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The Decline of Science and Technology in America
puke76 writes "There's a good article over on the BBC about the decline of science and technology in the U.S.. Vint Cerf and others are going on record to voice their concerns about the current administrations recipe for 'irrelevance and decline.' Scientists are increasingly concerned about the White House's pandering to the religious right at science's expense. From the article: 'radically we have moved away from regulation based on professional analysis of scientific data ...to regulation controlled by the White House and driven by political considerations.'"
is now accomplished by outsourcing engineering to India and manufacturing to China. IF the trend continues we'll end up a nation of international brokers and their support laborers (auto mechanics, maids, cooks, home repair, etc).
Of course such trends never continue indefinitely - it's just a leveling of inequalities left over from the WWII and cold war days. The US benefitted from an immigrant brain source once (Einstein, Von Braun, Tesla) - it could easily flow the other way if conditions here become too hostile or the grass looks greener elsewhere.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I must say you bring up some good points and I tend to agree much of your arguement. A good portion of this country is very uneducated and tends to follow blindly to what its fed from news stations such as Fox News who proclaim themselves to be, "Fair and Balanced." In a lot of ways this country *is* going backwards, as ultra-paranoid religious groups are collectively working to sway votes in the whitehouse. I think what we do need is the same sort of counter-group to thwart their attempts at branding their religious/ personal beliefs on "the rest of us."
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Or did you mean to suggest that they did not mean it, simply by virtue of their being "Christian"? Their variety of Christianity was far more enlightened than what is often found in evangelical churches today. Here's another quote:
That's one of the themes of the BBC article, and it's so true on a variety of levels. I recall that, recently, the DC Metro (WMATA) had a big chunk of its budget cut because they allowed pro-marijuana ads on trains and buses.
The real stupid part? The metro serves a large number of people and is always in need of more money. So, in reality, they punished the people. Look for lots of punishment from an angry God, er, government because scientists feel differently about religion, environment, and politics in general.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
The sad thing is many of these christian fanatics are uneducated, Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O'Reilly products (sculpted zombies) who's life doesn't stray further than Wal-Mart.
Or, in fact, into reading the bible any more than selectively. US fundamentalist Christaianity seems to have rather odd ideas about what exactly Christ said. The concepts of loving your neighbour, helping the poor, and forgiveness that seem to crop up a lot on the new testament... well apparently they're not so important. Despite 85% of the population of the US professing to be Christian, the US has ranks second to last among developed nations for foreign aid as a percentage of the economy, rate almost as poorly for private charity, have high rates of poverty for a developed nation, and are the only developed nation that still uses capital punishment (so much for "turn the other cheek"). 75% of Americans thought that "God helps those who help themselves." was a teaching from the bible - look as hard as you like, it isn't there; Ben Franklin said it. Christianity in the US is less Christianty, and more some bizarre American religion with vague Christian roots - I mean hell, most mormons are closer to following the new testament then a great many US Christians.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Early Christianity had the same effect in Europe...
"It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond."
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Corporations are more to blame for the decline of science than the government. Most industrial development is ultimately driven by companies looking to make money on new technologies. Lately, most companies have been gutting research budgets in favor of more short term profits (ie. HP). Look at most job postings, how many both require an advanced degree and are willing to pay enough to hire someone? Most companies aren't interested. Until corporate America can look past next quarter's numbers, R&D will not really exist in the U.S. anymore.
You hit the nail on the head. I just got back from visiting my girlfriend's parents in Mainland China, and the change I see there over the past year is mind blowing. In North America we're focused on the short term profit, on how to make a buck in the next quarter, in China they see the big picture and the long term goal. They know where they want to go, and know that some investments are long term.
We've forgotten that, and we're going to pay dearly for it over the next decade. In her home city I saw 4 bridges, multiple express ways, and countless buildings being built all at once. You could see at least 100 cranes at a time from any vantage point. In North America we have crumbling infrastructure, budgets on everything from education to health being slashed, and crumbling cities.
We need to wake up and see that we will become irrelivant unless we start looking at the long term.
"The Bush administration does not take kindly to anyone who has drawn a federal dollar being critical."
I feel sorry for Joseph Wilson and his wife every day. They experienced this first hand - object and be retaliated against.
It's not my idea - I heard it originally from a journalist for the SF Chronicle - but one of the biggest tools the White House is using is distraction. Attention is being drawn to social issues (such as gay rights, and vegetable rights - Schiavo), while significant detrimental policies are being waged against science (like barring publication of papers about global warming) and civil rights.
The true crimes involve Writ of Habeus Corpus (Jose Padilla), and intentional endangerment (Valerie Plame), not stem-cells and Hubble.
Your comment is not insightful because one doesn't have to "bash" Bush when it comes to science and religion. Bashing Bush would be saying he's a monkey, and falls off his bike, and is a poopyhead for opposing stem cell research, even the kind that doesn't involve embryos.
Anyone who is unbiased sees a world leader imposing religious dogma onto secular public schools, and scientists doing legitimate and lifesaving research with aborted fetus tissue, or even pre-life-viable embryos in a labratory.
Slashdot has a story involving Bush because like him or not he's a world leader and what he says counts as news. If he says something objectionable, then it's the medias' responsibility to report it and explain why it's objectionable. In an open society you're allowed to use the media to respond, or say the media is wrong for saying Bush is wrong, but if all you can say is that they are "biased" and that somehow passes as a solid argument, then we're letting people like you off way to easily.
Tell us WHY critics of Bush's science and religion policy are wrong? You can't, because they are right.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Or they just don't get it. I sat down with one of the VP's at my old job (as the company was starting to head down the toilet) to talk about their hiring practices. The company policy was "we pay in the 60th percentile." For every job, they used some salary survey to determine what it was worth. They literally looked at the salary range and picked a number based on the 60th percentile. Here's a summary of the conversation we had:
Me: What kind of organization are you trying to build?
VP: World Class.
Me: So, if you were going to hire someone to administer your databases (a component so critical that even a VP knew that the business did not run without them), what kind of person would you want?
VP: Someone at the top of their field.
Me: So if you had to rate them, say on a scale of 1 to 100, what are you looking for?
VP: I wouldn't even consider someone who isn't in the top five percent of candidates.
Me:So what your looking for is someone whose skills are in the 95th percentile but is willing to work for pay in the 60th percentile?
I never got a reply. For what it's worth, I wasn't an employee, I was a contractor.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
It's not just the perceptions of themselves, it's also their perceptions of the workings of the rest of the world that can be highly coloured. Ask a lot of people in the US about, say, the Canadian healthcare system and they'll give you lots of stories about people dieing on waiting lists, intolerable waiting times, and a general complete failure of the system. That's so far from the truth it isn't funny. No Canadian healthcare isn't perfect (personally I'd like to see them open up a parallel private system this "two tier healthcare is evil" is as stupid as the US fear of public healthcare), bt for the most part it functions very well, and very efficiently. Per captia health spending in Canada is significantly less than in the US.
There are also the perceptions of Europe as being some socialist unproductive quagmire. Yes, in terms of GDP per capita most European countries are behind the US - but they also get much longer holidays, and work less hours and thus have more time for family. Turning things around if CO2 emisisons (as US opponents of Kyoto like to claim) are the natural byproduct of production, and reducing emissions would reduce GDP... well consider this list of countries by GDP/CO2 emissions which shows that in terms of waste most European countries are significantly more efficient in generating GDP than the US. Is Europe perfect? No, not in the least, they're just different, with different priorities - they produce less but do it more efficiently. That's not the pereption a lot of Americans have of Europe though.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
No, it hasn't. It's been at the forefront for the last 70 years or so, but that's mostly due to the nazi's rise to power, which caused a big wave of immigration of European scientists.
Now, please don't take this as flamebait; I don't intend to say that the USA don't have their own brilliant minds or that they didn't have them before the nazis, but I think that the current situation, where the USA, which account for less than 5% of the world's population, are the scientific center of the world, so to speak, is in no small part due to the fact that many top scientists did go to the USA back then.
In the future, over time, things will shift again. Not necessarily back to Europe, but India and China, for example (both nations with more than a billion inhabitants, which is more than the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan have combined) will definitely leave us behind them in terms of scientific significance.
Basing politics on religion rather than science is just gonna speed that up even further.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
ok...seriously for a second...blame the baby boomers. They represent that major demographic for UK, US and Australia and hence they weild the voting power.
In the 60s/70s...they were entering the colleges and workforce...what did we get...a massive overhaul to the educational systems. In the 70/80s they were moving through their "working lives"...what did we get...a massive overhaul to industrial relations in favor of the workers...in 2000, they're all heading into retirement, mostly funded by shares, wanting to live on less money and also worried about death...what do we see? More power being given to corporations and taken from workers (in all three countries), more focus on immediate share holder returns rather than r&d, outsourcing to cut the cost of consumables, cutting of government research, services and educational assistence to lower taxes, and an increase in relious uptake as they all worry about death.
This is sheer speculation on my part, but in Australia we're watching all the great social practices put in place during the 60s/70s and 80s be repealed...from free education and medical, to workers rights...and from what I hear here it seems to be happening in the US and UK. These trends, to my untrained eye, seem to follow rather closely the needs of the major voting demographic (baby boomers)...so lets face it...if you're under 40 you're screwed...unless of course you move to south america where I believe the major demographics in most countries is 15-25 (they're having somewhat of a baby boom at the moment).
Excuse me while I interpret your post as a load of BS. As another poster said, Christianity has been a strong force throughout the history of the US. Every President the US has ever had has claimed to be a Christian.[1] Yet you've conveniently ignored that fact, made an unsubstantiated opinion, then presented it as fact. Is that the scientific process?[2]
The truth of the matter is that the United States has been a Wartime economy since World War II.[3] The thing propping up such an economy? The Cold War, of course![4] The US outspent the Soviet Union at every turn, eventually causing the USSR to go bankrupt. The wartime economy then began to taper off, slowly reducing the amount of private and government funded research. By the end of the 90's, science was already in trouble, but no one noticed because of the technology boom.[5] (Itself an artificial boom caused by overspending.) The tech boom crashes, and suddenly the true state of things is revealed.
The entire Stem Cell issue, and ID issue are irrelevant to the US's technology bottom line. We simply can't afford the level of progress that was achieved in the Post WWII economy. We had one last "Hurrah" in the 80's and early 90's, then everything petered out after that. It's not sexy, it's not pretty, and there's no good place to put the blame. But that's the way it is.
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Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'm incredibly disappointed with the lack of respect for science and intellectual achievement that seems to pervade the United States today. Everywhere I look I see this -- in energy, economics, medicine, education -- everywhere.
But, I had one glorious day last year. The Jet Propulsion Labs at CalTech had an open house in May, and I attended this year with my little boy. It was a unique experience. You don't just stumble upon JPL, it's way off in the corner of the LA basin, but people came from everywhere around to the open house.
At each of a fifty or so different stations, there were JPL scientists describing their current work to an incredibly diverse but intensely interested audience. The scientists and engineers are, of course, very enthusiastic about their projects -- but the tremendous enthusiasm of my fellow attendees was surprising and heartening. Young and old, of every imaginable race and combination thereof, in families and individually -- everyone was just enthralled. It was kind of interesting to watch the engineers trying to describe the interferometer that JPL hopes to send up to measure the positions and velocities of stars more accurately to this group -- but they struggled to explain it, and people struggled to understand it.
As I said above, it was glorious. I recommend it to anybody in the LA area. There is hope.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Considering that for the last 3 years, countries have been switching from USA to china for buying from, it is only a matter of time before we are irrelevant.
To make matters worse, Nixon took us off the gold standard to hide what he had done with the dollar (illegal minting). So now the OPEC communities are seriously talking about creating a gold based money. If they do, the dollar also becomes irrelevant.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This reminds me of an interview in Reason (a libertarian mag) of slashdot favorite Neal Stephenson. Here's the relevant part:
http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml
Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy's recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms--social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?
Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.
Bush and stem cells is probably a good example of religion and science interacting properly
Are you kidding? He crippled the entire line of ESC research for years. And every argument given for doing so was entirely baseless. The Christian Right simply wouldn't ever shut up about how it encourages abortion, even though the one has utterly nothing to do with another. As a result, the US has already begun falling behind in biosciences. He puts _faith healers_ on medical boards. Money spent on actual scientific studies of environmental problems gets thrown away because the guys at the top don't like the results. The latest crop of republicans are about the worst thing to happen to science and they are making religion look like a caricature of itself. To the rest of the world, the most powerful nation on earth looks like it's becoming a Christian version of Saudi Arabia.
The lunar missions ended because American leaders decided the money was better spent getting GIs killed in Vietman. The space program ultimately stagnated because US leaders made it a government monopoly run by a political committee. I see a solid week of news dedicated to ongoing technical problems with a single solitary shuttle (i.e., a third of our entire manned fleet) and I think, "We don't have a space program, we have a space hobby". And the reason people get pissed off with the expense is because it doesn't _do_ anything useful or even new anymore.
Anyway, it's not so much that there's a declining number of competent researchers and scientists. It's just that they are increasingly being told that neither they nor their work is wanted here. Fact is old and busted, faith-based-government is the new hotness. Average Joe is not just getting dumber, he's becoming more and more convinced that this is a virtue. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the studies showing that half the voting population would refuse to vote for a candidate for no other reason than because he was an atheist. I.e., competency and intelligence are secondary to whimsy and insanity.
Dyolf Knip
"You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do everything they can to assist you in this wise intention. "
George Washington 1779
"I have sometimes thought there could not be a stronger testimony in favor of religion or against temporal enjoyments, even the most rational and manly, than for men who occupy the most honorable and gainful departments and [who] are rising in reputation and wealth, publicly to declare their unsatisfactoriness by becoming fervent advocates in the cause of Christ; and I wish you may give in your evidence in this way."
James Madison 1773
"Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this."
Benjamin Franklin (who, let it be known to all the gentle readers, was decidedly NOT a Christian or a religious man)
Jefferson was an atheist.
You know what's missing from American Education? Even the tiniest bit of knowledge about how to think for yourself.
America (The United States) IS a religion.
Think about it, what else but religion, can do what the U.S. does?
Christ will free your soul. Coca-Cola will quench your thirst.
...It's the attitude that says this:
The single biggest negative perception about the US that I experience here in Europe is the collective ego represented by the way the US government conducts itself, and the comments made by so many Americans in many an Internet forum. Here are a few claims I've seen in the past week alone:
Now here's an alternative version, as seen by the devil's advocate:
Seriously, this isn't meant to be a troll. That first list really is the impression a lot of Americans I've encountered give, and the second list is certainly how the US is increasingly perceived here in the UK.
The problem for this discussion, of course, is that being a world leader in scientific research depends fundamentally on three things: attracting good people, getting them in touch with everyone else's good people, and funding them well enough to do their thing. Pissing off the rest of the world and destroying your economy from within probably aren't the best ways to achieve any of those three critical things. Yeah, I'd say the US is pretty much toast for a while as far as leading the world in scientific research.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Are you sure about this? I'm a veteran, got out in 98, and I recall one of the important devices in our communications systems that was French made. I also find it hard to believe that all the eletronic components are american made. Maybe the product is put together by an america company, but I don't think the parts are all made in america.
In the early half of the 20th century the U.S. was relatively isolated from the rest of the world. While the infrastructures of most of the countries in the world were destroyed by World War 2 none of the destruction reached the US. As a result America became the leader in technology development.
The rest of the world has been a relatively peaceful place for the last 50 years. So now the rest of the world is catching up. It doesn't mean the US is doing worse, the rest of the world is doing better.
I am a scientist working at a university and my salary comes entirely from research grants. Thanks to the Bush administration's bad attitude towards science, my funding will run out in a few months. I have written new grant proposals, applied for government research jobs and teaching jobs, but so far have had no luck at all. There are so many people out there right now who are in a similar situation, and many of them have even more experience than I do, so I really don't have a chance at competing with them.
The article commented about visa restrictions preventing talented people from coming to the U.S. to study or do research. I just don't see that at all. In my field, there are tons of foreign post-docs working in the U.S., and many them decide to stay here after their post-doctoral appointments are done. Ironically, I have been told by many people in my field that I should look for a job overseas, since I can't find one here. Instead of trying to cultivate the talent that is already here in the U.S., our government's policies and the hiring practices of many institutions are bringing in foreign scientists while American scientists are being told to look to other countries for employment. In principle, I'm not against bringing foreign talent to the U.S. to help with scientific research. I just don't think it makes sense to do this on a large scale when U.S. scientists are struggling to survive.
I've also heard the complaint from many industry leaders that they can't find Americans with the right technical and scientific skills to fill job openings, so they need to bring in foreign talent. I've started looking into industry jobs, and I'm beginning to realize that computerized resume searches may be partially to blame for the apparent lack of qualified applicants. Most of the job descriptions are so specialized that I don't think there would be anyone in the entire world who fit the job exactly and would have all the right keywords in their resume. It doesn't matter if corporations look for employees in the U.S. or in other countries if they aren't willing to invest in training their staff. The executives and upper level managers of most corporations probably don't have a lot of technical experience themselves, and yet they expect a prospective employee to show up at their first day of work and know everything there is to know about the corporation's products. This is unreasonable and impossible, given that this type of information is often proprietary and available only to people who already work at the company.
I think that there are plenty of talented scientists, engineers, and programmers in the U.S. but the policies of our government and the practices of large corporations make it nearly impossible for us to actually find work in our chosen fields. Until we fix these problems, the U.S. is going to get further and further behind the rest of the world.
Yes, you are an anomaly.
Much of the present climate is very much anti-science. In recent times I've been almost ridiculed for "believing" in DNA. One woman sneered and called me an "academic".
I think the problem is that science is being made into a "belief system". I've heard so many times, "Science is just like religion" or "Science is just another paradigm". Clearly it's not. If I were to say that the Bible instructs the faithful to wear purple polka-dotted pantaloons on Wednesdays I'd be dismissed as a crackpot. Yet so many in the religious community can claim that science is a "belief system" and misrepresent aspects of scientific theory (evolution, the Big Bang) and get away with it. They have conned people into believing that science is something more than a process and by doing so, forced people to choose between God and science.
Sure it's noble to seek knowledge, but ultimately it's just a process. One might as well call arithmetic a belief system. "You're adding! You godless heathen!!!"
Hmm, right... raping and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents -- not evil.
...?). Let me know when you grow up.
I suggest you go take a look at what happened in many southern American countries, or in pre-republic Iran for example. Please take a peek also at where the governments which were in power at the time got their money and knowledge from. By your own standards the USA has been and still is very evil.
You've sold out your morals (or your common sense) for a retarded idea (anti-Americanism? socialism?
I can't speak for the poster of GP, but I can say that for all I can see, he replaced the utter ignorance about anything outside the USA with a dislike of hypocracy. I congratulate him on that. Now for as far as you are concerned, come back when you can actually think for yourself and have informed yourself instead of mindlessly repeating what government propaganda is trying to tell you.
Just one more thing, if you do not want to look utterly stupid then it is really a good idea to consider that differing opinions and critisism are very American, stamping out anything that is not like you is very un-American. Next time you accuse people of being anti-American that might be something to consider. Maybe you heard about this concept called Freedom? Herr Bush loves to throw the word around, and so do his henchmen, now maybe go look up what it actually means, it may not be what you think it is.
The US military is currently on the edge of being over extended and cannot in practice be used to enforce national policy without some major changes. Right now, it's just not able to take on extra activities without leaving the country "undefended".
The US has been losing it's edge in technology research for a few years. The IT industry has come to a standstill pretty much since 1998 and won't move until MS and others stop being a bottle neck. Recently, Rice was the first foreign minister to blow off the ASEAN meeting, indicating that the US may be preparing to cede the entire Asian economic region over to China. For manufacturing, everybody including the US has already moved over to China.
Dollar hegemony and inertia look to be what keep things going this long. The dollar, however, would become irrelevant if the cost of oil were tied to the Euro. I recall Saddam Hussein including among his threats shortly before he got raided.
If current policies are allowed to continue much longer without intensive corrective action, it may be time to say that it's over for the US.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.