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De-funded science? Not to any dramatic extent in the US, at least. AFAICS US science funding has roughly plateaued or declined only shallowly since about 2003,
by leoc 12y ago
De-funded science? Not to any dramatic extent in the US, at least. AFAICS US science funding has roughly plateaued or declined only shallowly since about 2003, after decades of post-war increases. The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.)
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago>The main problem with salaries, career opportunities and so on is apparently that the number of people pursuing careers in science has risen to meet, then exceed, the increased funding. (Plus probably that an increasing share of the money is being funnelled off into university administration salaries, Elsevier and Bertelsmann and so on.) The reason is much more fundamental: the Profzi Scheme, http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144. As long as scientific labor is pyramidal, foisting most of the actual research work on "trainees" while professors mainly write grants, there will always be a structural necessity of far more trainee workers than there can ever be permanent positions. Thus, most trained scientists will always be employed outside their field or not at all, simply because a finite world cannot accommodate an indefinite exponential (recursively reproducing) increase in the number of scientists. (That said, science funding as a percentage of GDP has dropped, and actually dropped in inflation-adjusted dollars with the Great Recession.)
- DaveWalk 12y agoData for the curious: http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NIHfunding-fig1.png http://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/N...