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Did the US Take the Back Seat In Science In 2009?
tcd004 writes "In the PBS NewsHour's roundup of the biggest science news of the year, Neil DeGrasse Tyson dropped this doozie: '[Scientific leadership] drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide — almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.'"
For decades, many of the world's best students came to the US to get their PhDs. In many American labs you could hardly meet a native American scientist. And American science thrived, really. Maybe now it's time for the US to send their best students abroad and get valuable PhDs from countries where you can still find a taste for hard work and good science?
Now it's quite difficult for someone with a PhD to get a visa to work in the USA (unless they're just transferring within the same multinational company) and the desire to work in America is significantly lowered by the insane anti-terror legislation,
It's sad really, the most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same rabid supporters of the policies that are destroying it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
People mentioned the immigration policies and other factors, but I think the #1 reason long-term pursuits like science have faded from the forefront is the shift everywhere to short term thinking.
Personally, I think we should deemphasize the amount of attention paid to the stock market, and give it back to the billionaire's club. Invest your retirement money in something safe that gives reasonable returns....ror better yet, demand that they bring pensions back (the ultimate long term planning tool.)
The USA does not, contrary to some believing it, have a monopoly on science and technology.
During the 1970's to 1990's the USA may have made some innovative computer technology and got the Apollo mission to the Moon and the Space Shuttle, but the rest of the world has caught up and in some ways passed us by.
Due to offshoring the work to foreign nations and not hiring enough scientists, engineers, and computer science US citizens in the USA, most of us had to take a job to pay the bills that does not contribute to science and technology. The jobs went to the lower bidders in India, China, Russia, etc instead. Labor goes to where labor costs are cheaper as per classic capitalism and even China has become capitalist. Minimum wage is welfare capitalism and classic capitalism does not use it. The USA has welfare capitalism which means we have welfare ie social programs backed by capitalism via insurance and that means unemployment, COBRA, medicare, disability, welfare, etc. We also force companies to get health insurance for their employees but foreign nations do not. Plus we tax corporations to pay for our welfare capitalism social programs so it also forces companies to move to foreign nations to avoid all that.
When I went to UMR I hung out with the foreign students from China and other places. They were so smart I would play pinball with them in the student lounge and they would win all of these free games because of mechanical engineering and they taught me some of the tricks of playing pinball and gave me their free games, in which I would win more free games and give them to another student. The best of the best from foreign nations come to the USA for college degrees and used to work in the USA, but now thanks to the Internet they can work in a foreign nation and turn out work for pennies on the dollar of what a US citizen wants to earn.
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Personally, I blame the MBA. As in the "Masters of Business Administration" degree.
The MBA programmes at all North American universities promote this short of short-term, quarter-by-quarter, stock price driven corporate culture. As the MBA increasingly became the price of entry to more lucrative salaries and promotion within an enterprise, that culture became all-pervasive, to the point where it is now the water in which the fish swim.
And along the way, the MBA-trained manager class forgot the hard-learned lessons of their founding fathers - like long-term planning, maintainence of corporate morale, and taking care of employees.
My career arc went military (I was a product of a military college) -> civvi -> military. The military is hardly a perfect institution, but one thing it really gets right is teaching leadership. Actual *leadership*, not just management.
One of the key tenets of leadership is that quality personnel who are properly motivated can overcome shortfalls in pretty much everything else. Crappy materials, shitty situation, odds stacked against you - well led troops can overcome these things and manufacture success.
And so there are a number of principles that go along with providing this kind of leadership: Lead by example. Ask your subordinates to do nothing you wouldn't do (or haven't done). Loyalty up starts with loyalty down. Respect is earned, not demanded. Always tell the truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. If you have to correct someone (or you yourself are corrected) fix the problem and move on with no grudges. Provide subordinates with clear direction, including the mission to be accomplished and your intent, and then trust them to carry it out. Etc.
Yes, even in the military it is rare for all of these to gel in the same unit, and I can name commanders who I worked for/with who were deficient in one or more of these areas. But even the worst of them (and some could be pretty bad) were still better leaders and ultimately more effective than any MBA-trained manager I ever worked with as a civilian.
Having worked in a variety of civvie companies, ranging from small startups to major corporations (and most of my civvie experience was with US corporations) I've never seen so many people so completely oblivious to the effects of their decisions upon morale and the overall health and well being of their workforce. Decisions were routinely made with no consideration of second or third order effects. Corporate loyalty simply did not exist, with the employees in the trenches convinced (quite rightly) that management was out to screw them as hard as they could - and so it was OK then to screw the company as hard as they could.
And most frustratingly, any attempt to draw attention to problems in an attempt to get them rectified was usually perceived as an attack on the person who came up with the policy, not the policy itself. It was nearly impossible to pass ground truth up the chain because the bearer of bad news was treated as "difficult" and quite often punished or even terminated.
I wonder sometimes if the success of the "greatest generation" who fought in WW2 isn't because so many key people were exposed to military-style leadership and that sense of everybody in an enterprise pulling towards a common goal, and then that carrying on through the rest of their lives. Now, we get the short-sighted, numbers-focussed "leadership" of the MBA and the resulting destruction and misery.
I went back to the Army in large part because I couldn't take it any more. Even a bad day in the Army usually trumped a good day as a corporate wage slave.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
There are a number of factors as to why science is sliding, and it's not unique to the USA, most of the Western countries have this problem.
- In the UK, anyone on a science / engineering degree is sneered at; science, engineering and IT are SERIOUSLY uncool.
- In the UK, it is cool to be a moron.
- In the UK, there are no incentives for smart children to take up sciences (the government socially engineering moron population - easier to control).
- In the UK, a degree in a useless subject like English, art, politics, history, Latin, drama, can get you on the career paths which can earn LOTS of money (ie. acting, banking, politics). How many rich people do you see that are engineers? The list rapidly runs out after Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ellison and a few others.
- Education in sciences is not that great, many lecturers prefer the textbook approach and not enough practical skills.
But that's the education side. The other problem is people in the sciences of engineering come up with a new gadget or process, but then find out that they can't proceed because part of their idea has already been patented by Mega rich corp..
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This is what happens when you start to politicize science.
We spending money proving Global Warming but change it to Climate Change. Still not a lot of scientifically sound evidence that we are in a man-made cycle with irreversible conditions. Ironically, we are only releasing carbon from fossil fuels that was once in plants, which was once in the air, which is where we are putting it. Not sure that, given the planet earth is a closed system in terms of matter conservation, we are doing anything never seen in the history of this planet.
But we spend more money on social engineering than we do on real engineering or research. I think if the government gave up on all research it would be beneficial. Virgin is doing more with space technology than NASA is. And making money at it.
All government funded research does is take money away from people who want to spend it in some other manner and apply it towards projects that may not have any realizable benefit that's being run by people who are better at pitching funding proposals than delivering results.
Here's food for thought. Polywell fusion has amazing potential as a viable energy source. Government funding consists of $500,000 from the US Navy and run by a private company. The researchers are not Government employees. With some Venture Capital they could be running this project with billions of capital investments.
UAV technology is at a complete standstill in this country -- unless you work for the USAF. FAA regulations are so retarded you can't consider ever deploying UAV on US territories. But Australia and Korea are kicking butt on this research outside of military applications because they have commercially viable potential.
We don't do commercial R&D because we can't afford it. All our money is going to Federal programs.
The problem with anecdotal evidence, is that people arguing the exact opposite point can pull out a dozen examples too. In this article John Derbyshire pulls out a dozen examples of why Obama is trying to kill science in the United States. It's not convincing to anyone who knows about National Lab Day, Educate to Innovate STEM initiative, Computer Science Week, data.gov, and the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research... but this is all anecdotal too, a better resource would be an overview of all the projects being funded by the stimulus package or trends in government funding of scientific research.
However, I do completely agree that Tyson is being unfair to the American government. In fact, this is the same guy who previously argued Republicans were doing a great job of funding American science. The real issue here, and the one we are dealing with most in computer science, is American Culture's antipathy and outright contempt for science and academia. Kids aren't going into Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, etc, because they are afraid of being associated with "geeks." The kids all want to be gangsters, models, and sports stars... not realizing how unrealistic those dreams are and that only a miniscule percentage of people succeed in those arenas.
We need a culture change, we need to be proud geeks and make others envy us. It'll help us out in the long run.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
If it's free market you are worried about, did you notice that if you hire a foreign engineer even with just a bachelors, you just got approximately 16 years of training for absolutely free. The other country paid for the schooling, and you get the fruits.
The reason most countries have free education is that the investment into education is well worth it. Now you are saying no, when someone is giving it to you for free. The way to make sure that US engineers have jobs is to stimulate the job market, not by starving the job market of foreign talent. Investing in basic research is one way to do that, and the US has done that in the 50s and 60s, and we are still reaping the benefits. Now that huge government investment in basic research has gone the way of the dodo ... so will the jobs. Insulating ourselves and pretending nothing's wrong ain't going to work.
Go through a list of major scientific figures from the dark ages. They rapidly accelerate till around 1100AD followed by a sharp falloff. Science had all but stopped centuries (1300AD) before the renaissance began. Can't find anything better put together googling @ the moment but - this should give you an idea
Also read up on the mutazilah who dominated the scientific (scholar) community until Ghazali gained popularity resulting in them dying out (including many being killed outright) and the asherite (conservative) school attaining dominance
...why would an educated person from a developed country come here to live as a second-class citizen...
I'm about as American as anyone (except native Americans) but I find myself in a weird situation. I chose a career in scientific programming but, being something of a lower-tier scientist (not a super-star), the best job offer I could come up with in the USA was $30,000/year with no benefits. On the other hand, I got offered $45,000/year with benefits for a job in Asia.
So basically, I'm too much of a loser to get a decent job in the USA (despite being American), but not so much of a loser that no other country will take me. A manager at a fast food restaurant would make as much, if not more, than me in the USA but a manager at a fast food restaurant would probably have more trouble getting another country to take him (I've got the PhD in biochemistry and a solid working knowledge of half a dozen different programming languages).
So I'm moving to Asia. It's only a three year contract so I'll probably be back. And maybe, as a lower-tier scientist, the USA would be lucky to be rid of me anyway. While the USA doesn't treat lower-tier scientist all that bad compared to other second-class citizens (illegal immigrants, high school drop-outs, etc.), compared to other first-class citizens (medical doctors, lawyers, MBAs, etc) things are not great.
So, anyway, my personal experience is that there is now a situation in the USA where lower-tier scientists (even Americans) are finding that they are better off working in other countries.