not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms.
private interests have greater actual holdings than gov.
"they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.
"Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher."
I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.
As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.
NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.
I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.
I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime.
I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.
I didn't flag it, but I almost did. I am typically not in the habit of reading any articles that start with this kind of eye rolling invective, with every verb tortured through a sentiment thesaurus:
MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science - When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science...Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved...Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt...This new assault on U.S. science...
"War" "ignorance" "terrible news" "killing" "strangling" "screeching" "assault". I just don't read shit like this. Report the facts and stop trying so clumsily to tell me how to feel about them.
The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.
I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.
WOW. EU paper authorship is also back to 1980 levels. But still. I mean, I get that this is still better than the US, but wtf.
I wish Krugman had included that total papers has gone up spectacularly, and would not hide the absolute numbers. Plus I don't like that he's not being very clear on the distinction of social vs "hard" (positivist) sciences.
19 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] threadprivate interests have greater actual holdings than gov.
"they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.
"Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher."
https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50
besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"
I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.
MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science - When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science...Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved...Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt...This new assault on U.S. science...
"War" "ignorance" "terrible news" "killing" "strangling" "screeching" "assault". I just don't read shit like this. Report the facts and stop trying so clumsily to tell me how to feel about them.
I wish Krugman had included that total papers has gone up spectacularly, and would not hide the absolute numbers. Plus I don't like that he's not being very clear on the distinction of social vs "hard" (positivist) sciences.
But wtf.