Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU

explosivejared writes "The Economist has a story on the increasing scientific productivity of countries like China, India, and Brazil relative to the field's old guards in America, Europe, and Japan. Scientific productivity in this sense includes percent of GDP spent on R&D and the overall numbers of researchers, scholarly articles, and patents that a country produces. The article notes increasing levels of international collaboration on scholarly scientific articles in leading journals. From the article: '[M]ore than 35% of articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. That is up from 25% 15 years ago — something the old regime and the new alike can celebrate.'" Note that the "old guard" are still firmly in the lead on these measures of scientific prowess, but the growth rate is higher in the newcomer states.

Comments

Since were linking the Economist

[pavon]

Here is another article by them about rampant fraud in China's research. More power to Brazil and other countries that are legitimately improving their scientific establishment rather than faking it till they make it.

Re:Here's the solution

[glebovitz]

Seems like an incredibly dubious argument to me. Faith and Science are mutually exclusive and have nothing to do with atheists. It has to do with separation of scientific process and leaps of faith that can't be proven. Your arguments are typical of what the grandparent is trying to say. Faith assumes that observation is causality and science recognizes that observation can be related but not the cause. Tying observation to causality my be a natural defense in animals. We assume that the last thing we ate is the cause of our stomach ailments. This might be life saving, but it also makes us avoid things that don't make us sick. Science doesn't have this luxury. We need to root out causality to efficiently make scientific discovery. The beauty of science sometimes leads scientists to have faith is a high power, but it doesn't lead them to apply faith to the discovery process.

What is also hurting our institutions is the changes made during the Reagan era to reduce funding to higher education and place taxes on graduate student stipends. This was driven by your same argument, "Gosh we should stop funding universities because they are turning out to many liberal arts degrees." The government stopped funding universities and forced them into a quasi for profit position. Universities started drawing from the foreign pool of students whose governments had the foresight to fund the education of future leaders of arts and sciences. It is not surprising that our universities have a disproportionate number of foreign students, and they are returning to their homelands with the knowledge to succeed in science and engineering.

I think it is great that China and India have the wherewithal to see what is required to be a dominant economic and political power. They aren't sitting on slashdot arguing over faith versus science. They are just working hard at discovery knowing it will pay off.