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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
by cs702 1y ago
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.
- duxup 1y agoIt 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.
- Nevermark 1y agoI 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.
- duxup 1y agoI'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.
- ptsneves 1y agoThere 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.
- dv_dt 1y agoI 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.
- energy123 1y agoDecentralization overcomes the local knowledge problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 1y agoWe 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.
- anon7000 1y agoWhy? Britain was considered a larger power in the world until around WWII.
- thenobsta 1y agoI 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.
- jimbob45 1y agoI don’t disagree which is why I encourage comparing the EU to the US as a whole.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jack_h 1y ago> 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.
- Retric 1y agoUS 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.
- oldprogrammer2 1y agoSystems 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.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoSure, 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
- homieg33 1y ago> 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.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago[flagged]
- dralley 1y ago
- numbers_guy 1y agoI 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.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoTotal? 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”
- yubblegum 1y agoLet'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.
- ajb 1y agoThere 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.
- tehjoker 1y agoI 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.
- tkiolp4 1y agoSuch 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.
- makeitdouble 1y agoI 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 https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Phd-Researcher-Salary [1] https://publication.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/FR/T512/les_salaires_des_personnels_des_epscp_et_des_epst/ https://publication.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/F...
- zipy124 1y agoYour 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-salary-and-health-insurance-rates https://postdocs.mit.edu/postdoctoral-position/postdoctoral-...
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- begueradj 1y ago> 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...
- mytailorisrich 1y agoThis 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.