Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Tax wealth somehow, not just income. It's clear the accumulation has become a generational problem. Your great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the wealth his have.
It's frustrating that people honestly think this isn't a problem. What's the point of the system of economic value? It's supposed to make our exchange of good and services more efficient. What's more efficient about a handful of dudes hoarding effectively the entire supply? It works better when value is evenly distributed throughout the system. It's the whole point, in fact. If we allow it turn into a high score game where the winners are the ones with the best cheats we make a system that increases overall suffering, inefficiency, and rent-seeking.
Yes, in this theoretical world where stocks trend down over extended periods of time, I could see this being an issue.
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.
But that's only if they keep generating value. Plenty of companies don't do that and we forget about them. Basing one's worldview only on peak performers is the apex fallacy[0].
It doesn't need to hit peak. It just needs to be a good bit above where it was issued. Zuckerberg, e.g., could run this strategy indefinitely, even if meta dropped by 50%. He'll still defer the cap gains until his grave.
Once capital grows large enough it starts being able to bend the fabric of economic space around it. It begins to change rules and accumulate more capital merely because it's so big. This is a natural feature of capitalism. Properly attended to, fire makes steam and runs an engine. Left unchecked, it's a forest fire. Capitalism is like that. It needs moderating influences to keep it controlled and useful and not consuming everything it touches.
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.
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?
We have computers in our pockets that can perform trillions of calculations per second; we have social media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth, that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of calculations per year!"
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!"
>We have computers in our pockets that can perform trillions of calculations per second; we have social media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth, that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of calculations per year!"
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.
Why don't you help brainstorm ideas instead of being dismissive? There is no right answer right now. Clearly in order for society to move forward in a healthy way, single individuals cannot amass wealth/power that is a millennia ahead of everyone else. The goal isn't to say you can't be wealthy. The goal is wealth/power cannot be obscenely beyond everyone else. These few individuals have more power than governments. This is a complex issue that requires a complex solution. There is no easy answer.
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.
The OP just wants your hands off their money. They know it's a problem. It's not one they want solved. They probably also think they genuinely accumulated their wealth strictly from their own skillset with no external factors contributing to it.
The dodgy part is what happens after someone dies. 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.
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.
> Charging capital gains AND estate tax doesn't make sense, estate tax is typically higher than capital gains tax.
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".
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.
>The key here is that you need enough wealth to keep borrowing for rest of your life without touching your principle.
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.
Not really. The top 1% item roughly $50 Trillion in assets. In 2010…15 years ago…that was only $15 Trillion. If you look at the graph of the national debt and the graph of the money supply, i.e. money printing, you will find they basically overlap, correlate, track.
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.
The budget deficit so far. So yes, if we were to take all their money, the debt would go to zero for exactly one moment, then we would go back to spending more than we have immediately, but now with the chilling effect that taking wealth like that would have. Not super helpful.
Could you be overestimating how easy it is to take possession of their money given global free trade? In 10 years, what are the odds you and others will have finally, after all these years, actually managed to have “taxed the rich” as has been proposed as the solution to current debt levels for many years now? If we cannot be certain of those tax revenues from finally “taxing the rich”, then they cannot solve the debt problem and we therefore need to look for other solutions. Not that the wreckless and irresponsible cuts from DOGE are the solution. They are likely to increase the size and scope of the government in the long run, after impairing it’s efficiency and operational capacity in the short. Hopefully the dems don’t blow the opportunity this time.
> The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
> Markets don’t account for externalities
Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
> they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power)
You're describing regulatory capture. This is why governments are supposed to have limited powers. To keep them from passing rules that enrich cronies and entrench incumbents.
> they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable)
Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those things. There are plenty of high quality private schools, high quality private medical facilities and high quality private research labs.
The real problem here is that some people can't afford those things. But now you're making the case for a UBI so people can afford those things when they otherwise couldn't, not for having the government actually operate the doctor's office.
> As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California). The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
Meanwhile most of what the rich own are investment securities like stocks and US treasuries. What happens if you increase their taxes? They have less to invest. The stocks then go to someone not being taxed, i.e. foreign investors, so more of the future returns of US companies leave the country. Fewer treasury buyers increase the interest rate the US pays on the debt. Fewer stock buyers lower stock prices, which reduce capital gains and therefore capital gains tax revenue. Fewer stock buyers make it harder for companies to raise money, which lowers employment and wages, and therefore tax revenue again. Increasing the proportion of tax revenue that comes from "the rich" causes an extremely perverse incentive whenever you ask the Congressional Budget Office to do the numbers on how a policy that would transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class would affect tax revenue, and the policy correspondingly gets shelved.
>> There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
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.
> 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.
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!
Too generic terms become an issue at some point. "Government" and "market" are not one thing that you can easily measure to "big" or "small" or "good" or "bad".
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".
> 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.
"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.
Wealth in a free market is not "concentrated", it is created.
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 is not only about learning material being available. It is also about live circumstances of people. Think about when you are doing your learning. When do you have opportunity to learn. Think about what other people might be doing at that time, that prevents them from learning. Think about the mental framework you have, that enables you to learn and that others might not have.
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?
My friend Eric Engstrom (yes, that guy) got a programming job at Microsoft despite having zero education beyond high school. He became a team leader for DirectX.
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.
This post is a great example of how very smart people can fall victim to their own biases.
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.
I completely agree and would add that different people have different social needs. I love learning by myself. I don't need an example, I do it for fun. In the universities I studied, I have seen LOTS of people that were learning because everybody was learning. And they were smart, and capable, they just needed an environment and some structure.
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)
> Where can they go, to claim certificates or whatever, for their new knowledge, to get any chance of employment?
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.
I get where you are coming from, I really do, I've worked with those self starters. I worked with a guy without any education past HS and he was great, he taught me a lot.
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.
While what you say is true, I think it is a failure of generalization. A few special cases show it is possible, but what you don't mention is how extraordinary these cases are and at what time they happened and what background, including ideas, information, location, and motivation the people had.
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.
"One of the important ways we make use of donations is in awarding scholarships to highly skilled students. Each $5 you donate contributes to approximately one hour of work by a talented graduate student" from the dlang website.
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?
Pointing to unusual people, then claiming that proves they exemplify what should be usual…
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.
Speaking as someone who has been both a technical interviewer and an interviewee many times over the past 30 years, I find it a bit disingenuous to compare second hand bookstores to a formal primary or secondary education when it comes to their application in an active job market.
> 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%.
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.
In the US, capital gains are taxed at a different rate from ordinary income, so taxing the "rich" (where the money is) doesn't necessarily have to destroy investing (not to mention a lot of retirement is tied up in investing, the rich aren't the only investors).
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].
> 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%.
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/
> Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
> 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.
Norwegian here. It's not at all comparable. Norway has a wealth tax (about 1.09%), lots of consumption-level taxes (25% VAT, fees on gas, etc.), high capital gains tax (37.85% flat, no "qualified dividends" or tax-free bonds or Roth loopholes or anything like that).
> There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
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 are no documented instances of a truly free market.
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.
>The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.
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.
The United States, postwar Japan, postwar Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea, China, and so on.
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?
The united states during its periods of greatest growth as well as the other environments you called out had strong regulatory environments to keep "the market" in check
> The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
It would be interesting to note how you define a free market in this context and what makes it “more free”.
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.
> There are no documented instances of a truly free market.
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?
> those places tend to do better than the places captured by central planners.
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.
I mean, you can easily observe it. Look at Germany. Not investing sufficiently into education, public Infrastructure, hospitals, and probably more. Inefficient bureaucracy everywhere. Long term effects already visible and only becoming more pronounced. People have a 4y political memory and electing the same shit again.
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.
Blaming Germany’s problems on the free market is a wild conclusion to make.
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 money is there, it is being put into the wrong hands and into silly bureaucracy (for example by having to put out construction projects on the EU market, while local businesses collapse, ruining Germany's own economy).
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.
It is also part of the free market ideologists' ideas, that a hospital must be profitable, a school must be profitable, and similar absurd ideas. It is also part of their ideology, that school children go without lunch as a consequence.
>The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
Could you share some sources to back this up? At least a sources to back up at least a few case studies would be curious. I'm interested in economics and never have been aware that free market self-correction is a well documented fantasy and would love to understand where is your claim coming from.
Libertarians took over a town in NH and abolished town wide garbage collection. The free market produced a bunch of trash in people's yards, which attracted bears, causing havoc all around town. True story.
That's not to say you can't solve a lot of problems with markets. It just means waving your hands at "the free market" like it's a magic talisman is a childish thing to do.
That sounds like a case of "Tragedy of the Commons", which is not free market.
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.)
Because they couldn't reach a consensus with their governance mechanisms. There were people feeding and encouraging the bears. I guess they could have shot all the bears. Eliminating all the bears because a sensible consensus can't be reached seems like a gross failure of humanity to coexist with the natural (uncontrolled) world.
Sounds like they just couldn't put their money where their mouths were and wanted daddy gov to manage the bears and couldn't agree on how. If the neighborhood has bears just store your stuff better and you won't have to shoot them causing problems with the neighbors. Easier than bickering and cheaper than paying for government to do it.
Do you think the government should start owning shares? Seems problematic. Instead, we could tax realized gains and profits. I think in general this is all just a round about way of doing the taxation we already do, just more of it. Which I support (except for the needlessly antagonistic populist tone), for the same reason I support some cutting of government spending. We legitimately do have too much federal debt right now.
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources.
The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their operating costs though; I agree with that.
Have you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company? I’m assuming not or you’d know “inefficient allocation of resources” isn’t a government issue, it’s a large organization issue that’s as bad if not worse in the private sector.
While true, you overstate the problem. Look up the companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50. There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long term survivors.
That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety.
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.
That really depends on what you mean by churn. Lower levels of government are less stable than major corporations. Walmart stores don’t regularly all randomly shut down for a few weeks due to someone being unable to decide on a budget etc.
I’ll grant you it’s really different kinds of instability though.
A merger frequently involves major shakeups in both the acquirer and the acquired. You don’t have to, and shouldn’t destroy the old companies. You just want their resources redirected to more efficient uses every so often.
Yea, the "too big to fail" principle needs to just go. Corporations should be prevented from becoming so big in the first place. There must be a limit on the revenue generation - once you cross a number, you should be broken up.
Humongous companies just become national-level power brokers adversely affecting both the government and the free market.
Monopolies have a bone to pick with you. They aren’t generally garbage collected as their wealth becomes self-perpetuating even in the face of inefficiencies as they can continue to raise prices and push others out.
This was true during the gilded age and it’s become true again. It took systematic regulations, unions, welfare, and the Sherman antitrust act.
If it wasn’t for a democratic government the oligarchs would still have been in control. They are corrupting the current institutions thought the DOGE coup. You see this in the self dealing of the billionaires such as Musks contracts as well as the tariff exemption grift.
So please don’t flaunt a free market as a natural solution to inefficient systems, not even Adam Smith believed that.
As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.
And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick.
As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion.
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.
The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal".
Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning out into companies is enormous.
While the system could use some tuning, it also works pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear.
People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.
It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention.
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.
No system will optimally allocate resources. However projects are typically funded under competitive grants and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but methodically in the right direction.
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.
I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example.
To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home 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.
As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.
> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:
If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.
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.
one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.
The US was very good for a very long time at integrating immigrants. It should continue that tradition and work even harder at it.
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.
The US was historically rather hostile towards new waves of immigrants in practice, treating them very much like second class citizens (Irish, Italians, Latinos etc), effectively pressuring them to assimilate by becoming "more American than Americans" to avoid such attitudes. One can argue that the system kinda sorta worked in the long run, but I don't think it makes it worthy of emulation.
I think you need to consider history if you think this is a new thing. People literally paid for indentured servants, even outside of the slave trade.
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.
But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.
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?
Countries are just arbitrary here. What happens long term is there’s massive selective pressure because children of people that reproduce in wealthy economies are the only people to be around in 200+ years.
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.
Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction?
It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:
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!
I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it was just assumed that people would do it on their own, but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to get people to do it.
This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the super-not-weak anthropic principle?
We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.
Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!
Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.
This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf
EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.
They might still create more value than they cost. For example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
Where are you getting this from? The value you provide sets a kind of ceiling on what you can be paid. But you are paid based on how easy it is to replace you.
Here's how you determine who brings more value to society: If they were to just stop coming to work tomorrow, would society keep going?
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.
You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real.
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.
if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there. Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-term.
I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They protect their children at the expense of their elders, basically. It won't be national borders either: the fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there are certain regions where people still raise children.
Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other countries though.
The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it wants to. It's so good at this that it actually has and those people pay taxes but don't get government benefits.
There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US.
Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world?
The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
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.
> Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
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.
The ratio of younger vs older people is also a function of biological aging which might look very different in 500 years. I don’t think we can reasonably expect to retire at 65 if healthy lifespan hits 200+.
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.
You make it sound like the US is a parasite that takes the young of other countries to endow itself, never mind what happens about other countries.
Maybe it is?
that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources.
When's the last time someone in the Trump administration "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?
> US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results.
There's an assumption here that deserves some closer examination. If we are taking this as a justification for federal science spending, we would have to also support a policy of awarding research grants on the basis of expected long term return on investment, which is not the criteria applied now. Furthermore, we would have to justify this spending in competition with whatever economic investments the government could make elsewhere, or that the American taxpayers would make if we let them keep their money in the first place. From the standpoint of scientific research I don't think this is necessarily what we want, but even if it was we would have some hard questions about the last few decades of federal research funding.
NSF has actually been experimenting with this sort of funding model for a couple years through its new (as of 2019) convergence accelerator program, which I think is awesome. It’s explicitly a multi-sector program where academics partner with companies to do some proof of concept research in a phase 1 award and translate that into a viable commercial product or innovation in a phase 2 award. Potential for long term return on investment is explicitly part of the review criteria, which target this sort of historically underfunded middle ground between basic research and technology development
I don’t think that is the point. The argument is usually that we cannot predict what will be “high impact” 20 years from now but the current system works well enough that it is a net benefit despite a lot of research not being directly applicable in the end.
First, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA vaccines, most recently featured in COVID-19 vaccine, which also recently won a Nobel Prize.
Second, while there are always improvements to be made, the system as is (or was) worked pretty well in practice without knowing what the expected ROI was. The PageRank algorithm which led to Google was funded in part by an NSF grant on Digital Libraries. The ROI on that single invention just from taxes, jobs, and increased productivity likely exceeds NSF's annual budget. DataBricks and Duolingo are also based in part on NSF research.
Yeah, the system is imperfect, as all human-oriented systems are, but for the most part it works pretty well in practice and has been a linchpin in the US economic growth and national security.
If we're going to count the COVID-19 vaccine as a benefit of federal research funding, surely we need to also count COVID-19 itself as a cost, given the strong evidence that the virus was a product of US-funded gain of function research.
It’s not conclusive, but it’s strong enough that President Biden (or rather, someone with control of President Biden’s autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon backdated to 2014.
To believe that, they would have to believe he had done something that a prosecutor would object to and that was serious enough to get Fauci imprisoned. Which is to say, that he had committed a crime. If we're expecting it to be an arbitrary act of legal harassment, Trump's team could concoct something based on Fauci's work in 2013. Corruption isn't limited to a 2014-2025 window; unless they are basing it on facts.
As we have seen, Trump can hire prosecutors who will prosecute anybody he points his little finger at. He always hires lackeys, so it was easy to predict he would harass Fauci.
So how will the pardon help? If the assumption is that the prosecutors are going to fabricate crimes, the pardon will only help if they fabricate a crime that happened under certain conditions (see: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/). If they're just making something up they can make something up and claim it happened in 2013.
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.
None of your links show any indications of crimes. I don't get the obsession with Fauci when there's an actual criminal using the Oval Office to harass innocent people every day.
If they want to prosecute him they'll have to state a rationale to get around the pardon. That rationale will be used to prosecute them when they pardon themselves. If they want to weaken the pardon power, they are welcome to. Biden ensured they have to go to maximum lawlessness if they want to do that. They have the power to, no one is disputing that. But in choosing to exercise that power, they will hang a sword over their heads.
Actually it's not that hard. The main legal avenue to invalidate the Biden pardons would be to argue that Biden never actually issued the pardons. He didn't sign them (the autopen did) and given his mental state there's no clear evidence that he was even aware of them. Trump, in contrast, routinely signs executive orders and pardons with news cameras in the Oval Office with him, while chatting with journalists. So it would be hard to argue that Trump was not the one actually issuing them.
I would actually question the assumption that it still does. It's not obvious whether it does or doesn't, because the payoff horizon is in the very long term.
The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.
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.
I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.
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.
Your arguments are ideological as well. For one you fail to mention how much of the debt is due to war debt servicing and choose, like most debt hawks, to blame entitlements only.
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.
The amount of money we are talking about for research is so small in comparison to the debt that it’s a red herring to even bring up the current debt level. As you’ve noted, even the largest parts of the budget are dwarfed by the total deficit. Researching is a rounding error.
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.
Universities could pay for all of the research themselves theoretically considering they're the largest business in most states. Their portfolio income, the sports income, the donations, and the free real estate given to land grant universities that has been heavily monetized all add up. Of course I doubt they will allocate money to research, but they could if that was truely their purpose as an organization.
There’s could and then there’s should. Could they? I don’t know, I’d have to look at their finances individually, it’s not like all of them have Harvard level endowments or alabamas football income.
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.
I think a lot has changed in the last 20 years. It would be great if they could solve the problem internally, but it's already being run like a business. The innovation for pennies on the tax dollar is due to graduate student labor with pay in pennies on the hour to subsidize what is often commercial research that could be done by a company.
How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Britain was at a point where without massive aid from the US huge numbers of people would die of cold or starvation. The US has huge surpluses of food and energy.
The idea that we're in such a crisis that we have to eat our own seed corn (massive cuts to science research which is one of the main drivers of US economic growth) is crazy.
> How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Up until you got to the rationing and coal shortages I think the parallels with the contemporary US are pretty obvious.
No, not really. The fact that we import so much is a function of our wealth, not our poverty. We import food because we like to have a variety of produce year round and we like alcohol from foreign countries and we can afford it. Britain was importing food because otherwise there would be famine.
It's true that the United States does not depend on food and energy imports. However, the growing fiscal situation and unsustainable costs of maintaining global hegemony are very similar to that of Britain in the 20th century, as is the declining competitiveness of American industry. You're never going to find any exact or perfect historical parallels but there are enough similarities to cause concern.
No, it really, really isn't. The key difference is that the US can finance deficits and Britain couldn't. There's huge appetite all over the world to buy US government debt and to invest in the US. The UK needed massive foreign aid just to survive.
The US is not really in trouble because of maintaining global hegemony. It’s in trouble because of repeated tax cuts by Republicans that are too popular for Democrats to fully unravel, and deficit spending largely caused or enacted by Republican administrations. Maintaining global hegemony really isn’t that costly to the US as a percent of GDP. It’s foolishness like the Middle East wars that are costly.
Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.
If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.
US research funding is not what you want to cut though. It is among the most productive funding possible and there is evidence aplenty that it pays for itself many times over.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
Echoing this as well - administration for research is fairly thin in every institution I've worked at.
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.
I hear this about everything. “Don’t cut this thing because it’s the most efficient and productive thing ever!” Food stamps, homeless funding, public transport, public schools. Supposedly every single thing is the most efficient thing ever and we can’t possibly cut a dollar
Exactly, if their goal was to actually look for fraud and waste, why are they starting with such small potatoes like science funding? You'd think they'd focus on areas that are spending many more zeros, where they could have much more impact...
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.
It's important to remember that government debt doesn't ever need to be repaid, sort of how an immortal man could indefinitely refinance loans. That he'd have to borrow again to repay the old loans (while maintaining the debt) is part of the mechanism. Such an immortal could have his debt grow indefinitely and still be fine as long as lenders believe he'll be able to afford paying the interest and that other lenders will be willing to refinance the loans when they expire.
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 idea that cutting research will make a dent in the budget is a fantasy. NSF has a budget of 10 billion. Stop rationalizing gutting crucial programs because of “the deficit” Medicare, social security and the military are the main costs in the US budget. Sure universities are bloated, tackle that problem separately then.
> Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars.
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.
Tax revenue as percentage of GDP right now 17%. You can pick random countries and compare. China 26%, Sweden 41%, Japan 32% etc. Do you see the issue? When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we were at 20%.
I guess what is your point though? The current administration has absolutely no plans to reduce debt as a part of these funding cuts. They plan on INCREASING debt by issuing massive tax breaks that no amount of cutting will fund. It’s right there in their own budget.
If anything they’re taking the worst of all worlds by sacrificing future revenue (by way of new technology that can be sold) to give money to people who don’t need it right now. If you think the US is going to remain the center of the western world’s economic universe, or that any of our allies are going to remain on a dollar standard when we can’t be relied upon militarily or otherwise, I think you’re in for a very rude awakening.
US research funding still drives a positive return on investment for tax dollars because of the economic growth it drives, so ending research funding would expedite the debt crisis.
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
Really...? Until Liberation Day the other week, I would doubt this. The whole world holds the US dollar, if the USA fails (side-glare at Donald and Elon), the whole world goes into chaos. If President Harris had said "OK world, we need to borrow x more dollars to keep this country running", people (private creditors and nations) would say "I'm pretty sure the USA will still be a solid economy in 10 (or 30 years), x% ROI if I lend them money? Sure!".
[EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which doesn't help matters, as those never do.
Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea—I'd have argued that at the time, certainly).
Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance) usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very unwisely deep.
Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats. Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what should be baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too deep in the red.
Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.
And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only we weren't already in awful territory with our budget... but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and still seeing bad budget results due to a weakened economy, so, more spending it is, because that is what you do in these cases, you're just not supposed to start from such a poor position.
Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I have my complaints, but credit where it's due)
Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.
So yeah, we were on track to need decades of very-careful policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without making big cuts. And we'd have to raise taxes back to late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.
That many years of responsible management weren't gonna happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either. Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the back half of this century.
This administration appears to be moving that point many, many years earlier, though.
Not everyone is happy to depend on USD. BRICs were making plans to introduce their own alternative reserve currency. Trump once threatened 100% tariffs if they followed through with that.
I wonder if these plans have anything to do with the world's reserve currency being controlled by an entity that's sometimes erratic and assholey...
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.
That plan was DoA. They were never going to agree (Some being petro states, some being commodities exporters, some manufacturers etc) and half those countries lack proper rule of law to enforce contracts that turn out to be negative for said countries.
This has nothing to do with Trump beyond the fact that his plans could hasten how quickly this blows up. Bond rates were already going up before the election, the bond market was already nervous. Your indication that the world isn’t starting to have doubts isn’t born out by the bond market rates.
> And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina"
I never said that. China has been rolling US debt off of their books for a decade now and moving towards BRICS.
If we make this a partisan issue, which you appear to be, we won’t solve this problem. That would be a catastrophic mistake.
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.
That attitude sounds like a college grad with a fresh credit card they keep spending on.
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.
50 years is not "a fresh credit card". If someone predicts something and 50 years later it hasn't happened, I think it's time to re-examine their assumptions
And what were they predicting? Most reasonable predictions were that once the GDP to debt ratio reaches a certain point that’s when issues arise. It’s just now nearing that 100% of GDP mark. Obviously predictions on a national scale can take decades. The “fresh credit card” was handed out in the 70’s.
Just because climate change hasn’t ended the world yet in 50 years doesn’t mean it’s not a serious threat.
> Bond rates were already going up before the election
Treasuries behaving like a risk asset is 100% Trump. And it has nothing to do with him blowing out our deficit, it's 100% about stagflation and money markets.
> Bond rates were already going up before the election,
Do you think the fact that there was a 40-70% (and I'm being optimistic, here) chance that the election would elect Trump [1] had anything at all to do with that?
---
[1] Who made his plans for destroying both the American hegemony and global trade, and its domestic economy quite clear.
> 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.
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.
both your sentences are bullshit. I am too busy today. will prove that tomorrow. meanwhile, chill, or warm, depending on your climatic zone and other factors.
So your argument is that the U.S. is currently like wartime Britain, and that science funding specifically must be sacrificed despite the fact that is has created an economic boon that would help to pay down the debt: We just desperately need the money now for else the country could cease to exist, and we’ll sort out how to restore a science driven economy once the crisis is over?
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
1. No, it isn't. And if you think the finances of the US in 2025 are remotely similar to the finances and the world position of the British Empire in 1945, you are staggeringly wrong about either the past, or the present, or both.
2. And if it were, there's a million lower-ROI things that could be cut. Does an isolationist America really need eleven carrier groups, in a world where there are zero non-American ones?
Don't mix up the deficit and the debt (and the internal and external debt).
US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.
I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.
Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).
As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
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.
I'm genuinely curious what you think the "right" level of debt is, and how you justify your answer. The U.S. has only been debt-free once in its history, so obviously "zero" isn't the answer. And it seems self-evident that you are correct that there is a level where it becomes untenable. But what amount, and why that amount?
The way they math is presented is off. The US is deficit spending this year, yet you present the interest payment as something separate from the military. Obviously that interest is partially from the military spending the US makes this year that it has not paid for, military payments from last year it has not paid for etc. The billions sent to Israel, the Ukraine and the hundreds of military bases the US has spanning the globe are not cheap.
Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.
If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out
I have no idea what you’re talking about honestly. The data for government spending can be seen in multiple places, here is the CBO numbers (this might be an older article or out of date, I don’t have time or access to a laptop right now).
What the GP is talking about is that there are differing opinions on what counts as "military spending" or "defense spending". The CBO has its definition, but that is not universally accepted, particularly by people who think that the USA spends far too much on its military.
The question of whether or not e.g. veteran's health care should be considered part of military spending is not a stupid one, even if people may differ on their answers.
I suppose that’s fair, but kind of tangential. The point I was making was that if discretionary spending, approximately 25% of outlays, could be completely cut we would still have a deficit. I’m not suggesting this is even possible, I’m merely using it as a demonstration of the scale of the problem.
I'd still quibble with your whole framing though. For example:
> This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services.
I don't know if you have a mortgage, but assuming you do, is it useful to say of the interest payments you make on that "this is X dollars that cannot be used to buy food, heat, gas or streaming services" ? I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to government too.
Capital investments, and debt more broadly, comes in good, bad and indifferent varieties. Some portion of the US national debt arises from spending on "good" things, some on "bad" things and quite a bit on "indifferent" things. There's no point in (accurately) noting that a mortgage payer cannot use the money they pay in interest to pay for other things, because we (broadly) accept that borrowing money in order to own your own home is sensible and comes with lots of its own utility/value. Whatever portion of US national debt arises from "good" spending can be viewed in the same manner.
Of course, how the actual apportionment between good/bad/indifferent spending is described will vary with political outlook and many other things, so there's no single answer to the question "how much of the national debt is a good thing". But it's certainly some of it ...
> I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to government too.
I disagree, I think it is useful, and in fact important for young people to carefully consider the size of their mortgage and the interest they have to pay.
A persons long term financial health can be greatly impacted by the size of their mortgage, and I would always recommend taking the smallest possible loan. Taking a mortgage only makes sense if you would otherwise have to pay rent.
Same applies to governments.
In fact, I go one step further and think its shocking that one generation of people would leave behind a massive debt for their children and grandchildren have to service.
I don't agree with how DOGE is going about things, and I'm not a US citizen, but I strongly believe governments should be generating surpluses for their children to enjoy, not deficits for their children to pay off.
I think we’re actually broadly in agreement. I’m unfortunately busy at work so I’m not articulating my position as well as I perhaps should, but I don’t think all debt or deficit spending is bad. It absolutely has a place and should be utilized. I don’t think this explains the US though. We’ve already hit 100% public debt to GDP (or 120% total debt to GDP) and I’m not seeing this slowing down. The last projections from the congressional budget going into reconciliation is a doubling of public debt in 10 years from what I remember.
A lot of our deficit is because of Trump's 10 year tax cuts, which Republicans are about to re-extend. Trump does not care about debt, he just wants to destroy government institutions.
Where does government subsidized loans to banks (eg Fed, Fannie, Freddie) sit in your list? The government is a monetary sovereign - it cannot run out of dollars to use. The actual constraint is that creating too much new money creates too much price inflation. But for the past decades most monetary inflation has been flowing into the financial sector and bidding up the asset bubbles, with the "fiscal responsibility" political narrative merely being a dishonest cover to keep that gravy train flowing.
The problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to tax billionaires. We just passed even more tax cuts for rich people and are scheduled to add more to the debt. Just tax rich people, it's not complicated.
From their unwillingness to tax people. American tax revenue as a fraction of GDP is 6-7 percentage points lower than in the average OECD country. That gap is over $1.5 trillion/year.
The economic projections I’ve seen have shown taxing the rich will increase tax revenue by around 1.5% of GDP. We’re slated to borrow 7.3%. That math doesn’t work. To be fair, the republican math with cuts (assuming no tax cuts) also doesn’t work. Neither side is serious about this issue.
How can there possibly be an answer to "how much will tax revenue increase if we tax the rich" without specifying how much we tax the rich, and how we define the rich?
Taxing billionaires is just one of many necessary steps but it is the most important and vital step in my opinion. There are fundamental problems with how the US is run down to the local level but it starts with taxing billionaires and getting money out of politics.
What does the ideal solution look like to you? Are you happy with what DOGE is doing and if not what would you change? I'm asking genuinely because I don't think enough people put forth ideas in their own right.
Billionaires are the ones actively fucking the world and seeking tax cuts but you're right, there are plenty of multimillionaires that need to be paying their share.
I fully expect uncomfortable spending cuts with raising taxes while trying to balance economic growth in order to correct this problem. Im dissatisfied with what both sides of the isle are actually doing.
If you use a reasonable definition of rich like 150k for individuals then yes it could work. But that's not what people actually mean when they say it.
The rich half of the US populus own about $156 trillion. Thus therefore as a conclusion therefrom you only have to take 23% from half the population. Lets make it progressive from 0% at average wealth to 52% at the top.
Much less than Roosevelt's 94%
But I'm neither democrat nor republican, it might not make sense to anyone :)
Silly you indeed. I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt." As I mentioned in another comment, taxing billionaires is crucial step but one of many needed.
> I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt."
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.
I'm not moving goalpost, you just read my statement wrong. There are many steps to take but taxing billionaires is a crucial step to getting the funding to fix many of the other problems that cities don't have the money to tackle.
I thought taxing billionaires was supposed to fix the national debt, not to fund new spending that will supposedly "fix many of the other problems that cities don't have the money to tackle". (Which is false--lack of revenue is not the reason city governments don't work--but that's another issue). You've just moved the goalpost again.
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures that later, and unpredictably, come together.
There is a veritassium YouTube video describing the story of the electron microscope. At some point somebody even proved mathematically that any improvement was a dead end. Then a group of scientists whose research was mostly shunned, and almost at the point of losing their funding, found a way around the limitations and improved the electron microscope to measure atomic level fields, with great impact on science including materials.
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.
I think a lot of the decentralization also correlated up with a wide range of directions, with decisions to pursue activity made at much lower levels than happens today.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
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.
Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over. Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our system there is positive selection (in the 'natural selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.
This should give you pause.
Without claiming that any given administration is taking any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is net positive.
I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground. Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of reproducibility right now.
You might think crisis of reproducibility means everyone is faking data. No, that does not mean that. There are many factors to a crisis of reproducibility. One is fake data. A bigger one is a lack of incentive and a lack of complete data gathering details on some metric. Generally even if there is a crisis is subjective.
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.
> Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support your expectations), not blatant lies.
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’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
Echoing this. I've had two grants pulled in the last admin, and one in this one, and all of them were very sweeping - and wildly inefficient, killing projects during the phase of ramping up, rather than productively working.
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor.
I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
Literally nothing about their approach resembles an attempt at efficiency. Efficiency is a ratio of input resources to output. No part of the DOGE program I've seen or heard of even considers that relationship. Simply firing people at best results in reduced output, or hiring more expensive contractors. And you've flushed institutional knowledge down the toilet. It's like turning a car off and pretending you've boosted its fuel efficiency because nothing is burning. Except that the car saved you time on other tasks, oops. Firing people and then immediately having to rehire them is hilariously inefficient. Rewriting legacy software like they're attempting at Social Security is a classically inefficient blunder.
I don't know if it's all about revenge, but it's absolutely not about efficiency. It's an edgy teen's idea of tough governance. It's the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish. It's false economy all the way down.
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.
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.
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
Why would the people paying for the research not control what it can be spent on? Letting the people who spend the money decide is typically not a good system.
They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of compliance about how you can spend the money. For example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it and then they had to make a rule about it), you have to fly US carriers where possible, etc.
There are also reports you submit showing your progress and how you spent the money, to check that you are spending it on things you said you would.
This thread (not just the person I'm replying to) demonstrates a lot of misconceptions about why we have research funding, how it works, and what the results have been in practice. Please, everyone, don't rely on stereotypes of how you think research funding works.
Pure science may not be a typical case, though, because the people who control the funds don't really have any idea whether the work they are funding is ultimately going to turn out productive or not. The work involved is far from routine and basically a jump into the unknown.
I get the risk of fraud and nepotism, but in some other situations (Bell Labs etc.), "choose very good people and let them improvise within certain limits of a budget" turned out to be very efficient. The devil is in the "choose very good people" detail.
Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.
I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.
The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.
Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.
I think the particular method probably pales in comparison to the fact that the US simply had so much more money and resources. The UK is an island nation that lost its empire and was playing second fiddle.
Such a “simple” solution. Wonder why doing a PhD in the majority of european countries is equal to a poor monthly income. Just pay them more. I guess countries don’t like long term solutions.
I was curious how much of a gap there is, and landed on about 100k in the US[0] vs 85k[1] USD in France for instance, in average.
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.
Yeah, no PhDs in the US don't make 100K year. The stipend for an MIT PhD is about 50K a year half of what you're saying. Citing my wife who just finished their phd. MIT also makes it so everyone is paid the same as PhDs even if they bring in their own money like my wife did.
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
Your ciation [1] shows the highest number as being approximately 70,000 USD a year, not 85k. That's 15,000 dollars less than you claim. Your [0] citation is not a share-able link and just redirects to the home-page.
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)).
Sorry, I must have added the extra bonuses on top of the gross salary that already included them. The 5 210€ figure indeed matches 70k USD.
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)
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
There are orders of magnitude more patents in the private sector, but most are either not licensed or are licensed as part of huge 'pools' as private sector patenting is driven by the arms race between companies to have a large enough patent portfolio to retaliate if sued (there is a lot of patent 'slop'). And that's not even counting fake (troll) innovators. Whereas uni patents are probably more likely to be licensed out on an individual basis. So it's really hard to know the significance of counts alone. You'd have to look at a random sample of uni Vs private patents and assess each one.
We have to dispense with the silliness of comparing the US with countries a tenth its size. If you want to compare Britain to the US, pick a state of comparable size and do so. Otherwise you’re comparing apples to much larger apples.
I wonder if the analogy might be more like comparing an apple tree evolving in a forest vs breeding varieties of apples on a farm.
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
Because it was, it had a bigger population than the US does currently.
Then all those countries under it's thumb declared independence, and that changed things considerably.
This strikes as starting from the conclusion you want to reach (current funding cuts are bad) and then trying to build a narrative to prove it.
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.
This started when George Washington went to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island to speak to them promoting the 2nd of the 12 amendments to the Constitution, 10 of which became the Bill of Rights. Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution and this trip was to garner support to ratify the Bill of Rights which was to safeguard individual freedoms and limit the power of the federal government. Many of the Jews who first arrived in the United States did so in New Amsterdam whose families had pervious settled in Amsterdam after the Spanish Inquisition where they were forced to either leave Spain, convert to Catholicism, or be put to death.
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.
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
Yep, some of the first things Hitler did when he took power was to reverse the ridiculous large brain drain from most of the world into Germany, and stall most research by the chilling effect of censoring random topics and fighting institutions that harbored people he didn't like.
Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire.
The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war:
Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).
Being the leading power is about magnitude not intensity. The country that is twice as large and operates at a similar level of intensity will be the more dominant force (see also - China today). Per capita, I would bet on the Swiss (then and now) - though it will depend on the metric at that point and their output will be comparable to the Germans, British, French and the Americans.
The US definitely had a notion of quantum physics prior to WWII. Feynman got his PhD at Princeton in 1942 in Quantum Physics so I would assume that John Wheeler had some familiarity with the topic back then. I would mention that the most significant result of quantum mechanics is solid state transistors, and Shockley was awarded a phd for quantum mechanical applications back in the 30s.
Michelson and his experiments on the aether not existing were enormously influential to theoretical physics. “No notion” is incorrect, they had numerous home grown talents in physics, on top of the huge influx of talent from 1930s immigration of European scientists.
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.
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
We also emulated the British centralised model, with the Weapons Research Establishment. Like the British, Australia struggled to get research out of these centralised labs and into products: computing (CISRAC, 5th computer), satellites (WREsat, 7th nation in space), ...
It kicked off a feedback loop. The best scientists and engineers wanted to work on the projects that were 10 years ahead. As a result US companies were at the forefront of new technology and developments… attracting the next generation of the best scientists and engineers.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
The hope is that the ambiguity will lead people to think about their general principles. If they agree or disagree strongly depending on how the variable is resolved, what does that say?
Science and progress are not a one off thing.
The scientist are not used up after 10 years.
They keep working and keep the advantages going.
The advantage attracts even more intelligent people from every corner of the world.
Bretton Woods is not a 10-year advantage.
US had enjoyed pretty much free money until Vietnam, point at which had to kill the gold standard to enjoy free money some more.
The US provided billions in aid and resources under the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and especially Japan after the war. And provided billions again to Korea after the Korean War. Japan and South Korea obviously made the most of it with their massive science and technology industries in the post-war era.
I'm aware that Europeans think the post-war stimulus was a myth.
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.
Also, being far enough from Europe that a huge amount of talent decided the U.S. was a better bet for getting away from the Nazis. And then taking a large number of former Nazi scientist's post-war as well.
The article mentions but underrates the fact that post-war the British shot themselves in the foot economically.
As far as I'm aware, the article is kind of wrong that there wasn't a successful British computing industry post war, or at least it's not obvious that it's eventual failure has much to do with differences in basic research structure. There was a successful British computing industry at first, and it failed a few decades later.
Fair point! That's a great technical success; I didn't realize Arm was British.
If the main failure of British companies is that they don't have U.S. company market caps, it seems more off base to blame this on government science funding policy instead of something else. In almost every part of the economy, U.S. companies are going to be larger.
My understanding is that the British "Arm" is just a patent holder now. I don't think they actually make anything. Companies outside the UK are the ones that actually make the chips licensed from the Arm designs.
Indeed, although Sweden was officially neutral, they most notoriously permitted German trains to roll through their country to Norway with soldiers and materials both during and after its invasion.
I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.
Yes, including surrounded and forcibly brought them into US camps. But yeah, the Soviets did the same and we had the nuclear bomb race, the space race and the Cold War.
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.
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.
>> Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.
Citation needed.
The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on.
This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every other early-mid 20th century chemist or physicist did all or some of their training in Europe, Now, at least until recently, it's been Europe (and the rest of the world) flocking to our universities.
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.
Wouldn't everyone always be even higher if not for the low parts bringing down the average? That part of the comment sounds so biased that it makes me mistrust the rest of it.
It also didn't hurt that a certain European science superpower started purging academics based on ideology, said academics being more than welcome in the USA. Wait a minute...
I'm pretty sure you need to start looking at what they're doing (selecting for obedience over competence) than what they're saying (DEI is the root of all problems).
The point is that we know what this administration means by 'merrit based', it means to fire anyone who dissagres, particularly women and non-whites, while hirering grosely incompetent TV-people. The only 'merrit' is loyalty.
"the University must adopt and implement
merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or
national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among
faculty, staff, and leadership"
"Every department or field found to
lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within
that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to
lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will
provide viewpoint diversity"
"viewpoint diversity" isn't a guarantee of merit-based hiring policies
North Korea is good example as there is absence of any Democracy. However boasting about Democracy, while having 2-party system, is also quite interesting.
Fifth bullet point contradicts it. Also, it’s not clear for me at all, what “viewpoint” means. Flat Earthers in geography departments? Or more Republicans? Or the same thing as DEI, since being black gives you different viewpoints?
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
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.
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate? I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about the underlying drivers here.
Why does any business' requisitons staff manage their purchases? Because it's quite literally their job. They have limited money to allocate based on their budget, and their lifelong career is trying to make that money work as effectively as possible at keeping the American research "institution" powerful. That's why grants have application processes and contract negotiations
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.
I do not believe that sharing costs of facilities and equipment is so difficult that research universities can't handle it while every condo association in the US somehow manages to pull it off. I do not believe you that this is aggressively negotiated down by the government because private research grants come with much lower indirect costs percentages.
> Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd.
Well I guess we just have to pay for endlessly expanding bureaucracy then, because apparently expecting research universities to be somewhat efficient with their resources is "absurd."
> If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations.
Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
You're clearly not involved even remotely in academia and are just parroting bullshit you saw on your news outlet. What's even the point when you can just declare "no, it's totally a problem and they can just magically make money appear and I'm totally aware of the negotiation process for grants". Good Lord.
I can see I've hit a nerve here. But it's ok. I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against. It's understandable that you would resort to appeals to authority and ad hominems when you can't present a logical argument.
> I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.
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.
There are fixed costs associated with running research labs and facilities. Just because private funding can (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research money is public not private.
While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.
I guess the problem is that I just don't trust them. It's a bunch of university administrators and government bureaucrats (two groups I trust on the level of used car dealers) spending other people's money. I think the solution to this is transparency. If these universities want to continue getting tax exempt status and generous overhead allocations out of taxpayer funds, then they should be required to release their budgets to the public. It they are actually spending all that money on reasonable research costs, then fine, but I want to see the receipts.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the balance of power here.
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.
Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends will come back and do research here instead of in the US.
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.
It is not charity for the researchers. That's money earned. It's charity for the bureaucrats who administer it. As for the facilities and administration it pays for, I take no issue with the facilities. I want to take an axe to the useless bureaucrats and lawyers involved. My dad is a university researcher and he faces endless bureaucratic nonsense to run his lab. If we want to keep researchers here we should start by making it easy for them. It's a cost savings too.
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.
There it is again. Private research grants are often taken at loss, subsidized by the actual scientific funding infrastructure that has made the US the world superpower of science.
Illinois and Maryland look pretty secure on that front. Perhaps the Democrats can try to gerrymander NYS again, without getting slapped down by the courts
I feel most people have absolutely no idea that the US had its very large boot in the UK's face with our face in the mud for much of the post WW2 period, and still has. We had to dance exactly to their tune.
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
While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay:
“I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
dunno if it is this plain.. the regulatory capture in the last 30 years is not null. Especially in very niche, very profitable sub-corners of big-S Science.
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
Yes. If you are genuinely unaware and not just asking a rhetorical question, yes socialized medicine is a major goal of the progressive left. We came close in 2010 but the votes in congress weren't quite there. The only reason major parties don't pursue it is because progressivism doesn't have the votes. You can definitely vote for it though especially if you participate in primaries.
So is democracy not real? I find it funny that when things do right it's because of our superior system of people choosing their leaders, and when things go wrong it's because people don't have any choice.
Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor flawed example.
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.
EU also has freedom of movement, but vastly different social security systems.
Language is of course an extra barrier, but how much people will move is overrated. And maybe you could restrict supposed benefits to people who have lived there in a few years.
Obviously IANAL, but i am thinking - seems like you generally hate your government no matter who it is, so maybe states should be a bit more independent.
Sure, but the math doesn't work out. Vermont and California have both tried in various forms.
> EU also has freedom of movement, blah blah blah
They also coordinated the laws between the member countries. That's exactly what the federal government would need to do in this case, very good! The EU system doesn't work particularly well either, because it's loosely confederated. The US government has far more ability to coordinate the States.
Sarcasm detector has to be pretty high to catch this one ;)
But you've touched on the problem: any attempt to reform is immediately cast as "communism" (also without really understanding communism and equating it with soviet authoritarianism, but that's another topic).
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100 billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only 2.5x.
The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.
Yes, your anecdote about one person out of 300 million has convinced me that the statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve about the entire population are clearly incorrect.
I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our problems.
But killing the golden goose will not help solve the inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more expensive and difficult to get into universities with top research programs.
You might clarify "domestic peace". America has been one of the most secure nations in history from large-scale domestic invasion (it's essentially never happened: Pearl Harbor, isolated terrorist attacks, and "open borders" don't come close). That said, it has virtually always been actively involved in foreign conflicts and shadow wars during its 250 year history.
And yes, it's domestic security that enables long-term investment in science.
I would clarify it as relative peace. People simply left other parts of the world to pursue their dreams. If Europe weren’t basically war torn every couple of decades all the way up to the end of WWII, America might not have made it this far. And that’s why I don’t believe China will ever be that great until they reject pseudo-communist regime.
A better title would be: "How this one time the U.S. became a science superpower".
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?
I'm glad to see this article because this topic is very much worth thinking about right now - by both sides of the Atlantic :-). But history is more difficult to do well than this. A lot of this article just assumes its conclusions. You need more than 'this is a difference and therefore it was causative', especially if it happens to align with current conventional beliefs.
It’s stated as fact but what’s the causative link for indirect cost administration being the key? If those costs were made direct by university labs having to compete with commercial labs by requiring researchers to explicitly rent facilities why would that break things?
About the only argument I can see is transaction costs. And those are a factor but that incentivizes university labs because they have facilities for teaching as well so they can bring transaction costs low.
It is worth noting that the the majority of money that Britain spent on war material went to the US. That might be one reason the US could continue spending and the UK couldn't!
If you read carefully, there is no strict implication that the 85 years of leading only begun after the end of the war. If it began 1940, the quoted sentence would still be correct.
> Britain remained a leader in theoretical science and defense technology, but its socialist government economic policies led to its failure to commercialize wartime innovations.
And the detriment of UK's auto industry, manufacturing industry, and etc. I really don't understand how people still fancy state-controlled economy.
Sorry but this is such a shallow comment. In what way is the US government directing public funding to academic institutions not state control? It's just a different organisational framework that appears to have been more successful.
I've met Steve on a number of occasions, smart guy. I also work in this space and have definitely read a lot of the same books he has, along with many of his excellent articles. Alas, I'm pretty sure he would never read my articles, unless he got cancer, which I hope he doesn't.
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.
(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...
(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...
“Indirect costs” were accepted on the theory that this would be used to create job security for professors who did useful work but were not able to secure direct funding.
Spoiler alert: That job security doesn’t exist anymore. A professor who isn’t winning grants, even if tenured, is functionally dead. Research doesn’t matter except as PR and teaching definitely doesn’t matter; the ability to raise grants is the singular determinant of an academic’s career.
Consequently, most academics despise university overhead because it reduces the number of grants to go around and they get nothing for it.
That does not, of course, mean they support Trump or Musk. Most do not.
> “Indirect costs” were accepted on the theory that this would be used to create job security for professors who did useful work but were not able to secure direct funding.
This is an argument that I have literally never heard, despite being in academia a long time.
Right from the first paragraph I know this is just nonsense that is only being posted because of currentpoliticalthing
The US leapfroged the rest of the world in both science and engineering by it's civil war, this isn't disputable. It could only do that because of decade long tariffs that existed solely to protect it's nascent manufacturing industry.
People have constructed so many myths about WW2 it's crazy.
GDP: 1871 the US passes GB
By 1900 the US economy was double GB's size. by 1910 they've already passed them by GDP per capita.
INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT: Again 1870s. You can't really untie science from industrial output. Is there argument here that the US was behind scientifically because of Nobel prizes? If you narrowly define science as "things europeans liked to research" then I guess. But even by that definition Americans were discovering new drugs such as Actinomycin D as early as 1940, during, not after, WW2 and before they entered. So unless people like Waksman (educated in America) count as braindrain 30 years before the fact I don't think the argument is credible.
The UK failed to mass produce penicillin. It's this industrial ineptitude that caused "brain drain".
Was it tarrifs or just a large, highly educated population with a unified market? The US has always been one of the leaders in education and scientific research on a per capita basis. Even in the 1770s you har people like Franklin working on cutting edge physics (the standard sign convention for charge is still flipped because of him). At some point it also just outgrew all the other countries in terms of size and it naturally became the global leader around that time.
There is one problem with the current US system: it overproduces talent. When the US system was growing rapidly, the people could build a long-term career in the US. But nothing can grow forever at an exponential pace. The US continues to pour plenty of money into STEM, but it can't keep up with the pace of grad student production.
People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
> People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
Wait what? I know that many Chinese students are staying in China, but this is the first I've heard of a substantial demographic immigrating to China to work there, esp from the US. Do you have data?
One annecdata. When I handed in my doctoral thesis in Oxbridge, I was contacted by a recruiter from PRC that offered me generous startup funds ($600k-1M) and salary to bootstrap my own academic lab at Tsinghua, Fudan, or other top universities. It'd take me 4-6 years to get an equivalent offer in UK or EU where experience and connections are much more important than talent.
I am European and I do basic research in science. They seem to be very interested in fundamental science and investing heavily in lots of subfields. As discussed in other comments, the improvement in their research quality during the last decade is nothing short of impressive.
It's not widespread. But China has made an effort to offer obscene amounts of money to attract smart professors and researchers to switch to Chinese universities as they've tried to build up their top-tier beyond Beida and Tsinghua.
It overproduces credentialed morons. Giving someone a degree doesn't confer talent. And when you insist on an ever increasing percentage of the population attend college, the result is exactly as you would expect.
Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Im afraid you'd need to be pretty liberal with your definition of rich at this point to dig us out of this hole through taxes alone.
Tax wealth somehow, not just income. It's clear the accumulation has become a generational problem. Your great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the wealth his have.
Even with their preposterous salaries, NBA stars would have to work for millenia without spending anything before getting Bezos-level wealth.
Everything about this sentence makes me sad lol
> Your great grandkids could cure cancer and bezo's could do nothing and yours would never have a fraction of the wealth his have.
This isn't a problem.
It's frustrating that people honestly think this isn't a problem. What's the point of the system of economic value? It's supposed to make our exchange of good and services more efficient. What's more efficient about a handful of dudes hoarding effectively the entire supply? It works better when value is evenly distributed throughout the system. It's the whole point, in fact. If we allow it turn into a high score game where the winners are the ones with the best cheats we make a system that increases overall suffering, inefficiency, and rent-seeking.
They aren't hoarding supply. The value is tied to that business continuing to be useful.
The fact that people hold this opinion is part of the problem. Nobody can see beyond how a problem effects them, especially when it comes to wealth.
Also that this wealth is dependent on value. It's not like having cash. It's shares, whose value will go down if the company stops providing value.
Yes, in this theoretical world where stocks trend down over extended periods of time, I could see this being an issue.
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.
But that's only if they keep generating value. Plenty of companies don't do that and we forget about them. Basing one's worldview only on peak performers is the apex fallacy[0].
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Apex_fallacy (I know, I know, rationalwiki)
It doesn't need to hit peak. It just needs to be a good bit above where it was issued. Zuckerberg, e.g., could run this strategy indefinitely, even if meta dropped by 50%. He'll still defer the cap gains until his grave.
Once capital grows large enough it starts being able to bend the fabric of economic space around it. It begins to change rules and accumulate more capital merely because it's so big. This is a natural feature of capitalism. Properly attended to, fire makes steam and runs an engine. Left unchecked, it's a forest fire. Capitalism is like that. It needs moderating influences to keep it controlled and useful and not consuming everything it touches.
> Tax wealth somehow, not just income.
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.
>Tax wealth somehow
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?
We have computers in our pockets that can perform trillions of calculations per second; we have social media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth, that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of calculations per year!"
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!"
>We have computers in our pockets that can perform trillions of calculations per second; we have social media sites capturing terabytes or petabytes of data per second; we have LLMs with trillions of parameters. So it boggles my mind to see someone say "we can't tax wealth, that'd be too complicated! We'd have to do dozens of calculations per year!"
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.
Why don't you help brainstorm ideas instead of being dismissive? There is no right answer right now. Clearly in order for society to move forward in a healthy way, single individuals cannot amass wealth/power that is a millennia ahead of everyone else. The goal isn't to say you can't be wealthy. The goal is wealth/power cannot be obscenely beyond everyone else. These few individuals have more power than governments. This is a complex issue that requires a complex solution. There is no easy answer.
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.
The OP just wants your hands off their money. They know it's a problem. It's not one they want solved. They probably also think they genuinely accumulated their wealth strictly from their own skillset with no external factors contributing to it.
Do they think they're a 100-billionaire too? Life goals I guess.
Maybe it's Elon. He's got a lot of spare time.
He can't eat with his shares. He can use them as collateral for debt. Presently, that's how he dodges taxes. You'd close that loophole.
> He can't eat with his shares. He can use them as collateral for debt. Presently, that's how he dodges taxes. You'd close that loophole.
You also don't get taxed on your debts, e.g. a mortgage. You pay interest on your debt instead.
>He can't eat with his shares.
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 dodgy part is what happens after someone dies. 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.
The key here is that you need enough wealth to keep borrowing for rest of your life without touching your principle.
Too late to edit my comment, but one other thing:
>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.
> Charging capital gains AND estate tax doesn't make sense, estate tax is typically higher than capital gains tax.
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".
>They should be multiplicative.
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.
>The key here is that you need enough wealth to keep borrowing for rest of your life without touching your principle.
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.
>Correct. The OP likely knows this.
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.
>The stocks get a one-time relief from capital gains as it moves to the heir.
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.
Tax wealth above $100 million at ~90% upon death.
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.
That is an estate/inheritance tax, not a wealth tax as discussed.
You have to ask if that kind of volatility would exist in a system that taxes wealth.
Taxing the rich will have all sorts of positive knock-on effects that will also go a long way towards fixing these issues.
Not really. The top 1% item roughly $50 Trillion in assets. In 2010…15 years ago…that was only $15 Trillion. If you look at the graph of the national debt and the graph of the money supply, i.e. money printing, you will find they basically overlap, correlate, track.
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.
I just want to point that while yes, this is true, there's no physical or economical law that mandates that printed money goes to the finance system.
This happens due to explicit government policy, one that has been relentlessly pushed all over the world since the 80s.
The top 11–12 richest individuals in the U.S. hold assets equivalent to the national budget deficit. Let’s not fool ourselves. The money is there.
The budget deficit so far. So yes, if we were to take all their money, the debt would go to zero for exactly one moment, then we would go back to spending more than we have immediately, but now with the chilling effect that taking wealth like that would have. Not super helpful.
No, you are just underestimating how rich the rich are.
Could you be overestimating how easy it is to take possession of their money given global free trade? In 10 years, what are the odds you and others will have finally, after all these years, actually managed to have “taxed the rich” as has been proposed as the solution to current debt levels for many years now? If we cannot be certain of those tax revenues from finally “taxing the rich”, then they cannot solve the debt problem and we therefore need to look for other solutions. Not that the wreckless and irresponsible cuts from DOGE are the solution. They are likely to increase the size and scope of the government in the long run, after impairing it’s efficiency and operational capacity in the short. Hopefully the dems don’t blow the opportunity this time.
The US government can (and regularly do) sanction entire countries, trade is only “global” and “free” to the extent permitted by Washington.
Saying that the rich could somehow avoid the US government by moving abroad is a fallacy.
> The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
> Markets don’t account for externalities
Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
> they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power)
You're describing regulatory capture. This is why governments are supposed to have limited powers. To keep them from passing rules that enrich cronies and entrench incumbents.
> they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable)
Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those things. There are plenty of high quality private schools, high quality private medical facilities and high quality private research labs.
The real problem here is that some people can't afford those things. But now you're making the case for a UBI so people can afford those things when they otherwise couldn't, not for having the government actually operate the doctor's office.
> As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California). The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
Meanwhile most of what the rich own are investment securities like stocks and US treasuries. What happens if you increase their taxes? They have less to invest. The stocks then go to someone not being taxed, i.e. foreign investors, so more of the future returns of US companies leave the country. Fewer treasury buyers increase the interest rate the US pays on the debt. Fewer stock buyers lower stock prices, which reduce capital gains and therefore capital gains tax revenue. Fewer stock buyers make it harder for companies to raise money, which lowers employment and wages, and therefore tax revenue again. Increasing the proportion of tax revenue that comes from "the rich" causes an extremely perverse incentive whenever you ask the Congressional Budget Office to do the numbers on how a policy that would transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class would affect tax revenue, and the policy correspondingly gets shelved.
TANSTAAFL.
>> There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
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.
> 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.
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!
Too generic terms become an issue at some point. "Government" and "market" are not one thing that you can easily measure to "big" or "small" or "good" or "bad".
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".
> 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.
"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.
Wealth in a free market is not "concentrated", it is created.
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.
It is not only about learning material being available. It is also about live circumstances of people. Think about when you are doing your learning. When do you have opportunity to learn. Think about what other people might be doing at that time, that prevents them from learning. Think about the mental framework you have, that enables you to learn and that others might not have.
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?
My friend Eric Engstrom (yes, that guy) got a programming job at Microsoft despite having zero education beyond high school. He became a team leader for DirectX.
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.
This post is a great example of how very smart people can fall victim to their own biases.
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.
I completely agree and would add that different people have different social needs. I love learning by myself. I don't need an example, I do it for fun. In the universities I studied, I have seen LOTS of people that were learning because everybody was learning. And they were smart, and capable, they just needed an environment and some structure.
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)
> Where can they go, to claim certificates or whatever, for their new knowledge, to get any chance of employment?
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.
I get where you are coming from, I really do, I've worked with those self starters. I worked with a guy without any education past HS and he was great, he taught me a lot.
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.
While what you say is true, I think it is a failure of generalization. A few special cases show it is possible, but what you don't mention is how extraordinary these cases are and at what time they happened and what background, including ideas, information, location, and motivation the people had.
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.
"One of the important ways we make use of donations is in awarding scholarships to highly skilled students. Each $5 you donate contributes to approximately one hour of work by a talented graduate student" from the dlang website.
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?
Pointing to unusual people, then claiming that proves they exemplify what should be usual…
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.
Speaking as someone who has been both a technical interviewer and an interviewee many times over the past 30 years, I find it a bit disingenuous to compare second hand bookstores to a formal primary or secondary education when it comes to their application in an active job market.
There's the Khan Academy, too. Apparently a lot of home schoolers rely on it, and it is used by students who need extra help.
It's true that what I wrote about is not formal education, but it is education nevertheless and freely available.
> 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%.
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.
In the US, capital gains are taxed at a different rate from ordinary income, so taxing the "rich" (where the money is) doesn't necessarily have to destroy investing (not to mention a lot of retirement is tied up in investing, the rich aren't the only investors).
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...
> 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%.
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.
> Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
> 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.
Norwegian here. It's not at all comparable. Norway has a wealth tax (about 1.09%), lots of consumption-level taxes (25% VAT, fees on gas, etc.), high capital gains tax (37.85% flat, no "qualified dividends" or tax-free bonds or Roth loopholes or anything like that).
> There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
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 are no documented instances of a truly free market.
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.
>The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.
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.
The United States, postwar Japan, postwar Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea, China, and so on.
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?
The united states during its periods of greatest growth as well as the other environments you called out had strong regulatory environments to keep "the market" in check
I suspect you may be thinking that a free market is anarchy (no government). It isn't.
> The historical reality is the more free a free market is, the better it performs.
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.
> Performs for whom?
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
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.
It would be interesting to note how you define a free market in this context and what makes it “more free”.
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.
A free market is not anarchy. It requires a government to protect rights, enforce contracts, and deal with externalities.
This is precisely my argument. A free market isn't really free if the government has to intervene in any form or manner. Per wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market> There are no documented instances of a truly free market.
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?
> those places tend to do better than the places captured by central planners.
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.
> Markets don’t account for externalities
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.
I mean, you can easily observe it. Look at Germany. Not investing sufficiently into education, public Infrastructure, hospitals, and probably more. Inefficient bureaucracy everywhere. Long term effects already visible and only becoming more pronounced. People have a 4y political memory and electing the same shit again.
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.
Blaming Germany’s problems on the free market is a wild conclusion to make.
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 money is there, it is being put into the wrong hands and into silly bureaucracy (for example by having to put out construction projects on the EU market, while local businesses collapse, ruining Germany's own economy).
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.
> Not investing sufficiently into education, public Infrastructure, hospitals, and probably more. Inefficient bureaucracy everywhere.
Youre blaming this on markets? Germanys problem is an overly rigid beuarcratic state that refuses to run a deficit, not overly free markets.
It is also part of the free market ideologists' ideas, that a hospital must be profitable, a school must be profitable, and similar absurd ideas. It is also part of their ideology, that school children go without lunch as a consequence.
>The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
Could you share some sources to back this up? At least a sources to back up at least a few case studies would be curious. I'm interested in economics and never have been aware that free market self-correction is a well documented fantasy and would love to understand where is your claim coming from.
Libertarians took over a town in NH and abolished town wide garbage collection. The free market produced a bunch of trash in people's yards, which attracted bears, causing havoc all around town. True story.
That's not to say you can't solve a lot of problems with markets. It just means waving your hands at "the free market" like it's a magic talisman is a childish thing to do.
> Libertarians took over a town in NH and abolished town wide garbage collection.
Presumably this is the case you’re citing: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...
That sounds like a case of "Tragedy of the Commons", which is not free market.
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.)
No true scotsman
??
You mean the Articles of Confederation that failed because the government wasn’t strong enough?
The Articles of Confederation were not the founding of the United States. The founding was the Constitution.
Why didn't they just shoot the bears? You'd figure libertarians would be all for that.
Because they couldn't reach a consensus with their governance mechanisms. There were people feeding and encouraging the bears. I guess they could have shot all the bears. Eliminating all the bears because a sensible consensus can't be reached seems like a gross failure of humanity to coexist with the natural (uncontrolled) world.
Sounds like they just couldn't put their money where their mouths were and wanted daddy gov to manage the bears and couldn't agree on how. If the neighborhood has bears just store your stuff better and you won't have to shoot them causing problems with the neighbors. Easier than bickering and cheaper than paying for government to do it.
Edit: I guess this works of thieves too.
It would have violated the NAP.
> As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
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.
> will self-correct and optimize outcomes
It does self-correct and optimize. But as you said it below, it optimizes towards
> they concentrate wealth
Monopolies or oligopolies.
There aren't enough rich people to fund the government at the levels it spends.
According to
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.
It’s paper wealth. If you forced a sell off, the value would plummet. Look at revenue.
Maybe a direct transfer then. Don’t have to worry about share prices when the tax is a % of shares owned.
Do you think the government should start owning shares? Seems problematic. Instead, we could tax realized gains and profits. I think in general this is all just a round about way of doing the taxation we already do, just more of it. Which I support (except for the needlessly antagonistic populist tone), for the same reason I support some cutting of government spending. We legitimately do have too much federal debt right now.
We should be thankful you did not write: eat the rich.
Tax the rich, the rich hike prices, inflation. Please find another magic wand, that one does not work.
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources.
The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their operating costs though; I agree with that.
Have you ever actually worked with a Fortune 500 company? I’m assuming not or you’d know “inefficient allocation of resources” isn’t a government issue, it’s a large organization issue that’s as bad if not worse in the private sector.
There is a natural garbage collection mechanism for corporations that become too inefficient. Inefficient government agencies can last much longer.
There was; now we have bailouts. "Too big to fail".
While true, you overstate the problem. Look up the companies in the S&P 500 today, 10 years ago, 20, 30, 50. There are dramatic changes with only a handful of long term survivors.
That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety.
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.
There is a LOT more personnel churn in private sector than federal government.
That really depends on what you mean by churn. Lower levels of government are less stable than major corporations. Walmart stores don’t regularly all randomly shut down for a few weeks due to someone being unable to decide on a budget etc.
I’ll grant you it’s really different kinds of instability though.
A merger frequently involves major shakeups in both the acquirer and the acquired. You don’t have to, and shouldn’t destroy the old companies. You just want their resources redirected to more efficient uses every so often.
Yea, the "too big to fail" principle needs to just go. Corporations should be prevented from becoming so big in the first place. There must be a limit on the revenue generation - once you cross a number, you should be broken up.
Humongous companies just become national-level power brokers adversely affecting both the government and the free market.
Monopolies have a bone to pick with you. They aren’t generally garbage collected as their wealth becomes self-perpetuating even in the face of inefficiencies as they can continue to raise prices and push others out.
This was true during the gilded age and it’s become true again. It took systematic regulations, unions, welfare, and the Sherman antitrust act.
If it wasn’t for a democratic government the oligarchs would still have been in control. They are corrupting the current institutions thought the DOGE coup. You see this in the self dealing of the billionaires such as Musks contracts as well as the tariff exemption grift.
So please don’t flaunt a free market as a natural solution to inefficient systems, not even Adam Smith believed that.
As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.
And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick.
As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion.
They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.
> They are operating a coup
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.
The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.
Optimal relative to what? And more seriously, name any large program, government or corporate, that is "optimal".
Google, Duolingo, and DataBricks are three multibillion dollar tech companies based in part on NSF research. The return on investment from NSF-funded research spinning out into companies is enormous.
While the system could use some tuning, it also works pretty well as is. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Noting people do is 100% optimal, but productivity gains mean resource constraint problems are more solvable than they first appear.
People are worried about automation driving people out of the workplace while others are worried about a lack of workers due to changing demographics. What’s going to happen is the result of a bunch of different forces, simplified projections are easy to make and unlikely to prove accurate.
It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention.
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.
No system will optimally allocate resources. However projects are typically funded under competitive grants and that process is fairly good at moving slowly but methodically in the right direction.
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.
The solution is a straightforward but painful increasing of the retirement age to like at least 70.
I mean, a relatively easy fix to a negative replacement rate (at least when you have a well-run, wealthy, attractive country) is immigration. Replacement rate isn't a problem when you let more folks in
I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example.
To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.
> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.
There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home 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.
As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.
> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:
If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699799
There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572
Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.
My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.
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.
one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.
The US was very good for a very long time at integrating immigrants. It should continue that tradition and work even harder at it.
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.
The US was historically rather hostile towards new waves of immigrants in practice, treating them very much like second class citizens (Irish, Italians, Latinos etc), effectively pressuring them to assimilate by becoming "more American than Americans" to avoid such attitudes. One can argue that the system kinda sorta worked in the long run, but I don't think it makes it worthy of emulation.
> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels.
heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...
I think you need to consider history if you think this is a new thing. People literally paid for indentured servants, even outside of the slave trade.
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.
But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.
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?
Countries are just arbitrary here. What happens long term is there’s massive selective pressure because children of people that reproduce in wealthy economies are the only people to be around in 200+ years.
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.
Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction? It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.
You know NYC is already minority white right?
My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:
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!
> The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently.
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.
I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it was just assumed that people would do it on their own, but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to get people to do it.
This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the super-not-weak anthropic principle?
We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.
Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!
Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.
This doesn’t fix your problem if the people you let in cost more than they contribute in taxes. See for example the Netherlands where non-Western immigrants are large net negative contributors and their children are no better. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569.pdf
Similar results apply in Denmark. https://docs.iza.org/dp8844.pdf
EU style negatively selected immigration where easily a billion people are eligible for asylum and refugee status with easy family reunification means immigration is a large net negative fiscal contributor.
They might still create more value than they cost. For example, a bus driver enables many people to work, but has a low wage and hence pays little in taxes.
On average you are paid according to your value so this doesn't track.
Where are you getting this from? The value you provide sets a kind of ceiling on what you can be paid. But you are paid based on how easy it is to replace you.
So a top TikTok influencer is more valuable than a surgeon?
Yes. They provide a scaled entertainment. You are forgetting the reach that this person has.
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?
Here's how you determine who brings more value to society: If they were to just stop coming to work tomorrow, would society keep going?
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.
You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real.
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.
if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
Yeah we knew that, that's the point.
Fertility rates are below replacement on every continent except Africa, and they're dropping quickly there. Immigration isn't going to save us, at least not long-term.
I think what'll happen is that areas that still have a vibrant age pyramid will put up borders (either geographic or economic or both) with ones that don't, and say "Sorry, you're on your own" to the latter. They protect their children at the expense of their elders, basically. It won't be national borders either: the fertility issue cuts across most major nations, but there are certain regions where people still raise children.
Stop trying to solve problems 100 years from now in other countries though.
The US is an enormously attractive immigration target and can easily bring in enormous numbers of new workers if it wants to. It's so good at this that it actually has and those people pay taxes but don't get government benefits.
There is no "other countries", it's a global economy. Mexico exports $450B worth of stuff to the US every year. When their fertility rate was 6 and then one or two of those kids immigrate to the US, that's fine for them. Now that their fertility rate is below the population replacement rate too, if their kids emigrate their country is screwed. Then there's nobody to make that $450B worth of stuff, because the kids who migrated are busy filling the existing jobs in the US.
Meanwhile what do you expect to happen in countries with fertility rates below population replacement and net out-migration of the youth? Is it morally reasonable to willingly cause that to happen, even without considering the consequences to the US of that level of desperation spreading through the rest of the world?
The alternative would be to get the fertility rate back to the population replacement rate.
Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
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.
> Assuming current trends are unchanged we’re still talking about having billions of humans for hundreds of years. On that kind of timescale we might see significant life extension, artificial wombs, and hard core genetic engineering.
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.
The ratio of younger vs older people is also a function of biological aging which might look very different in 500 years. I don’t think we can reasonably expect to retire at 65 if healthy lifespan hits 200+.
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.
You make it sound like the US is a parasite that takes the young of other countries to endow itself, never mind what happens about other countries. Maybe it is?
People decide where they want to go, and people overwhelmingly despite significant risks choose immigrate to the United States in one form or another.
It’s not just regions you find differences based on culture, and guess what natural selection is going to do with less fertile cultures.
Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers
that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources.
When's the last time someone in the Trump administration "optimally allocated resources" in a way that didn't "allocate" them to his or her own bank account?
> US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results.
There's an assumption here that deserves some closer examination. If we are taking this as a justification for federal science spending, we would have to also support a policy of awarding research grants on the basis of expected long term return on investment, which is not the criteria applied now. Furthermore, we would have to justify this spending in competition with whatever economic investments the government could make elsewhere, or that the American taxpayers would make if we let them keep their money in the first place. From the standpoint of scientific research I don't think this is necessarily what we want, but even if it was we would have some hard questions about the last few decades of federal research funding.
NSF has actually been experimenting with this sort of funding model for a couple years through its new (as of 2019) convergence accelerator program, which I think is awesome. It’s explicitly a multi-sector program where academics partner with companies to do some proof of concept research in a phase 1 award and translate that into a viable commercial product or innovation in a phase 2 award. Potential for long term return on investment is explicitly part of the review criteria, which target this sort of historically underfunded middle ground between basic research and technology development
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/convergence-accelera...
I don’t think that is the point. The argument is usually that we cannot predict what will be “high impact” 20 years from now but the current system works well enough that it is a net benefit despite a lot of research not being directly applicable in the end.
First, it's highly unclear a priori which scientific discoveries will pay off. The discoverer of Green Fluorescent Protein was denied funding, with others eventually winning the Nobel Prize for it. Same for mRNA vaccines, most recently featured in COVID-19 vaccine, which also recently won a Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
Second, while there are always improvements to be made, the system as is (or was) worked pretty well in practice without knowing what the expected ROI was. The PageRank algorithm which led to Google was funded in part by an NSF grant on Digital Libraries. The ROI on that single invention just from taxes, jobs, and increased productivity likely exceeds NSF's annual budget. DataBricks and Duolingo are also based in part on NSF research.
Yeah, the system is imperfect, as all human-oriented systems are, but for the most part it works pretty well in practice and has been a linchpin in the US economic growth and national security.
If we're going to count the COVID-19 vaccine as a benefit of federal research funding, surely we need to also count COVID-19 itself as a cost, given the strong evidence that the virus was a product of US-funded gain of function research.
Consensus is that the evidence supporting that is not strong.
It’s not conclusive, but it’s strong enough that President Biden (or rather, someone with control of President Biden’s autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon backdated to 2014.
> President Biden (or rather, someone with control of President Biden’s autopen) issued Dr. Fauci a blanket pardon backdated to 2014.
This merely proved that President Biden believed that President Trump will prosecute and imprison Dr Fauci if given the opportunity.
To believe that, they would have to believe he had done something that a prosecutor would object to and that was serious enough to get Fauci imprisoned. Which is to say, that he had committed a crime. If we're expecting it to be an arbitrary act of legal harassment, Trump's team could concoct something based on Fauci's work in 2013. Corruption isn't limited to a 2014-2025 window; unless they are basing it on facts.
As we have seen, Trump can hire prosecutors who will prosecute anybody he points his little finger at. He always hires lackeys, so it was easy to predict he would harass Fauci.
So how will the pardon help? If the assumption is that the prosecutors are going to fabricate crimes, the pardon will only help if they fabricate a crime that happened under certain conditions (see: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1385746/). If they're just making something up they can make something up and claim it happened in 2013.
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.
None of your links show any indications of crimes. I don't get the obsession with Fauci when there's an actual criminal using the Oval Office to harass innocent people every day.
This conversation is pointless. Have a nice day.
If they want to prosecute him they'll have to state a rationale to get around the pardon. That rationale will be used to prosecute them when they pardon themselves. If they want to weaken the pardon power, they are welcome to. Biden ensured they have to go to maximum lawlessness if they want to do that. They have the power to, no one is disputing that. But in choosing to exercise that power, they will hang a sword over their heads.
Actually it's not that hard. The main legal avenue to invalidate the Biden pardons would be to argue that Biden never actually issued the pardons. He didn't sign them (the autopen did) and given his mental state there's no clear evidence that he was even aware of them. Trump, in contrast, routinely signs executive orders and pardons with news cameras in the Oval Office with him, while chatting with journalists. So it would be hard to argue that Trump was not the one actually issuing them.
If that's all it takes to invalidate a pardon, it would indeed severely weaken the power.
So, the current system generates net income for the government, but you’re claiming it needs to be changed in order to do so?
I would actually question the assumption that it still does. It's not obvious whether it does or doesn't, because the payoff horizon is in the very long term.
Well, last year it generated more than the sum of all the money speant since what, WWII?
Research funding is really cheap compared to everything else the government does.
The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.
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.
I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.
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.
Your arguments are ideological as well. For one you fail to mention how much of the debt is due to war debt servicing and choose, like most debt hawks, to blame entitlements only.
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.
The amount of money we are talking about for research is so small in comparison to the debt that it’s a red herring to even bring up the current debt level. As you’ve noted, even the largest parts of the budget are dwarfed by the total deficit. Researching is a rounding error.
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.
Universities could pay for all of the research themselves theoretically considering they're the largest business in most states. Their portfolio income, the sports income, the donations, and the free real estate given to land grant universities that has been heavily monetized all add up. Of course I doubt they will allocate money to research, but they could if that was truely their purpose as an organization.
There’s could and then there’s should. Could they? I don’t know, I’d have to look at their finances individually, it’s not like all of them have Harvard level endowments or alabamas football income.
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.
I think a lot has changed in the last 20 years. It would be great if they could solve the problem internally, but it's already being run like a business. The innovation for pennies on the tax dollar is due to graduate student labor with pay in pennies on the hour to subsidize what is often commercial research that could be done by a company.
How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Britain was at a point where without massive aid from the US huge numbers of people would die of cold or starvation. The US has huge surpluses of food and energy.
The idea that we're in such a crisis that we have to eat our own seed corn (massive cuts to science research which is one of the main drivers of US economic growth) is crazy.
> How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Up until you got to the rationing and coal shortages I think the parallels with the contemporary US are pretty obvious.
No, not really. The fact that we import so much is a function of our wealth, not our poverty. We import food because we like to have a variety of produce year round and we like alcohol from foreign countries and we can afford it. Britain was importing food because otherwise there would be famine.
These are not equivalent situations.
It's true that the United States does not depend on food and energy imports. However, the growing fiscal situation and unsustainable costs of maintaining global hegemony are very similar to that of Britain in the 20th century, as is the declining competitiveness of American industry. You're never going to find any exact or perfect historical parallels but there are enough similarities to cause concern.
No, it really, really isn't. The key difference is that the US can finance deficits and Britain couldn't. There's huge appetite all over the world to buy US government debt and to invest in the US. The UK needed massive foreign aid just to survive.
As long as you can still find someone to lend you money, debt isn’t a problem? Good to know.
The US is not really in trouble because of maintaining global hegemony. It’s in trouble because of repeated tax cuts by Republicans that are too popular for Democrats to fully unravel, and deficit spending largely caused or enacted by Republican administrations. Maintaining global hegemony really isn’t that costly to the US as a percent of GDP. It’s foolishness like the Middle East wars that are costly.
Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.
If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.
US research funding is not what you want to cut though. It is among the most productive funding possible and there is evidence aplenty that it pays for itself many times over.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
Echoing this as well - administration for research is fairly thin in every institution I've worked at.
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.
I hear this about everything. “Don’t cut this thing because it’s the most efficient and productive thing ever!” Food stamps, homeless funding, public transport, public schools. Supposedly every single thing is the most efficient thing ever and we can’t possibly cut a dollar
All of your examples put together would be a rounding error in the US Military budget
Exactly, if their goal was to actually look for fraud and waste, why are they starting with such small potatoes like science funding? You'd think they'd focus on areas that are spending many more zeros, where they could have much more impact...
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.
In everything, there is some low-hanging fruit that yields an impactful outcome for minimal spending.
It's important to remember that government debt doesn't ever need to be repaid, sort of how an immortal man could indefinitely refinance loans. That he'd have to borrow again to repay the old loans (while maintaining the debt) is part of the mechanism. Such an immortal could have his debt grow indefinitely and still be fine as long as lenders believe he'll be able to afford paying the interest and that other lenders will be willing to refinance the loans when they expire.
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.
P.S.
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 idea that cutting research will make a dent in the budget is a fantasy. NSF has a budget of 10 billion. Stop rationalizing gutting crucial programs because of “the deficit” Medicare, social security and the military are the main costs in the US budget. Sure universities are bloated, tackle that problem separately then.
The dollar was strong, interest rates low, inflation rate competitively low (compare with other countries).
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.
> Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars.
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).
There are numerous errors in this.
The most obvious is that social security money somehow disappears into a black hole. Of course it doesn't. All of that money is spent on something - usually useful things produced and sold by businesses.
The subtext with complaints about government spending is usually that this money is being handed out to the morally undeserving, and this - by some bizarre alchemy - is the direct cause of a weaker dollar.
In reality the deficit is the difference between money collected in taxes and money spent. Failing to close that gap by raising taxation on those who hoard wealth offshore, spend it on unproductive toys, and buy up key assets like property is an ideological choice, not an economic necessity.
The deficit is a direct result of unproductive wealth hoarding facilitated by unnecessary tax cuts, not of public spending.
But it's hard to get this point across in a country where "Why should I pay taxes to subsidise my neghbour's health care?" is taken seriously as a talking point, but "Why are corporations bankrupting half a million people year instead of paying out for health insurance as contracted?" is considered ideological extremism.
As for the rest - the US was clearly at its strongest and most innovative and productive when taxes were high and the government was funding original R&D before handing it over to the private sector for marketing and commercial development.
The funding part including training generations of PhDs.
That's literally how the computer industry started.
The idea that an ideologically pure private sector can do this on its own without getting stuck in the usual tar pits of quarterly short-termism, cranky narcissistic mismanagement, and toxic oligopoly is a pipe dream.
US corporate culture can't do long-term strategy. It's always going to aim for the nearest short-term maximum while missing bigger rewards that are years or even decades out.
Tax revenue as percentage of GDP right now 17%. You can pick random countries and compare. China 26%, Sweden 41%, Japan 32% etc. Do you see the issue? When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we were at 20%.
> 17% ... When we ran a surplus during Clinton's admin, we were at 20%.
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://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product
$5 Trillion Tax Revenue
$28.177 trillion GDP
I guess what is your point though? The current administration has absolutely no plans to reduce debt as a part of these funding cuts. They plan on INCREASING debt by issuing massive tax breaks that no amount of cutting will fund. It’s right there in their own budget.
If anything they’re taking the worst of all worlds by sacrificing future revenue (by way of new technology that can be sold) to give money to people who don’t need it right now. If you think the US is going to remain the center of the western world’s economic universe, or that any of our allies are going to remain on a dollar standard when we can’t be relied upon militarily or otherwise, I think you’re in for a very rude awakening.
US research funding still drives a positive return on investment for tax dollars because of the economic growth it drives, so ending research funding would expedite the debt crisis.
Federally funded R&D was around 3.4% of the GDP in 2021: https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23339.
The chart in that link seems to indicate it was 0.6%, while total R&D funding was 3.4%
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
Really...? Until Liberation Day the other week, I would doubt this. The whole world holds the US dollar, if the USA fails (side-glare at Donald and Elon), the whole world goes into chaos. If President Harris had said "OK world, we need to borrow x more dollars to keep this country running", people (private creditors and nations) would say "I'm pretty sure the USA will still be a solid economy in 10 (or 30 years), x% ROI if I lend them money? Sure!".
And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina": https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-heres-who-owns-u-s-...
It's not wrong.
We were doing great in 2000.
[EDIT] Plus of course there's the '01 crash in here, which doesn't help matters, as those never do.
Bush pushed through a huge tax cut while launching two extremely expensive wars, one of which was definitely not necessary (arguably, neither of them were a good idea—I'd have argued that at the time, certainly).
Then, financial crisis. You (under orthodox modern political-economy and national fiscal policy guidance) usually try to reserve your biggest deficit spending for exactly these kinds of cases. We had no "cushion" because we'd wasted it on tax cuts and wars. The deficit goes very unwisely deep.
Then, Obama. Tax cuts not reversed under the democrats. Wars not ended (fast enough). More expensive foreign adventures, in fact, though not really comparable to the budgetary catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan. At least the economy recovers, but we don't get back to what should be baseline levels of deficit spending, we stay way too deep in the red.
Then, Trump. More tax cuts. Deeper in the red.
And wouldn't you know it, another disaster! Covid. If only we weren't already in awful territory with our budget... but we are, and deficit spending beats a bad recession and still seeing bad budget results due to a weakened economy, so, more spending it is, because that is what you do in these cases, you're just not supposed to start from such a poor position.
Biden. Little done to fix any of that, aside from doing a pretty good job managing Covid on the econ side (which, I have my complaints, but credit where it's due)
Trump again. We're likely to see tax receipts drop due to IRS cuts and a declining economy, this time for no good reason. And they're talking tax cuts... again.
So yeah, we were on track to need decades of very-careful policy to let our GDP catch up with our debt, without making big cuts. And we'd have to raise taxes back to late-90s levels for that to work, anyway.
That many years of responsible management weren't gonna happen. Tax increases evidently aren't, either. Realistically, we were on track to eventually hit and have to work through a crisis over this, probably early in the back half of this century.
This administration appears to be moving that point many, many years earlier, though.
Not everyone is happy to depend on USD. BRICs were making plans to introduce their own alternative reserve currency. Trump once threatened 100% tariffs if they followed through with that.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/aggressive-tariffs-f...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-threatens-100-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-afr...
I wonder if these plans have anything to do with the world's reserve currency being controlled by an entity that's sometimes erratic and assholey...
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.
That plan was DoA. They were never going to agree (Some being petro states, some being commodities exporters, some manufacturers etc) and half those countries lack proper rule of law to enforce contracts that turn out to be negative for said countries.
This has nothing to do with Trump beyond the fact that his plans could hasten how quickly this blows up. Bond rates were already going up before the election, the bond market was already nervous. Your indication that the world isn’t starting to have doubts isn’t born out by the bond market rates.
> And as this chart says, it's not all owned by "Chaina"
I never said that. China has been rolling US debt off of their books for a decade now and moving towards BRICS.
If we make this a partisan issue, which you appear to be, we won’t solve this problem. That would be a catastrophic mistake.
Are you saying that hastening the catastrophe is the right move?
No.
Ok. You never know what you are going to hear on HN :)
Fine I’ll oblige. :P
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.
People have been predicting catastrophe since the 70s. Same with social security. Somehow we keep muddling along.
That attitude sounds like a college grad with a fresh credit card they keep spending on.
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...
50 years is not "a fresh credit card". If someone predicts something and 50 years later it hasn't happened, I think it's time to re-examine their assumptions
And what were they predicting? Most reasonable predictions were that once the GDP to debt ratio reaches a certain point that’s when issues arise. It’s just now nearing that 100% of GDP mark. Obviously predictions on a national scale can take decades. The “fresh credit card” was handed out in the 70’s.
Just because climate change hasn’t ended the world yet in 50 years doesn’t mean it’s not a serious threat.
> Bond rates were already going up before the election
Treasuries behaving like a risk asset is 100% Trump. And it has nothing to do with him blowing out our deficit, it's 100% about stagflation and money markets.
> Bond rates were already going up before the election,
Do you think the fact that there was a 40-70% (and I'm being optimistic, here) chance that the election would elect Trump [1] had anything at all to do with that?
---
[1] Who made his plans for destroying both the American hegemony and global trade, and its domestic economy quite clear.
> 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.
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.
>At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output.
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.?
what happened to lehman bros, bear stearns...? The worst companies did fail. You would never see that in the government
Governments fail too - every four years (US), sometimes, or some multiple thereof.
thats not the government failing, its a political party failing. The administrative state remains intact.
both your sentences are bullshit. I am too busy today. will prove that tomorrow. meanwhile, chill, or warm, depending on your climatic zone and other factors.
So your argument is that the U.S. is currently like wartime Britain, and that science funding specifically must be sacrificed despite the fact that is has created an economic boon that would help to pay down the debt: We just desperately need the money now for else the country could cease to exist, and we’ll sort out how to restore a science driven economy once the crisis is over?
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
1. No, it isn't. And if you think the finances of the US in 2025 are remotely similar to the finances and the world position of the British Empire in 1945, you are staggeringly wrong about either the past, or the present, or both.
2. And if it were, there's a million lower-ROI things that could be cut. Does an isolationist America really need eleven carrier groups, in a world where there are zero non-American ones?
Don't mix up the deficit and the debt (and the internal and external debt).
US debt, especially internal debt, is somewhat artificial. For a given level of deficit - the US federal government has been choosing mostly to create debt, i.e. borrow, instead of creating money. So, it has been accruing more and more debt. This can be changed not just for the future, but retroactively, by creating an amount of money with which to pay those parts of the federal debt which the government wishes to disappear. There are some technical details here (e.g. Federal Reserve vs government action etc.; for which reason a suggested method for this has been minting Trillion-dollar coins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin), but of course the main obstacle is socio-political.
I said "for a given level of deficit", but of course that is not a given: The federal government can increase overall taxation (or decrease overall spending). It has been decreasing taxes affecting large corporations and the wealthy, massively over past decades - a significant reason for the deficit.
Not that I expect the US government to suddenly change its course of action, since the current arrangements work well for some (even if poorly for most).
As for "the free market", that's just a contradiction in terms, markets are never free, "efficiency" is to a large extent a value judgement, and the larger owners of capital are rarely allowed to fail. It is more likely they would just have the entire economy be forced to bail them out via government action.
> The US debt is starting to become an existential problem.
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.
I'm genuinely curious what you think the "right" level of debt is, and how you justify your answer. The U.S. has only been debt-free once in its history, so obviously "zero" isn't the answer. And it seems self-evident that you are correct that there is a level where it becomes untenable. But what amount, and why that amount?
The free market gave you all these quality bathing spots: https://environment.data.gov.uk/bwq/profiles/
The way they math is presented is off. The US is deficit spending this year, yet you present the interest payment as something separate from the military. Obviously that interest is partially from the military spending the US makes this year that it has not paid for, military payments from last year it has not paid for etc. The billions sent to Israel, the Ukraine and the hundreds of military bases the US has spanning the globe are not cheap.
Also, a lot of other military expenses are not counted as military expenditures in your math. A veteran whose leg was blown off overseas going to a VA hospital is not a military expenditure in this math.
If you have an extremely narrow definition of military spending, you can make it look small, but if you count veteran's benefits, interest on past military adventures etc. It looks larger. Why are Navy ships being shot at off Yemen, to cover for what the UN committee investigating it found is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Which is also helping bankruptcy the US, as you pointed out
I have no idea what you’re talking about honestly. The data for government spending can be seen in multiple places, here is the CBO numbers (this might be an older article or out of date, I don’t have time or access to a laptop right now).
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61172
What the GP is talking about is that there are differing opinions on what counts as "military spending" or "defense spending". The CBO has its definition, but that is not universally accepted, particularly by people who think that the USA spends far too much on its military.
The question of whether or not e.g. veteran's health care should be considered part of military spending is not a stupid one, even if people may differ on their answers.
I suppose that’s fair, but kind of tangential. The point I was making was that if discretionary spending, approximately 25% of outlays, could be completely cut we would still have a deficit. I’m not suggesting this is even possible, I’m merely using it as a demonstration of the scale of the problem.
Fair enough.
I'd still quibble with your whole framing though. For example:
> This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services.
I don't know if you have a mortgage, but assuming you do, is it useful to say of the interest payments you make on that "this is X dollars that cannot be used to buy food, heat, gas or streaming services" ? I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to government too.
Capital investments, and debt more broadly, comes in good, bad and indifferent varieties. Some portion of the US national debt arises from spending on "good" things, some on "bad" things and quite a bit on "indifferent" things. There's no point in (accurately) noting that a mortgage payer cannot use the money they pay in interest to pay for other things, because we (broadly) accept that borrowing money in order to own your own home is sensible and comes with lots of its own utility/value. Whatever portion of US national debt arises from "good" spending can be viewed in the same manner.
Of course, how the actual apportionment between good/bad/indifferent spending is described will vary with political outlook and many other things, so there's no single answer to the question "how much of the national debt is a good thing". But it's certainly some of it ...
> I suggest that it is not, and for reasons that apply to government too.
I disagree, I think it is useful, and in fact important for young people to carefully consider the size of their mortgage and the interest they have to pay.
A persons long term financial health can be greatly impacted by the size of their mortgage, and I would always recommend taking the smallest possible loan. Taking a mortgage only makes sense if you would otherwise have to pay rent.
Same applies to governments.
In fact, I go one step further and think its shocking that one generation of people would leave behind a massive debt for their children and grandchildren have to service.
I don't agree with how DOGE is going about things, and I'm not a US citizen, but I strongly believe governments should be generating surpluses for their children to enjoy, not deficits for their children to pay off.
I think we’re actually broadly in agreement. I’m unfortunately busy at work so I’m not articulating my position as well as I perhaps should, but I don’t think all debt or deficit spending is bad. It absolutely has a place and should be utilized. I don’t think this explains the US though. We’ve already hit 100% public debt to GDP (or 120% total debt to GDP) and I’m not seeing this slowing down. The last projections from the congressional budget going into reconciliation is a doubling of public debt in 10 years from what I remember.
A lot of our deficit is because of Trump's 10 year tax cuts, which Republicans are about to re-extend. Trump does not care about debt, he just wants to destroy government institutions.
Where does government subsidized loans to banks (eg Fed, Fannie, Freddie) sit in your list? The government is a monetary sovereign - it cannot run out of dollars to use. The actual constraint is that creating too much new money creates too much price inflation. But for the past decades most monetary inflation has been flowing into the financial sector and bidding up the asset bubbles, with the "fiscal responsibility" political narrative merely being a dishonest cover to keep that gravy train flowing.
I don’t think your “existential problem” and Churchill’s are in any way equivalent.
The problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to tax billionaires. We just passed even more tax cuts for rich people and are scheduled to add more to the debt. Just tax rich people, it's not complicated.
From their unwillingness to tax people. American tax revenue as a fraction of GDP is 6-7 percentage points lower than in the average OECD country. That gap is over $1.5 trillion/year.
The economic projections I’ve seen have shown taxing the rich will increase tax revenue by around 1.5% of GDP. We’re slated to borrow 7.3%. That math doesn’t work. To be fair, the republican math with cuts (assuming no tax cuts) also doesn’t work. Neither side is serious about this issue.
How can there possibly be an answer to "how much will tax revenue increase if we tax the rich" without specifying how much we tax the rich, and how we define the rich?
Taxing billionaires is just one of many necessary steps but it is the most important and vital step in my opinion. There are fundamental problems with how the US is run down to the local level but it starts with taxing billionaires and getting money out of politics.
To be clear, I think raising taxes on everyone is going to have to happen along with spending cuts.
What does the ideal solution look like to you? Are you happy with what DOGE is doing and if not what would you change? I'm asking genuinely because I don't think enough people put forth ideas in their own right.
Why point at billionaires, anyone with more than a million is living a comfortable life, everybody should be doing their part.
Billionaires are the ones actively fucking the world and seeking tax cuts but you're right, there are plenty of multimillionaires that need to be paying their share.
You can tax the rich, and then cut less of the good stuff. Or you can cut taxes and decimate everything. Guess what the billionaire class chose.
I fully expect uncomfortable spending cuts with raising taxes while trying to balance economic growth in order to correct this problem. Im dissatisfied with what both sides of the isle are actually doing.
If you use a reasonable definition of rich like 150k for individuals then yes it could work. But that's not what people actually mean when they say it.
False. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is about 6 trillion dollars. The US national debt is over 36 trillion dollars.
The rich half of the US populus own about $156 trillion. Thus therefore as a conclusion therefrom you only have to take 23% from half the population. Lets make it progressive from 0% at average wealth to 52% at the top.
Much less than Roosevelt's 94%
But I'm neither democrat nor republican, it might not make sense to anyone :)
To be sensible, you don't just pay 100% and be done with it. That would be silly. 1.3% for the top hoarders seems enough. It will grow back.
As the saying goes, Republicans can't do science, and Democrats can't do math.
All this 'just tax the billionaires' is the latter.
If you thought I, or anyone else thinks that by taxing billionaires we would pay off the entirety of the debt, I don't know what to tell you bud.
Silly of me to take you at your word when you said, "the problem with US debt comes from their unwillingness to tax billionaires".
Silly you indeed. I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt." As I mentioned in another comment, taxing billionaires is crucial step but one of many needed.
> I have no idea how you read that and interpret it as "taxing billionaires will pay the entire debt."
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.
I'm not moving goalpost, you just read my statement wrong. There are many steps to take but taxing billionaires is a crucial step to getting the funding to fix many of the other problems that cities don't have the money to tackle.
I thought taxing billionaires was supposed to fix the national debt, not to fund new spending that will supposedly "fix many of the other problems that cities don't have the money to tackle". (Which is false--lack of revenue is not the reason city governments don't work--but that's another issue). You've just moved the goalpost again.
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures that later, and unpredictably, come together.
There is a veritassium YouTube video describing the story of the electron microscope. At some point somebody even proved mathematically that any improvement was a dead end. Then a group of scientists whose research was mostly shunned, and almost at the point of losing their funding, found a way around the limitations and improved the electron microscope to measure atomic level fields, with great impact on science including materials.
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.
I think a lot of the decentralization also correlated up with a wide range of directions, with decisions to pursue activity made at much lower levels than happens today.
Decentralization overcomes the local knowledge problem.
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
OP, please grapple with this.
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.
Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over. Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our system there is positive selection (in the 'natural selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.
This should give you pause.
Without claiming that any given administration is taking any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is net positive.
I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground. Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of reproducibility right now.
You might think crisis of reproducibility means everyone is faking data. No, that does not mean that. There are many factors to a crisis of reproducibility. One is fake data. A bigger one is a lack of incentive and a lack of complete data gathering details on some metric. Generally even if there is a crisis is subjective.
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.
> Most issues are small nudges or selective data (e.g, retesting when data doesn't support your expectations), not blatant lies.
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’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
Echoing this. I've had two grants pulled in the last admin, and one in this one, and all of them were very sweeping - and wildly inefficient, killing projects during the phase of ramping up, rather than productively working.
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor.
I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
Literally nothing about their approach resembles an attempt at efficiency. Efficiency is a ratio of input resources to output. No part of the DOGE program I've seen or heard of even considers that relationship. Simply firing people at best results in reduced output, or hiring more expensive contractors. And you've flushed institutional knowledge down the toilet. It's like turning a car off and pretending you've boosted its fuel efficiency because nothing is burning. Except that the car saved you time on other tasks, oops. Firing people and then immediately having to rehire them is hilariously inefficient. Rewriting legacy software like they're attempting at Social Security is a classically inefficient blunder.
I don't know if it's all about revenge, but it's absolutely not about efficiency. It's an edgy teen's idea of tough governance. It's the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish. It's false economy all the way down.
If for no other reason, if you terminate a grant for cause, you have to specify why.
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.
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.
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
Why would the people paying for the research not control what it can be spent on? Letting the people who spend the money decide is typically not a good system.
They do control what it's spent on. There are volumes of compliance about how you can spend the money. For example, can't use the funds on food, alcohol, paying rent, bribing people (yes, seriously, some idiot tried it and then they had to make a rule about it), you have to fly US carriers where possible, etc.
There are also reports you submit showing your progress and how you spent the money, to check that you are spending it on things you said you would.
This thread (not just the person I'm replying to) demonstrates a lot of misconceptions about why we have research funding, how it works, and what the results have been in practice. Please, everyone, don't rely on stereotypes of how you think research funding works.
typically
Pure science may not be a typical case, though, because the people who control the funds don't really have any idea whether the work they are funding is ultimately going to turn out productive or not. The work involved is far from routine and basically a jump into the unknown.
I get the risk of fraud and nepotism, but in some other situations (Bell Labs etc.), "choose very good people and let them improvise within certain limits of a budget" turned out to be very efficient. The devil is in the "choose very good people" detail.
...Why would the people paying control what it's spent on...?
Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.
I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.
The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.
Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.
I think the particular method probably pales in comparison to the fact that the US simply had so much more money and resources. The UK is an island nation that lost its empire and was playing second fiddle.
Such a “simple” solution. Wonder why doing a PhD in the majority of european countries is equal to a poor monthly income. Just pay them more. I guess countries don’t like long term solutions.
I was curious how much of a gap there is, and landed on about 100k in the US[0] vs 85k[1] USD in France for instance, in average.
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...
Yeah, no PhDs in the US don't make 100K year. The stipend for an MIT PhD is about 50K a year half of what you're saying. Citing my wife who just finished their phd. MIT also makes it so everyone is paid the same as PhDs even if they bring in their own money like my wife did.
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
Your ciation [1] shows the highest number as being approximately 70,000 USD a year, not 85k. That's 15,000 dollars less than you claim. Your [0] citation is not a share-able link and just redirects to the home-page.
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-...
Sorry, I must have added the extra bonuses on top of the gross salary that already included them. The 5 210€ figure indeed matches 70k USD.
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)
> 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.
So that could be a political stance...
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
There are orders of magnitude more patents in the private sector, but most are either not licensed or are licensed as part of huge 'pools' as private sector patenting is driven by the arms race between companies to have a large enough patent portfolio to retaliate if sued (there is a lot of patent 'slop'). And that's not even counting fake (troll) innovators. Whereas uni patents are probably more likely to be licensed out on an individual basis. So it's really hard to know the significance of counts alone. You'd have to look at a random sample of uni Vs private patents and assess each one.
We have to dispense with the silliness of comparing the US with countries a tenth its size. If you want to compare Britain to the US, pick a state of comparable size and do so. Otherwise you’re comparing apples to much larger apples.
I wonder if the analogy might be more like comparing an apple tree evolving in a forest vs breeding varieties of apples on a farm.
Even if you pick a state, science in any single state has still gotten federal funding and had the ability to easily cross-pollinate with other very good researchers across state boarders. The federal funding then gets redirected to areas of success and the flywheel starts.
That's harder on the scale of a small country.
I don’t disagree which is why I encourage comparing the EU to the US as a whole.
Why? Britain was considered a larger power in the world until around WWII.
Because it was, it had a bigger population than the US does currently. Then all those countries under it's thumb declared independence, and that changed things considerably.
This strikes as starting from the conclusion you want to reach (current funding cuts are bad) and then trying to build a narrative to prove it.
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.
There are a couple fundamental flaws here:
One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain.
Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people.
While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding probably helped a lot. Bringing in the Von Neumanns and Erdos of the world couldn't have hurt.
This started when George Washington went to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island to speak to them promoting the 2nd of the 12 amendments to the Constitution, 10 of which became the Bill of Rights. Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution and this trip was to garner support to ratify the Bill of Rights which was to safeguard individual freedoms and limit the power of the federal government. Many of the Jews who first arrived in the United States did so in New Amsterdam whose families had pervious settled in Amsterdam after the Spanish Inquisition where they were forced to either leave Spain, convert to Catholicism, or be put to death.
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-...
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
Yep, some of the first things Hitler did when he took power was to reverse the ridiculous large brain drain from most of the world into Germany, and stall most research by the chilling effect of censoring random topics and fighting institutions that harbored people he didn't like.
Smart people are annoying and told us to wear masks though ?
Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire. The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war: Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).
> Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire
Per capita? The US had a larger population.
Being the leading power is about magnitude not intensity. The country that is twice as large and operates at a similar level of intensity will be the more dominant force (see also - China today). Per capita, I would bet on the Swiss (then and now) - though it will depend on the metric at that point and their output will be comparable to the Germans, British, French and the Americans.
> Penicillin
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.
Prior WW 2, the US had even no notion of quantum physics. How could it be the world power in science?
The US definitely had a notion of quantum physics prior to WWII. Feynman got his PhD at Princeton in 1942 in Quantum Physics so I would assume that John Wheeler had some familiarity with the topic back then. I would mention that the most significant result of quantum mechanics is solid state transistors, and Shockley was awarded a phd for quantum mechanical applications back in the 30s.
Michelson and his experiments on the aether not existing were enormously influential to theoretical physics. “No notion” is incorrect, they had numerous home grown talents in physics, on top of the huge influx of talent from 1930s immigration of European scientists.
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.
Someone was reading too much of Mobi Dick.
Being the sole western industrialized nation that hadn't just had most of their infrastructure bombed to rubble can't have hurt.
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
We also emulated the British centralised model, with the Weapons Research Establishment. Like the British, Australia struggled to get research out of these centralised labs and into products: computing (CISRAC, 5th computer), satellites (WREsat, 7th nation in space), ...
The USA's huge population and large internal free trade area give it better economies of scale.
Canada's population was 10mil, maybe less, when ww2 ended.
Absolutely, but what did that give the United States, a 10-year advantage?
Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
It kicked off a feedback loop. The best scientists and engineers wanted to work on the projects that were 10 years ahead. As a result US companies were at the forefront of new technology and developments… attracting the next generation of the best scientists and engineers.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
Schrödinger's politics
The hope is that the ambiguity will lead people to think about their general principles. If they agree or disagree strongly depending on how the variable is resolved, what does that say?
Science and progress are not a one off thing. The scientist are not used up after 10 years. They keep working and keep the advantages going. The advantage attracts even more intelligent people from every corner of the world.
Bretton Woods is not a 10-year advantage. US had enjoyed pretty much free money until Vietnam, point at which had to kill the gold standard to enjoy free money some more.
The US provided billions in aid and resources under the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and especially Japan after the war. And provided billions again to Korea after the Korean War. Japan and South Korea obviously made the most of it with their massive science and technology industries in the post-war era.
The Marshall plan’s effectiveness is more of a myth
https://miwi-institut.de/archives/2898
I'm aware that Europeans think the post-war stimulus was a myth.
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.
Also, being far enough from Europe that a huge amount of talent decided the U.S. was a better bet for getting away from the Nazis. And then taking a large number of former Nazi scientist's post-war as well.
The article mentions but underrates the fact that post-war the British shot themselves in the foot economically.
As far as I'm aware, the article is kind of wrong that there wasn't a successful British computing industry post war, or at least it's not obvious that it's eventual failure has much to do with differences in basic research structure. There was a successful British computing industry at first, and it failed a few decades later.
And yet here we are with Arm cores everywhere you look! :-D
Fair point! That's a great technical success; I didn't realize Arm was British.
If the main failure of British companies is that they don't have U.S. company market caps, it seems more off base to blame this on government science funding policy instead of something else. In almost every part of the economy, U.S. companies are going to be larger.
My understanding is that the British "Arm" is just a patent holder now. I don't think they actually make anything. Companies outside the UK are the ones that actually make the chips licensed from the Arm designs.
Sweden was not bombed.
But they were aligned with the nazis until close to the very end. It was easier to remember back then, but people have mostly forgotten nowadays.
Indeed, although Sweden was officially neutral, they most notoriously permitted German trains to roll through their country to Norway with soldiers and materials both during and after its invasion.
I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Hard to overstate how much effort the US put into collecting all the best scientists in the post WWII world.
Yes, including surrounded and forcibly brought them into US camps. But yeah, the Soviets did the same and we had the nuclear bomb race, the space race and the Cold War.
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.
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.
>> Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.
Citation needed. The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on. This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every other early-mid 20th century chemist or physicist did all or some of their training in Europe, Now, at least until recently, it's been Europe (and the rest of the world) flocking to our universities.
Depends how you measure it. I vaguely remember that Germany had most Nobel prizes before 1930s.
And now come back with per capita numbers.
A simple Google search would reveal: GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp... GPD Per Capita: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
US: 6134 UK: 5983 GER: 5544
The US would be even higher were it not for the South bringing down the average. Not really a surprise: America has always been a highly educated and highly skilled country.
Wouldn't everyone always be even higher if not for the low parts bringing down the average? That part of the comment sounds so biased that it makes me mistrust the rest of it.
It also didn't hurt that a certain European science superpower started purging academics based on ideology, said academics being more than welcome in the USA. Wait a minute...
I'm pretty sure the US is currently pushing for merit-based admission.
I'm pretty sure you need to start looking at what they're doing (selecting for obedience over competence) than what they're saying (DEI is the root of all problems).
You'd have to be a fool to believe that.
Read third bullet point
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
Yes, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is very democratic, it says so in their name!
Having the word democratic in your name is not the same as sending a letter to a university where one of the listed demands is merit-based admission.
The point is that we know what this administration means by 'merrit based', it means to fire anyone who dissagres, particularly women and non-whites, while hirering grosely incompetent TV-people. The only 'merrit' is loyalty.
"the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership"
"Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity"
"viewpoint diversity" isn't a guarantee of merit-based hiring policies
North Korea is good example as there is absence of any Democracy. However boasting about Democracy, while having 2-party system, is also quite interesting.
Fifth bullet point contradicts it. Also, it’s not clear for me at all, what “viewpoint” means. Flat Earthers in geography departments? Or more Republicans? Or the same thing as DEI, since being black gives you different viewpoints?
I think it refers to political viewpoint diversity.
You'd have to be a fool to believe that.
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
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.
> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.
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?
Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere speak a few languages.
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate? I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about the underlying drivers here.
Why does any business' requisitons staff manage their purchases? Because it's quite literally their job. They have limited money to allocate based on their budget, and their lifelong career is trying to make that money work as effectively as possible at keeping the American research "institution" powerful. That's why grants have application processes and contract negotiations
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.
I do not believe that sharing costs of facilities and equipment is so difficult that research universities can't handle it while every condo association in the US somehow manages to pull it off. I do not believe you that this is aggressively negotiated down by the government because private research grants come with much lower indirect costs percentages.
> Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd.
Well I guess we just have to pay for endlessly expanding bureaucracy then, because apparently expecting research universities to be somewhat efficient with their resources is "absurd."
> If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations.
Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
You're clearly not involved even remotely in academia and are just parroting bullshit you saw on your news outlet. What's even the point when you can just declare "no, it's totally a problem and they can just magically make money appear and I'm totally aware of the negotiation process for grants". Good Lord.
I can see I've hit a nerve here. But it's ok. I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against. It's understandable that you would resort to appeals to authority and ad hominems when you can't present a logical argument.
> I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.
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.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24332
There are fixed costs associated with running research labs and facilities. Just because private funding can (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research money is public not private.
While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.
I guess the problem is that I just don't trust them. It's a bunch of university administrators and government bureaucrats (two groups I trust on the level of used car dealers) spending other people's money. I think the solution to this is transparency. If these universities want to continue getting tax exempt status and generous overhead allocations out of taxpayer funds, then they should be required to release their budgets to the public. It they are actually spending all that money on reasonable research costs, then fine, but I want to see the receipts.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the balance of power here.
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.
Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends will come back and do research here instead of in the US.
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.
It is not charity for the researchers. That's money earned. It's charity for the bureaucrats who administer it. As for the facilities and administration it pays for, I take no issue with the facilities. I want to take an axe to the useless bureaucrats and lawyers involved. My dad is a university researcher and he faces endless bureaucratic nonsense to run his lab. If we want to keep researchers here we should start by making it easy for them. It's a cost savings too.
A couple things:
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.
There it is again. Private research grants are often taken at loss, subsidized by the actual scientific funding infrastructure that has made the US the world superpower of science.
> Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
These rates are negotiated with the federal government. There's already a mechanism for this.
>Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
Sure, that's Congress' job. The executive branch's current attempts to reduce it via executive order have no basis in law and therefore are not valid.
I don't know that I'd rely too heavily on midterms in 26. Gerrymandering and all that.
Gerrymandering? More like scrubbing the voters of the right to vote (SAVE act) or voter intimidation (all those militias standing ready!)
I don't know why this is getting shadowed. You're absolutely right. Gerrymandering is a threat.
Illinois and Maryland look pretty secure on that front. Perhaps the Democrats can try to gerrymander NYS again, without getting slapped down by the courts
I feel most people have absolutely no idea that the US had its very large boot in the UK's face with our face in the mud for much of the post WW2 period, and still has. We had to dance exactly to their tune.
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
We are killing the golden goose
While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay: “I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
dunno if it is this plain.. the regulatory capture in the last 30 years is not null. Especially in very niche, very profitable sub-corners of big-S Science.
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
They could have voted socialist at any point in time. Americans could have had healthcare, 36 hour work week and a pension system.
That is the tragedy of the American empire- instead of improving the lives of its citizens all the money went to tax cuts.
Could we have though? Last I checked neither majir party has seriously persued this. So how are the american people to vote for it?
Yes. If you are genuinely unaware and not just asking a rhetorical question, yes socialized medicine is a major goal of the progressive left. We came close in 2010 but the votes in congress weren't quite there. The only reason major parties don't pursue it is because progressivism doesn't have the votes. You can definitely vote for it though especially if you participate in primaries.
So is democracy not real? I find it funny that when things do right it's because of our superior system of people choosing their leaders, and when things go wrong it's because people don't have any choice.
Democracy is a spectrum and the US system is but one poor flawed example.
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.
> They could have voted socialist at any point in time.
> Lest the poorly educated masses of people
Impossible since that would mean extreme left wing radical socialism. And communism.
Unless there could be a less black and white option in the middle?
Like a bit more taxes on the wealthiest, a bit more social safety nets for the neediest?
Yeah obviously.
I am not from USA, but maybe you'll need to figure this out on state level? Country level seems rather blocked at the moment.
Can't do it, individual states can't print money and freedom of movement means the free rider problem will pop up quickly.
> can't print money
But can they raise taxes?
> freedom of movement
EU also has freedom of movement, but vastly different social security systems.
Language is of course an extra barrier, but how much people will move is overrated. And maybe you could restrict supposed benefits to people who have lived there in a few years.
Obviously IANAL, but i am thinking - seems like you generally hate your government no matter who it is, so maybe states should be a bit more independent.
> But can they raise taxes?
Sure, but the math doesn't work out. Vermont and California have both tried in various forms.
> EU also has freedom of movement, blah blah blah
They also coordinated the laws between the member countries. That's exactly what the federal government would need to do in this case, very good! The EU system doesn't work particularly well either, because it's loosely confederated. The US government has far more ability to coordinate the States.
Sarcasm detector has to be pretty high to catch this one ;)
But you've touched on the problem: any attempt to reform is immediately cast as "communism" (also without really understanding communism and equating it with soviet authoritarianism, but that's another topic).
Yeah, cultural difference.
Coming from Europe I think the sarcasm was pretty obvious. More like "duh".
Sigh.
Unfortunately, your implications are spot on.
We, the people, are our own worst enemies.
You have to attribute some blame to the elite who run an ongoing propaganda campaign for voters to work against their own interests.
Really? Is that your honest take? It's either late stage unfettered capitalism, regulatory capture and oligarchy OR communism?
Edit: I forgot theocracy.
Yeah, sarcasm does not work on internet, I know. I tried to paraphrase the ruler in chief.
Ah, thank you. I was so terribly disappointed to see that take on here.
I think the comment was tongue-in-cheek.
Inequality isn't the cause of our problems in the US. It's basically the same as it was in the 90s https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100 billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only 2.5x.
The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.
Yes, your anecdote about one person out of 300 million has convinced me that the statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve about the entire population are clearly incorrect.
Perception is politics.
I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our problems.
But killing the golden goose will not help solve the inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more expensive and difficult to get into universities with top research programs.
Gini coefficient may be the most commonly used statistic but it is not sensitive to current conditions in the US (https://www.investopedia.com/news/measuring-inequality-forge...). The palma ratio does indeed show increasing inequality since the 90s (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/palma-ratio-s90s40-ratio?...). Also wealth inequality is another place to be looking, especially if you're familiar with Piketty's body of work which points at it specifically (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...).
You know what they say about lies and statistics.
‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’
Plutarch
Gonna state the obvious: freedom and peace. People mention money but money followed technological boom. And, yes, peace derived from military.
You might clarify "domestic peace". America has been one of the most secure nations in history from large-scale domestic invasion (it's essentially never happened: Pearl Harbor, isolated terrorist attacks, and "open borders" don't come close). That said, it has virtually always been actively involved in foreign conflicts and shadow wars during its 250 year history.
And yes, it's domestic security that enables long-term investment in science.
I would clarify it as relative peace. People simply left other parts of the world to pursue their dreams. If Europe weren’t basically war torn every couple of decades all the way up to the end of WWII, America might not have made it this far. And that’s why I don’t believe China will ever be that great until they reject pseudo-communist regime.
A better title would be: "How this one time the U.S. became a science superpower".
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?
>Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers
Why do you think that?
I'm glad to see this article because this topic is very much worth thinking about right now - by both sides of the Atlantic :-). But history is more difficult to do well than this. A lot of this article just assumes its conclusions. You need more than 'this is a difference and therefore it was causative', especially if it happens to align with current conventional beliefs.
It’s stated as fact but what’s the causative link for indirect cost administration being the key? If those costs were made direct by university labs having to compete with commercial labs by requiring researchers to explicitly rent facilities why would that break things?
About the only argument I can see is transaction costs. And those are a factor but that incentivizes university labs because they have facilities for teaching as well so they can bring transaction costs low.
Wasn't it obvious that the US, the richest country on earth, would become the science superpower? How could it have been different?
Time for the EU to take the place of the US.
China is probably more likely to take over in science.
Not if the EU creates the conditions to attract the scientific talent wanting to leave the US.
EU has a terrible track record. It's a gigantic bureaucratic papermill. They never promoted innovation, why would they start now?
They'll probably talk about starting to promote innovation. They kind of have to. But it's a paradigm shift.
> EU has a terrible track record.
In a context where the comparison is China...
I say, let a thousand flowers bloom!
EU slaps regulations
Don’t forget: quite many innovations (most?) that supported the Covid vaccines were developed in the EU.
It is worth noting that the the majority of money that Britain spent on war material went to the US. That might be one reason the US could continue spending and the UK couldn't!
Related from same author earlier:
How the United States became a science superpower — and how quickly it could crumble
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687118
Haven't read the article yet but Imma guess Operation Paperclip has a lot to do with it.
Soon we might need a summary of how they managed to fall from grace and others slowly surpassed them.
> By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years
Was this written in 2030? The war ended in 1945.
Just a minor nit... It was jarring to see a statement of questionable accuracy in the opening paragraph.
If you read carefully, there is no strict implication that the 85 years of leading only begun after the end of the war. If it began 1940, the quoted sentence would still be correct.
I mean definitely props to the university system we have today in the US, but the UK was also bombed the fuck out after WWII.
It's hard to really compare the two.
> Britain remained a leader in theoretical science and defense technology, but its socialist government economic policies led to its failure to commercialize wartime innovations.
And the detriment of UK's auto industry, manufacturing industry, and etc. I really don't understand how people still fancy state-controlled economy.
Sorry but this is such a shallow comment. In what way is the US government directing public funding to academic institutions not state control? It's just a different organisational framework that appears to have been more successful.
I've met Steve on a number of occasions, smart guy. I also work in this space and have definitely read a lot of the same books he has, along with many of his excellent articles. Alas, I'm pretty sure he would never read my articles, unless he got cancer, which I hope he doesn't.
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...
Not for long.
“Indirect costs” were accepted on the theory that this would be used to create job security for professors who did useful work but were not able to secure direct funding.
Spoiler alert: That job security doesn’t exist anymore. A professor who isn’t winning grants, even if tenured, is functionally dead. Research doesn’t matter except as PR and teaching definitely doesn’t matter; the ability to raise grants is the singular determinant of an academic’s career.
Consequently, most academics despise university overhead because it reduces the number of grants to go around and they get nothing for it.
That does not, of course, mean they support Trump or Musk. Most do not.
> “Indirect costs” were accepted on the theory that this would be used to create job security for professors who did useful work but were not able to secure direct funding.
This is an argument that I have literally never heard, despite being in academia a long time.
Next chapter under Trump is written right now: How the US lost its status as science superpower
And how the Trump admin is ruining it in very little time.
Right from the first paragraph I know this is just nonsense that is only being posted because of currentpoliticalthing
The US leapfroged the rest of the world in both science and engineering by it's civil war, this isn't disputable. It could only do that because of decade long tariffs that existed solely to protect it's nascent manufacturing industry.
People have constructed so many myths about WW2 it's crazy.
GDP: 1871 the US passes GB By 1900 the US economy was double GB's size. by 1910 they've already passed them by GDP per capita. INDUSTRIAL OUTPUT: Again 1870s. You can't really untie science from industrial output. Is there argument here that the US was behind scientifically because of Nobel prizes? If you narrowly define science as "things europeans liked to research" then I guess. But even by that definition Americans were discovering new drugs such as Actinomycin D as early as 1940, during, not after, WW2 and before they entered. So unless people like Waksman (educated in America) count as braindrain 30 years before the fact I don't think the argument is credible.
The UK failed to mass produce penicillin. It's this industrial ineptitude that caused "brain drain".
Was it tarrifs or just a large, highly educated population with a unified market? The US has always been one of the leaders in education and scientific research on a per capita basis. Even in the 1770s you har people like Franklin working on cutting edge physics (the standard sign convention for charge is still flipped because of him). At some point it also just outgrew all the other countries in terms of size and it naturally became the global leader around that time.
Too many smart people doing smart stuff. Got to destroy that! Victory to the Idiocracy.
How? Money.
There is one problem with the current US system: it overproduces talent. When the US system was growing rapidly, the people could build a long-term career in the US. But nothing can grow forever at an exponential pace. The US continues to pour plenty of money into STEM, but it can't keep up with the pace of grad student production.
People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
> People are making smart, individual decisions to head overseas for work. Places like China are rewarding them.
Wait what? I know that many Chinese students are staying in China, but this is the first I've heard of a substantial demographic immigrating to China to work there, esp from the US. Do you have data?
One annecdata. When I handed in my doctoral thesis in Oxbridge, I was contacted by a recruiter from PRC that offered me generous startup funds ($600k-1M) and salary to bootstrap my own academic lab at Tsinghua, Fudan, or other top universities. It'd take me 4-6 years to get an equivalent offer in UK or EU where experience and connections are much more important than talent.
I am European and I do basic research in science. They seem to be very interested in fundamental science and investing heavily in lots of subfields. As discussed in other comments, the improvement in their research quality during the last decade is nothing short of impressive.
Interesting
I didn't even reply, as I didn't want to taint my profile. But it looked very interesting and serious.
Plus, from this one can infer they are clearly scouting researchers in a systematic way.
It's not widespread. But China has made an effort to offer obscene amounts of money to attract smart professors and researchers to switch to Chinese universities as they've tried to build up their top-tier beyond Beida and Tsinghua.
It overproduces credentialed morons. Giving someone a degree doesn't confer talent. And when you insist on an ever increasing percentage of the population attend college, the result is exactly as you would expect.