring to we're not talking about Good Will Hunting here) do you work with at your organization?
As an educator dealing with 20-somethings who are in the position of finding employment, I don't think what you're suggesting can scale. It's not a path the 100+ students I teach every semester can take. These students cannot pick up a leetcode book and study for 3 weeks and land a job at FAANG. Some of them have trouble landing a FAANG job with the degree, and the work experience, and project experience.
"The people with get-up-and-go are going to find a way get what they want."
Sure, this is just saying that the cream rises to the top. Maybe a handful of students could do it, but 90% of the rest of them not going to, so they need alternatives. And we need to provide those alternatives because like I said, you can't build an economy from cream.
95% of the people need a framework to educate themselves, they can't just go to youtube.com and come away with the ability to pass a Google interview in 3 weeks. They need focused, intensive study. A tight feeback loop. The ability to get 1:1 time with an expert to move past hurdles. The ability to work closely with peers and to work in groups. Broad and varied perspectives. Instruction from actual experts (which I will point out your college had and most people don't). You know, a real education.
You can very much buy an education in many places. Money from parents pays for the best universities, no, actually schools already, the best teachers, the best atmosphere/setting for learning. While some children work on a farm, rich people's children will already be learning, simply because the parents can afford it.
There are many places, where it doesn't work like in your extraordinary examples. Just because something is possible for a few, it doesn't mean, that it is generalizable and that it can be done for everyone.
I think it's good that scholarships are awarded, some money goes to graduate students doing work (even if I think the amount per hour is low), etc.
But I can't square your implications that this type of education is equivalent to self-taught when your own foundation seems to put an emphasis on it. Or is it just marketing for an audience that might believe that they're not equivalent?
Why is there this focus on people from formal education backgrounds or supporting people through scholarships to get a formal education when describing what a donation would go to?
I want to re-iterate. It's not that I believe you can just go sit in a class without focusing and acquire an education. I also don't believe that someone can't learn outside of a formal setting or even that they can't get superior results!
But, it seems to me that there's definitely some sort of difference between equally motivated people in a formal setting and in a self taught setting. And it seems to me that even the dlang foundation acknowledges that implicitly. Obviously there are lots of free resources provided by the foundation as well, so I can't argue there's a strong preference. But, if they were equivalent the foundation could just support one of them. And if a choice was to be made wouldn't the freely available resources be a more efficient allocation of donations?
That isn’t an argument or solution for anything. That’s state some fact, then state your desired conclusion, without even an attempt at reasoning in between.
Show me any community that turns their success demographics around. Someone pointing at a few successful examples, and saying everyone should do that, won’t be how they did it.
People have suffered in disadvantaged demographics from the dawn of time. They are real. Nobody wants differences like that to exist, but they are pernicious. Context has a huge impact on people and bad contexts are often very self-reinforcing.
It's true that what I wrote about is not formal education, but it is education nevertheless and freely available.
Marginal income tax rate. People's aggregate incomes are a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of wealth in the world.
I'm mostly a fan of free markets, but the way we've set up the game around the Western world, we're moving back towards a sort of feudal system made up of an asset owning upper class and then everyone else who needs to work to survive.
I think what we need is a 100% marginal estate tax. Maybe something along the lines of 1M$ tax free per child and spouse.
Everyone should have the right to vast financial success through free enterprise, but no one should be able to build multi generational dynasties, since it destroys the fabric of democracy over time.
Clinton's government balanced the budget and had a surplus by decreasing spending and increasing taxes. He backed off on some capital gains tax increases and still had the surplus.
The fact of the matter is that if the US government is going to outlay X% of GDP then it needs to match X% of GDP in revenue: that's what Clinton's government did. Outlays dropped from 20.7% of GDP to 17.6% of GDP, tax revenue increased from 17.0% of GDP to 20.0% of GDP. [1]
And that government did not defund Universities to do it (iirc they actually increased funding).
Norway's tax revenue as a % of GDP in 2023 was 41.4%. United States was 25.2% [2]
Your marginal rate comparison doesn't paint a fair comparison because a lot of their government revenue comes from VAT and a special very high petroleum tax (I couldn't find exact percentages). And I think they have fairly low income inequality[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Bill_Cl... (citing https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...)
[2] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... [page 15]
[3] https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/hfa-explorer/gini-coefficien...
Sure. It’s not simple. But you’re missing a lot of the picture too. People with high wealth and ownership can leverage massive loopholes (like taking a loan with stock as collateral) which means they pay very little effective tax on their “income”: https://www.profgalloway.com/earners-vs-owners-2/
The solution is surely not the status quo.
> 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.
The problem is that those two principles are at odds with each other. You need the government to have enough power to fix externalities, but also limited power to avoid corruption.
There are no documented instances of a truly free market. The parent's point I think has less to do with "it has been tried and it failed" and moreso that the idea that truly free market can exist is pure fantasy.
FWIW - Costa Rica is probably the greatest example of a Libertarian's dream of a free market. I would love to show any free market absolutionist the colossal amount of time it takes to just pave 500m of a road in that country.
There's no such thing as pure water, either. Nor is there any person who has not had impure thoughts. Nor can you ever cut a board to an exact length. Nor has anything created by man (or nature) been perfect.
The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.
A free market does not have to be a "truly free market" in order to deliver the goods.
Citation VERY MUCH needed. A free market leads to monopoly and abuse. It does not lead to competition, it does not lead to better long-term results, it leads to corruption, market capture, and oppression.
How do you explain the scores of millions of people that came to the US, and still come, if the US free market is a hellhole of monopoly, abuse, corruption, and oppression?
Performs for whom? The central idea of a free market is that is provides better goods and services and thus better outcomes for civilization. We have countless examples of innovations that have come through government intervention (internet, space grade goods and services, GPS, etc. just to name a few), so you simply cannot say in a deterministic way that a free market "performs better". This is simply NOT true.
FWIW - I'm a free market advocate, but I recognize markets and areas where externalities cannot be controlled for and thus require a centralized body to regulate.
In the 19th century, the free market resulted in bootstrapping scores of millions of people up out of poverty into the middle class and beyond. The government was not involved in this.
> We have countless examples of innovations that have come through government intervention
We have far more from the free market. Have you ever looked at the number of patents?
As for the internet, that was simply a protocol. There were many other network protocols - Prodigy, RBBS, Bix, AOL, Ethernet, etc. Any time someone had two computers, they were connected with some form of network.
You're overlooking the grandaddy of networks - the telegraphy system. Yes, the first international binary network protocol. All later networks were based on ideas it pioneered. But somehow only the IP is valid?
Did you know that controled, powered flight came from the free market? Did you know that jet engines were developed thanks to funds from the free market, as the military saw no use for jet engines? The government did not get involved until they saw flying jet aircraft?
The free market also invented cars, bicycles, light bulbs, electric power generation utilities, telephones, circular saws, and on and on and on and on?
> I recognize markets and areas where externalities cannot be controlled for and thus require a centralized body to regulate
Externalities, such as pollution, are not free market, and are in the purview of government.
Did you know that the US railroad system was largely propped up by the US government during the 19th century, thus leading to the greatest exchange of goods and services across the whole of the US?
> Have you ever looked at the number of patents?
Did you even read the article?
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.
> Externalities, such as pollution, are not free market, and are in the purview of government.
You're proving my point yet again. If externalities are regulated ("purview of the government") then the good or service that is provided IS NOT REALLY A FREE MARKET. A truly free market would presume that any externality incurred would cause a subsequent good or service to be created to solve that externality.
You keep providing examples of the free market creating goods and services that are meaningful and beneficial as counter examples as to why they are better than government innovations. Yet, I am saying BOTH ARE IMPORTANT and one cannot unilaterally be true because we have cases on both side. In other words, it's not mutually exclusive, both can be true. Yet you continue to beat this drum that free market solves everything. Odd.
sigh At least try to look for examples that aren't so completely, utterly wrong. Which "flying jet aircraft" would that even be? The only one where you could even start to make that argument would be Heinkel's He178 prototype. Apart from the fact that it was explicitly designed to be monetized militarily...where do you think those funds came from in late 30s Germany, at one of the leading military plane manufacturers? (and please don't say Lufthansa...they didn't operate on a "free market" even since their inception in 26, and certainly not after 33).
You can't spell jet aircraft without military-industrial complex. Hell, even the first 707 family variant in service was a military one (KC-135).
Edit - almost overlooked that nugget:
>Externalities, such as pollution, are not free market, and are in the purview of government.
Ah yes, privatize profits, socialize costs. That kind of free market. I shouldn't have bothered.
Because a market can not be free unless there are rules and they are enforced.
Without rules and government intervention when necessary, what you get is the law of the jungle, which is precisely the thing the last 12000 years of human history has been about escaping.
Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority
But why is that interesting?
If you enter into a contract to sell your car to someone and then instead of paying you they steal your car and kill you, that's crime, not a free market. Killing people by dumping mercury into the river is still just crime. Killing people by burning dirty coal is something that should be crime, even if it officially isn't.
But this is different than banning things where each involved party is consenting, or imposing unfunded mandates or bureaucratic filing requirements. The less of those things there are, the freer the market is, and those places tend to do better than the places captured by central planners.
Moreover, the main point is completely valid. If Palm's product isn't as good as an iPhone then you don't have to buy it and then they go away. If the DMV sucks, what are you going to do?
There is no deterministic evidence for this and you cannot unilaterally say that. The problem here is that the market/service requires context. The main point made was that you can take any market and it will eventually self correct - this is simply untrue and we have countless examples of this.
But on net the externalities are just as likely to be doing more good than bad. I've yet to see anyone in the public debate tallying up the positive externalities of markets. "They have externalities!" is likely to be an argument in favour of free markets, without the positive externalities a free market generates we would be poorer and more uncomfortable - it doesn't take much looking to find a whole raft of spinoffs where free market activity generates positive externalities.
Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease where through no action of their own actors and musicians get a lot more money than in medieval times purely to represent the alternatives the market offers them.
This apparently will continue until we hit rock bottom. I just hope others will be ready to face angry German mobs this time around.
Of course there is also a chance that we will finally learn something as a society and prevent bad things from happening. An admittedly tiny chance, but it exists.
Germany’s underinvestment in public infrastructure is a combination of an obsession with minimising public debt at any cost, a wast and complicated bureaucracy that allows people to delay projects almost inevitably.
The market does not regulate that, and everyone who takes a look can see that, no matter how often some FDP or CDU wacko will claim otherwise. That is the point I am making. The market is very short sighted, oriented towards short term gain, at the cost of the general public. The general public needs to deal with the fallout of it all. Terrible train service, bad infrastructure, expensive public transport, too many cars, bad air quality, bad health, lacking education, the list goes on. All those matters are matters, where spending does not directly benefit some already wealthy group of people.
It goes even further: The "market", consists also of lobbyists, who do everything they can to influence politicians and get policies implemented, that make people buy cars, even at the cost of worsening public infrastructure. They have delayed developing electric cars and are now clinging to the German market. They do not care about normal people having to get to work via public transport. Buy a frickin' car! Is their response. Instead of improving public transport, it gets noticeably worse every year. So the free market is not only responsible for not doing good things, it is also responsible for actively harming the population.
Now it may be, that the free market also has its upsides. But the view that it will solve all the problems if we only let it is very naive and proven wrong again and again.
Youre blaming this on markets? Germanys problem is an overly rigid beuarcratic state that refuses to run a deficit, not overly free markets.
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.
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.
Presumably this is the case you’re citing: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
Also, police is a requirement because libertarianism relies on government to protect peoples' rights. Gutting the police department is what anarchists do, not libertarians.
If you want to know of a successful libertarian experiement, see the founding of the United States. (Excluding the slave states, of course. Slavery is antiethical to libertarianism.)
Edit: I guess this works of thieves too.
The debt is so huge it does not even account for a fraction of it. People need to stop dreaming about easy solutions that fit on a piece of paper.
It does self-correct and optimize. But as you said it below, it optimizes towards
> they concentrate wealth
Monopolies or oligopolies.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
the top 0.1% hold $22.14 trillion and the top 1% hold $54 trillion.
The total federal debt is around $35 trillion. So for sure the top 1% could pay off the debt in order to have a reset at least.
I'm not saying it should be done, but it does not seem impossible.
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.
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.
Instead it’s the same kind of shakeups you regularly see in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA is a merger of the Health Services Administration (1973–1982) and Health Resources Administration (1973–1982). However currently one of its major functions is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed up in 1990.
I’ll grant you it’s really different kinds of instability though.
Humongous companies just become national-level power brokers adversely affecting both the government and the free market.
This was true during the gilded age and it’s become true again. It took systematic regulations, unions, welfare, and the Sherman antitrust act.
If it wasn’t for a democratic government the oligarchs would still have been in control. They are corrupting the current institutions thought the DOGE coup. You see this in the self dealing of the billionaires such as Musks contracts as well as the tariff exemption grift.
So please don’t flaunt a free market as a natural solution to inefficient systems, not even Adam Smith believed that.
As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance? Which elected officials have they fired?
If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a coup.
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.
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.
The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.
Even when it doesn’t, it is training researchers who can enter systems which have different incentives like private research and development. That is a massive positive externality.
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.
There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home prices. These policies create housing scarcity both for homes and rental units.
That saddles later generations with unreasonably high housing costs and makes them unable to afford to start a family, so the fertility rate drops. If you want more kids, build more housing.
> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:
If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.
I believe it was some Republican president who said something to the effect of “if you move to Germany you may be a citizen but you are not a German… But if you move to America and become a citizen you are an American”.
It’s worth noting that not all advanced societies have fared as badly as Korea and Japan. Scandinavia for instance is below replacement but not nearly as catastrophically as Korea. It’s possible that a bit more policy tweaking and more productivity=>leisure time could get them back to a replacement rate.
heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
Importing cheap labor has been a constant throughout the countries history, look at camps of people building the railroads you’ll see lots of Chinese people etc.
How do we solve the issue of the end state, where all economies have reached our current level of advancement?
I assume we solve it, or we go extinct, and that would be an odd reason to do so after millions of years, wouldn't it?
The USA as a whole has 1.7 births per woman which is really close to the ~2.1 needed. However that isn’t evenly distributed ethic Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander’s living in the US actually sit just above replacement rate. Give it 200 years and that may very well increase.
Really 3 kids needs to be seen as normal long term because some people just aren’t going to have any.
The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing.
If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
Indeed, in some parts of Russia, white supremacists do not consider Caucasians to be white. It really does depend on who and when you ask.
We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.
Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!
Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.
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.
Compared to a surgeon who's impact is more local, they might help a few patients in a week.
Do you think a combat soldier is more important than a VP of Google?
If every ticktocker quit tomorrow, would society still function? Yes. Things would go on like nothing ever happened.
If every surgeon quit tomorrow, would society still function? No, people would die, they would become timid and afraid of being hurt, because minor injuries would be fatal and life changing. Not only that, we would lose centuries worth of knowledge and be forced to learn it all from scratch again from books instead of trained surgeons.
The danger in your logic is it leads to thinking like this: "ticktockers provide more value than surgeons because they can scale their reach, therefore in order to maximize total value to society, we can maximize the number of ticktickers and we don't have to worry about surgeons. We can just offset the lost value by the value brought by all the ticktockers."
That's an obvious bad idea and straw man, but people really try to go down that slippery slope in non-obvious cases. The realm of education comes to mind. "MOOCs are more valuable than universities because they have more reach, therefore in the future we will close down universities and only have MOOCs" is something I've heard seriously proposed before.
The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity.
The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars.
Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct?
A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.
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.
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.
Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world?
The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
Some countries like South Korea are going to face major challenges far sooner, but frankly having the most extreme examples collapse means the average stays higher.
The absolute number of humans isn't the issue. It's that people expect to retire at 65, but are now living into their 80s and 90s. Retirees have to be supported by working people, i.e. younger people. If the ratio of younger people to older people gets out of kilter, there's huge problems. Life extension makes this worse rather than better.
If 150 year olds are as healthy as current 50 year olds they may very well be expected to work. And personally I’d happily extend how long people are expected to work in exchange for significantly longer lifespans.
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?
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.
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/convergence-accelera...
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.
This merely proved that President Biden believed that President Trump will prosecute and imprison Dr Fauci if given the opportunity.
The pardon doesn't protect him from harassment, it only protects him if he specifically committed crimes from 2014-2025 or in several official capacities. If the Trump team is just going to pretend they can say he did something 25 years ago in a private capacity and the pardon does nothing. The pardon only helps if he did something plausibly criminal recently (in which case there is a real question of why he got a pardon - they aren't supposed to be preemptive method of putting people above the law without even knowing what they did).
A charitable interpretation for Fauci is it is there to distract people from the numerous Biden-family pardons the same day and to stop people asking what they did (https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-jos... if anyone wants to look - C-f "Biden" & I count 4 that day + Hunter). But there are probably other things going on.
This conversation is pointless. Have a nice day.
Research funding is really cheap compared to everything else the government does.
That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.
We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will happen.
If debt was such a killer the US would have never waged the wars it did. Debt hawks have been saying Social security medicare and medicaid will bankrupt our country for decades. It hasn't happened.
There’s this thing called taxes. We’ve had thirty years of tax hawks intentionally creating this situation that we find ourselves in, because they’ve cut taxes without any sense of responsibility for its impact on the debt/deficit. In fact that’s been their plan all along, to “starve the beast”, cause a crisis, and force cuts to popular programs that they wouldn’t get political support for otherwise.
Should they? We literally built a juggernaut with our incumbent model that is the envy of the entire world and has produced untold innovation and wealth creation, for pennies of our tax dollars. The only reason I can see being advanced to undo that is pure dogma and blind faith in ideology.
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.
Up until you got to the rationing and coal shortages I think the parallels with the contemporary US are pretty obvious.
These are not equivalent situations.
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.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
In my career, there's only one position I can definitely point to as "That shouldn't exist" - ironically, it's both one that played well with "The university should be more like a business" and was also, in effect, a retention move for their massively productive spouse.
It's like me saying I'm going to cut down my spending, and instead of moving houses to reduce my rent by $1000, I instead focus right away on cutting out my $5/mo VPS hosting service.
That's not to say that government debt couldn't become a problem, even a serious one, but as long as the economy grows fast enough to support the interest payments, it's not an "existential problem". The danger isn't so much the debt itself but in the confidence in the US economy falling below the level required to sustain that debt.
I loan the US government money by buying treasury bills because I trust that when they mature, others would be willing to lend the US money. When this trust in the health of the US economy declines, then there's a problem with the debt, but then there are also other big problems. What you'll see is rising interest rates that is likely combined with an unpromising economy, and yeah, that's a serious problem. A high debt could definitely exacerbate it (and that's why it's helpful to slow down the growth of the debt or even reduce it if possible), but it's not its cause.
Another thing to remember is that government expenses are often investments. This doesn't only apply to health, education, law enforcement, and transportation infrastructure but also to social security. If people think they'll be left penniless at retirement, they'll spend less and save more. Borrowing to finance investment is a wise policy when the resulting growth can pay for the interest and then some, even if it means a growing debt.
If you invest well, leveraging your investment is exactly what you should do.
The deficit just means the US government should collect more taxes and cut spending. Efficiency efforts should have gone towards neutering nimbys.
Now with Republicans in power, we can expect tax revenue to take a huge hit, and economic recession, and the deficit to blow out.
In the last 25 years, Republicans have consistently taken positive trends in gdp, unemployment, and deficits and tanked the economy.
And, yet, they're doing nothing to tax the wealth at the top and are actively trying to reduce their tax revenue streams.
America doesn't need to cut every service they have to be OK. They're the most powerful country in the world.. or they were 90 days ago.
Until the US actually looks hard at the wealth disparity and accumulation of the >0.1%, it's hard to take it seriously that they care about their debt. Likewise, in their current approach to MORE military spending, tariffs (crashing the economy tends to REDUCE tax Rev and increase deficits), and immigration campaign (you don't tackle the deficit by killing your workforce).
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.
Where did you get these figures from? According to OECD, the US' tax revenue-to-GDP ratio was 27.6% in 2022 and 25.2% in 2023: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i... It was 28.3% in 2000, when Clinton was still President.
https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product
$5 Trillion Tax Revenue
$28.177 trillion GDP
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.
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-...
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.
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...
In the utopia where the USA is actually a beacon of democracy, the people in the BRICs countries might be fans of it, and would vehemently support politicians who align themselves with it, weakening other political factions.
> 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.
I believe hastening it (momentarily) has been good. Well the looming debt issue as I understand this subthread to be about.
Like a patient getting indigestion and goes to the ER thinking it's a heat attack, only to find it’s not but his cholesterol and BP is through the roof and he needs blood pressure meds asap.
Trumps tactics has caused much more attention on the matter. Tariffs can be reduced, etc, but hopefully bringing a wake up call will help avoid catastrophe.
No idea if that was part of Trumps plan or just bumbling, but I believe it’ll be good long term.
I’ve been reading lots of dystopian sci-fi fearing hyperinflation in the near future in the US and then Europe. Now it seems people are taking it a bit more seriously. Even this comment chain shows that.
Then again I’m also encouraged by Argentina’s response after 70-80 years of hyperinflation and stagnation. Javier Milei‘s policies appear to be working contrary to the prediction of most everyone beforehand.
Their parents warn them that if they keep spending on it there will be major issues. But hey, they still have like $10k of credit and they can get another card! They’re just old and predicting catastrophe all the time.
Until one day they they have no more credit left and all their income goes to paying credit card interest not even paying off the debt.
In the 70s the debt was negligible. Now the debt is nearing 100% of the US GDP [1]. Historically once countries reach 120% hyperinflation occurs. The dollar being the global reserve currency buffers it a bit but not indefinitely.
1: https://econofact.org/why-is-the-u-s-debt-expected-to-keep-g...
Just because climate change hasn’t ended the world yet in 50 years doesn’t mean it’s not a serious threat.
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.
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.
This is just very much not the case. The government can always spend to meet obligations unless it chooses not to, whether that's interest on unnecessary bonds or social security benefits. Any restriction on the arbitrary total "debt" is a self-imposed farce and should all stop playing along.
Presenting a problem of tension for dollars is a tool used to justify withholding delivering services people want and need. It's a choice, when really the only scarcity is resources.
ha ha. you mean like in 2008 and 2009, the great recession (1), the subprime mortgage crisis (2), etc., and then things like:
(1) the great recession
(2) the subprime mortgage crisis
TARP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Progra...
terms floating around at that time, like:
"privatize profits, socialize losses"
"too big to fail"
etc.?
actually, IIRC now, that was "nationalize losses" - meaning, let us (fat cats) benefit when we make big profits, and let the public suffer when we make big losses - by making the government support / prop us up financially through acts / things like TARP.
mea culpa.
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?
US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.
I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.
Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).
As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
It is not existential except for the financial markets, because they need safe securities: remove US bonds and modern finance grinds to halt.
US debt is high just because the US government decided in the 80s that they will start borrowing money from the rich instead of taxing them. The money exists, and it doesn't have to be borrowed just because Laffer draw a cute curve on a restaurant napkin.
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
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'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 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.
Much less than Roosevelt's 94%
But I'm neither democrat nor republican, it might not make sense to anyone :)
All this 'just tax the billionaires' is the latter.
It’s the direct, logical implication of the statement and you are obviously moving the goalposts after the fact. The truth is, any tax increases will have to affect just about everyone who pays taxes in order to make any real difference. There is no possible way that taxing billionaires more is even a significant chunk of the solution.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
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.
PS: veritassium is just amazing. Yesterday I learned that conservation of energy is a local phenomenon and a geometric consequence, not a law of the universe at all. I am 36 with an engineering background and conservation laws were close to sacred laws of the universe. It turns out, not really and it has to do with the universe expanding. Veritassium just drops it like that, with a nice story.
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.
This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of hundreds of thousands proves the point!
Of course it doesn't.
Do you understand that? If so, then why are you casually throwing around those talking points that are contributing to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human livelihoods? This isn't a game.
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.
There's also usually a mismatch between what older scientists and younger scientists think are the right approach to studying something.
But generally, science is pretty good. You're reading small slices and assuming it actually represents all of science. It doesn't. Please give me a better sense of what ground your ear is on. I don't think it's generally representative of most science fields. Science has a cool thing where you could post totally fake data, but there are enough actors that also would question it if it's entirely unreproducible. Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support your expectations), not blatant lies. The blatant lie stories you hear are not actually common and I'd love to hear where you think they are.
Yeah you missed it. When you do small nudges or selectively report data that's even worse than faking data. Not all villains twirl their mustaches. It's the ones that don't that are the most dangerous, these are the ones that are going to suck time and effort away from the collective endeavour the worst. Everyone knows that leclair can't do synthesis. But how certain are we that Phil Baran's Xenon oxidation really worked?
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.
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
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.
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.
> “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.
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.)
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.
It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
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.
That sounds on par with most other professions where the US salary is about a third higher, with a cost of living (health, housing etc) eating most of the difference.
Perhaps I'm also not buying that the US has a fundamentally better system, and not just a dominant position to begin with, with tons of money to invest and raise an army of researchers. Comparing to China could be a more interesting exercise, as it's also flooded with money now and is getting competitive in research.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Phd-Researcher-Salary
[1] https://publication.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/F...
You definitely could make 70K if you worked somewhere and also won a research fellowship, but that is the exception, not the rule. I think it's amazing how much science the US produces, considering how low the pay is. Maybe I'm spoiled in CS, but it's crazy how little people in science get paid, especially considering I think their work is often fundamentally more challenging. Granted is also much more risky and hard to monetize
In the UK (where I am based so I know the numbers well) a post doc is usually paid around 52,936 dollars a year, or a bit more if in london closer to 60,000 dollars a year. US postdocs seem to be somewehre between 60,000-90,000 dollars depending on institution, MIT [2] for example state a minimum of 69,000 and maximum of 90,000 dollars for a post-doc. This lines up well with your claim of a third higher, however the cost of living claim doesn't really check out, especially since tax rates are much higher in european countries than the US.
If we take your numbers for example with 100k usd, after federal taxes and NY state taxes (the highest I believe) you're looking at close to a 25% marginal tax rate so a take-home of 75,000 USD. In France on 85000 USD you would have a marginal tax rate of 38% for a take home of 52,700 USD. This is closer to a 43% difference not 33%, and does not include the fact that this is not disposable income. For instance my annual pay recently doubled, but my disposable income after council tax/bills/food/transport increased by about 900%, far above the 200% increase. Thus a 33% pay increase would be life-changing, not just some minor increase. (and the cost of living is really not that much higher in the US anyway, since VAT at 20% in europe is much higher than sales tax in most states, and health-care is included in many US jobs of the type we are talking about here, rent is the only thing largely more expensive in the US, but you guys actually have incredibly cheap property when normalised by size. In the us you are looking at a median of 2,500 USD per square meter for houses and somewhere around 5,000 for an apatment, whilst in france it is somewhere around 6750 (couldn't find a breakdown per type)).
[2]: https://postdocs.mit.edu/postdoctoral-position/postdoctoral-...
The first link was ZipRecruiter survey with two peaks at 54k and 150k, leading to the average of 100k.
On the cost of living, I see your point, and sure a straight 33% increase is nothing to sneeze at. The actual impact is more complicated depending on the personal situation, I'm not in the US so I was under the impression there's a lot more costs, especially with a family for instance, where EU countries tend to be costly for singles but easier to deal with with kids. But it also comes down to life style, and researchers might benefit as much of the social perks in general (overall I'm mostly in agreement)
So that could be a political stance...
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.
Post-WWII the US had already become the superpower in science and technology and Europe was struggling to rebuild after the war (e.g. rationing ended in the UK only in 1954).
The brain drain started before the war, was amplified by the war, and continued after the war because the US were so rich generally. This has continued since. I don't think that what Trump is doing will have an impact because it may not last and the US will still overall much more attractive than, say, Europe.
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.
Reiterating what the Hebrew congregation write to Washington he responded:
> For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [0]
It is a paradox that people living the United States with its freedoms can only continue doing so as long as they equally protect the freedoms of everyone else without bigotry or persecution.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...
Per capita? The US had a larger population.
Invented and developed in the UK.
> Microwave communication
Lion's share of pre-war advances and development were in various European countries.
> Synthetic Rubber
Developed by Fritz hoffman at the Bayer Laboratory in Germany, 1906
Frankly, your comment is a massive self-own.
The USA being a beacon of hope and enlightenment in those days stands in stark contrast to the isolationist, anti-intellectual, anti-research, and frankly xenophobic policies pursued by the current admin, courts, and congress.
Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
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).
What isn't a myth is the billions of dollars given to them. The same billions were given to Japan and Korea and they actually used it to bootstrap an advanced, sustainable technology-driven economy. Europe squandered the opportunity.
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.
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.
A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
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.
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.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
"viewpoint diversity" isn't a guarantee of merit-based hiring policies
> 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.
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.
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.
Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.
In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?
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.
And it's also why it's so insulting to just dismiss this whole process and claim rampant fraud with zero evidence. It's basically accusing thousands of people of being lazy and felonious and maliciously negligent. It's telling thousands of researchers who struggle for funding that they're apparently just morons for not getting in on the "infinite cash" we purportedly hand out like candy. It's saying universities don't need buildings or janitors and shouldn't take bulk discounts on their raw materials. Etc.
This isn't even getting into the absurd misunderstanding of economics of treating a government grant like a hamburger purchase. The US gives money to a US university which purchases US materials and pays US staff that are all taxed to give money to the US government. And their findings develop knowledge and cultivate skilled labor in the US that produce higher value exports for the US which are taxed to the US government. They aren't buying a hamburger, they're taking on what has proven to be one of the best investments in world history.
> 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...
Here's an easy approach to a counterargument.
Private foundation grants account for less than 10% of all research funding in the sciences [1]. The fact that researchers apply for and receive private grants has _nothing_ to do with whether their funding restrictions would be sustainable when scaled up.
While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.
In your mind it seems to be "those people come pleading for money so they can do research, giving it is essentially charity"- but it couldn't be further from the truth.
Most top-tier researchers can do their science anywhere. If you don't make stuff easy and comfortable enough to hold them, they'll just leave the country. A significant chunk of science spending is an attempt to bribe researchers to stay. Drop that and other countries are going to get those invaluable people.
I can tell you that several major EU universities have started massive outreach programs and are starting to snatch all the top researchers from the US. The damage this will cause to the US' scientific leadership is not even quantifiable, it's completely insane.
Shooting your own foot because you "don't trust bureaucrats". Oh well.
Anyway, at my university the first few top researchers already arrived, this is going to be exciting in european research. If you guys don't want this massive advantage, we'll gladly take it.
One of my friends, who is a tenured professor in a top 10 US university, already switched our Signal messages to expire after 24h the other day. I asked him why, and he said "you never know what the current administration might use against you".
So yes, I'm all for having our people back if the US voted that they don't want them.
1) We refuse them when we can. Like if you have a lower indirect rate, my institution's policy is that has to be located somewhere that's documented, you can't just do it. I did have one where the sponsored programs folks just said no.
2) As mentioned, they're sort of a drop in the bucket, and also important to junior faculty, so they're a little bit accepted as loss leaders.
3) At several institutions, it was made clear to me that if you relied on these, and not "full fat" grants, by the time you came up for tenure, things would be bad.
The great irony is every research administrator I know (and I know a lot) sort of hates these. If they had wanted to, "You cannot charge a private organization a indirect rate lower than your negotiated federal rate of the same type" (there are different rates depending on the nature of the project) would probably have been met with "Yeah, that tracks."
Instead, they're trying to use it as an excuse to absolutely gut research.
These rates are negotiated with the federal government. There's already a mechanism for this.
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.
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.
- The research animal facilities - HPC staff, upgrades, etc. - Our BSL-3 facilities (the only ones for a long way) - Various and sundry research cores - New faculty startup funds
Those are all pretty tightly correlated with success, and very difficult to support via single grants.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system
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.
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.
That is the tragedy of the American empire- instead of improving the lives of its citizens all the money went to tax cuts.
Despite the founders being anti-party politics and wanting a spectrum of representatives each representing a block of the broader population and hammering out consensual deals that most can live with, the US has devolved into a two party system in which neither party especially represents 50% of the population despite both butting up against the median of actual voters.
This is the doom spiral of iterative FPTP and Hotelling's 'law'.
Other democracies have many parties, larger parties mixed with smaller parties, greater voter engagement, various forms of proportional voting systems (there are several), etc.
US democracy is just one example of many global democracies.
> Lest the poorly educated masses of people
Like a bit more taxes on the wealthiest, a bit more social safety nets for the neediest?
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.
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.
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.
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).
Coming from Europe I think the sarcasm was pretty obvious. More like "duh".
Unfortunately, your implications are spot on.
We, the people, are our own worst enemies.
Edit: I forgot theocracy.
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.
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.
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.
You know what they say about lies and statistics.
Plutarch
It annoys me no end to read so many comments to the effect of "why didn't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?". Not that I'm saying there were not any economic failures by various British governments over the years.
Honestly, so many Americans have no idea about their country's foreign policy. I guess you have to be on the receiving end of their short stick to understand
And yes, it's domestic security that enables long-term investment in science.
We all know the rule: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Two significant and obvious difference come to mind. I'm sure there are others.
1) WWII did major physical damage to Europe and Japan, to say nothing of the underlying economic damage (e.g., Britain's war debt handcuffed them). Sans any serious competition, of course the US excelled.
2) Along the same lines, the US then didn't have the trillions in debt the US has now. Many of the universities seeing their grants cut are well into the black. On the other hand, Uncle Sam is drenched red ink.
I understand the value of investing. But given the financial fitness of the universities, it feels more like subsidies. Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers. Yes, Sam can continue to buy success, but at what cost?
Why do you think that?
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.
They'll probably talk about starting to promote innovation. They kind of have to. But it's a paradigm shift.
In a context where the comparison is China...
I say, let a thousand flowers bloom!
How the United States became a science superpower — and how quickly it could crumble
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.
It's hard to really compare the two.
And the detriment of UK's auto industry, manufacturing industry, and etc. I really don't understand how people still fancy state-controlled economy.
I do want to pick up where he left off: the interface between the US and China, and specifically look at how China has invested. I've spent some effort on this forum making the point that our system has left some critical vulnerabilities that the Chinese have leveraged, e.g. (1,2).
It's worth understanding that Xi Jinping has been working hard on this problem set, along with his predecessors and many around him for a long time. To really understand his whole-of-economy approach, I highly recommend Hank Paulson's Dealing with China (3). He has and maintains a narrative of literally going from a boy in a cave to the leader of the largest nation on Earth. Much like the narrative arc Churchill maintained for himself (the Prof Blank mentions), Xi would see science as a component of the tapestry, but not the whole story.
Xi is also using the Belt and Road Initiative for massive effect, see the maps in (4). The US has started to pay attention with renewed investments in the region, e.g. (5) but Xi has a decade head start and a political base that could be characterized as relatively stable compared to the current US administration.
As my time is limited, I'm appending a reading list at the end for those interested (6 to end). Suffice to say, yes this is how we became a science superpower. But it ignores how our parochial incentives and belief in American exceptionalism morphed in the American narcissism (14) this is very likely to doom the American experiment without significant effort on the part of the American population to come together. Unfortunately, I fear the fracturing of the population is too far gone to remediate without major conflict, but major conflict in the present setting is likely far more serious than we could survive as a nation.
As a final thought, the major conflict is obviously nuclear war. We will not survive that as a nation. Thus the Prisoner's Dilemma. We are all prisoners on Earth. Even Musk's species-level escape is far from escape. The physics of deep space travel or even intra-solar-system travel just don't work out in our favor. So, how do you survive the Prisoner's Dilemma? The math answer is "there are a lot of complicated answers" ref (15) but mainly, all parties need to work toward, and signal reliably that they are working toward, stable equilibrium. Being an unreliable partner must be met with brutality, even at the cost of everyone.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655390
(2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321493
(3) Hank Paulson, Dealing with China. We, and specifically, Goldman Sachs, and specifically Hank Paulson, taught Xi how to win. https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superp...
(4) https://merics.org/en/tracker/how-bri-shaping-global-trade-a...
(5) https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/us-revives-wwii-era-pacific-ai...
(6) Manchester. The Last Lion, the 3 volume definitive biography of Churchill, which puts the Prof's work in the largest possible context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Lion:_Winston_Spencer...
(7) Jamie Holmes. 12 Seconds of Silence, the definitive story of the proximity fuse, a significant portio of Merle Tuve's unique contributions to the war, and the story of the founding of Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory. https://www.amazon.com/Seconds-Silence-Inventors-Tinkerers-S...
(8) Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Note Merle Tuve also plays a critical role in this narrative, not bad for one of those 'second rate' government labs. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
(9) Rocco Casagrande and the work of Gryphon Scientific, alas (but probably net good) acquired by Deloitte. Wayback has some of their reports: https://web.archive.org/web/20240228103801/https://www.gryph...
(10) Senior Colonel Ji-Wei Guo, and his theory of Merciful Conquest, audaciously published in the US's own Military Medicine journal https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19813351/ see also https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/weaponizing-bio...
(11) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Dictator's Handbook. This Berkeley professor uses innumerable real world examples to illustrate how dictators effectively control their populations https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
(12) James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. UC Santa Cruz professor uses several extremely large examples the illustrate other ways governments control their resources. Spends a lot of time on the negative effects but certainly acknowledges the net upsides usually seem to outweigh the net downsides, but it would be good to learn how to avoid downsides when you can: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
(13) Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Most interesting passage to me was the dinner with Obama where Jobs told Obama the manufacturing jobs are never coming back. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648...
(14) H.R. McMaster https://www.twincities.com/2020/10/16/h-r-mcmaster-u-s-forei... also https://www.amazon.com/Battlegrounds-Fight-Defend-Free-World...
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.
This is an argument that I have literally never heard, despite being in academia a long time.
This is the entire basis of the US, excluding Native Americans. I'm first-gen American, have only ever lived here and wholly identify as an American. My story is super common here - and its not that many generations back that most Americans were European/African/Asian as a whole. So I don't exactly understand what you mean - the power did consolidate here with the mixture of many brilliant minds across the globe, and largely has remained until a recent President has decimated our reputation.
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".
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.
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?
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.