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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.'"
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
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.