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When some other state-power, perhaps the Chinese, starts sucking up American intellectual capital, then the US will collapse. So long as the US still offers the

When some other state-power, perhaps the Chinese, starts sucking up American intellectual capital, then the US will collapse. So long as the US still offers the highest standard of living for high-wage workers, there won't be any sort of collapse. Grants from the NIH will presumably move to the private sector. Is this a good thing? Perhaps not, but in the eyes of our new overlords the lifeblood of the economy is not public investment but in the collaborative spaces of creative minds working in diverse fields, as demonstrated, for them, by the productivity of big tech. And for individuals like Musk, this is limited by public institutions and can only be most fully explored via private investment.

SubiculumCode 2y ago
Companies don't like to do basic research..It doesn't pay off for decades
knowaveragejoe 2y ago
How does this square the circle of basic research that has no clear, or at least easy, commercialization potential?
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  I'm sure that Magritte painting that sold for so much money not so long ago did not have the same "commercialization potential" when it was produced.
scarab92 2y ago
The clickbait article title is completely unsupported by the actual content of the article. The NIH isn't being slashed and burned. It's simply redirecting more of it's funding to actual grant recipients, to do actual research, rather than allowing NIH funding to be siphoned off by the universities for largely unrelated purposes. Harvard siphoned off a whopping 69% of the grant amount, and it's not going to funding equipment or similar, those expenses also comes out of the remaining 31%. If people actually cared about increasing the overall NIH research output, they should be supportive of these changes.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  It doesn't work like that. NIH grants are awarded in terms of direct costs, and indirect costs come on top of that. If you have a $500k/year grant and your university has negotiated 69% overhead rate, NIH pays the university $845k/year. If the overhead rate is slashed to 15%, the university gets $575k/year. The remaining $270k/year probably won't be spent on anything, as the entire point is supposed to be cutting government spending.
energy123 2y ago
The federal debt is going to be a big deal for this Trump admin: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S This was last seen in the 1990s, which Clinton fixed with tax increases, fiscal austerity and a strong real economy. It remains to be seen, but I don't trust Trump or any of his loyalist appointees to steer the ship well.

SubiculumCode 2y ago

Companies don't like to do basic research..It doesn't pay off for decades

knowaveragejoe 2y ago

How does this square the circle of basic research that has no clear, or at least easy, commercialization potential?

DiscourseFan 2y ago
I'm sure that Magritte painting that sold for so much money not so long ago did not have the same "commercialization potential" when it was produced.

scarab92 2y ago

The clickbait article title is completely unsupported by the actual content of the article. The NIH isn't being slashed and burned. It's simply redirecting more of it's funding to actual grant recipients, to do actual research, rather than allowing NIH funding to be siphoned off by the universities for largely unrelated purposes. Harvard siphoned off a whopping 69% of the grant amount, and it's not going to funding equipment or similar, those expenses also comes out of the remaining 31%. If people actually cared about increasing the overall NIH research output, they should be supportive of these changes.

jltsiren 2y ago
It doesn't work like that. NIH grants are awarded in terms of direct costs, and indirect costs come on top of that. If you have a $500k/year grant and your university has negotiated 69% overhead rate, NIH pays the university $845k/year. If the overhead rate is slashed to 15%, the university gets $575k/year. The remaining $270k/year probably won't be spent on anything, as the entire point is supposed to be cutting government spending.

energy123 2y ago

The federal debt is going to be a big deal for this Trump admin: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S This was last seen in the 1990s, which Clinton fixed with tax increases, fiscal austerity and a strong real economy. It remains to be seen, but I don't trust Trump or any of his loyalist appointees to steer the ship well.