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Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU

Posted by kdawson on from the old-guard-passing dept.

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.

14 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Just too bad by countertrolling · · Score: 5, Funny

    We here in the States have much more pressing issues at the moment... Science is for pagans and heathens

    --
    For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
    1. Re:Just too bad by paiute · · Score: 5, Funny

      I read that article and I think maybe they're trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than training more priests to perform exorcisms maybe they need to stop looking for demons in everything.

      When all you've got is holy water, every problem looks like a demon.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    2. Re:Just too bad by Urkki · · Score: 5, Funny

      I say make more people MBAs! We need more MBAs!!

      (What do MBAs actually do? Cause at my work all they seem to do is regurgitate things I say and make very boring power point presentations with the same clip art and generic percentage data about general stuff)

      MBAs talk to other MBAs. It takes an MBA to do that, really. Without MBAs in between, you don't know what engineers and other riff-raff would be up to. Just look at the OSS communities without MBAs, they're total disasters, no useful output what so ever, total waste of human resources.

  2. patents/capita by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Judging scientific productivity in terms of patents filed is like measuring software value in lines of code. I realize that's not the only metric here but the fact that they're even looking at it this way is ridiculous.

    1. Re:patents/capita by toQDuj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Take a look at lab time per dollar. You might find that the Chinese researchers put in ten hours, and we put in one for the same cost, and Europe is the same.

      Like many bosses say: "Ten hours in the lab can save you one hour in the library". In my eyes, working hard does not beat working a little and thinking a lot. Research simply takes time.

      --
      Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
  3. Chinese science by AnonymousClown · · Score: 5, Informative
    FTFA:

    But citation of English-language articles in Chinese journals by other publications remains low.

    Maybe it's because Chinese science isn't trustworthy enough?

    --
    RIP America

    July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001

  4. Here's the solution by nbauman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've got a great idea.

    Instead of making college free like other countries, let's raise the cost of going to college so high that nobody can afford it.

    Instead, we'll let them take out loans that will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.

    We'll make the interest rates so high that they'll never be able to pay it off.

    And to stop them from going bankrupt like businessmen or anybody else who is overwhelmed by debt, we'll make it illegal for them to go bankrupt.

    (Note to self: Don't forget to underpay science teachers and destroy teachers' unions.)

    1. Re:Here's the solution by Godskitchen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Making college free" - you mean using tax dollars to pay the tuition for... everyone? As it stands, probably 50% of the people who show up for class at university should have settled for trade school. Instead, they will spend 5-6 years getting a philosophy or art degree and then working as an assistant manager at Borders. I don't want to subsidize this any more than I already have to (interest deferred school loans).

    2. Re:Here's the solution by Godskitchen · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh God! A Borders assistant manager.

    3. Re:Here's the solution by glebovitz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Here's the solution by dachshund · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.

      Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs. If you start from that perspective, then of course you don't want any competition.

      I would be perfectly happy living in a world where everyone had a college degree, provided the degrees actually came with a real education. I also think the country would be a whole lot richer in that case, probably by more than enough to make up for the "fleecing" you mention.

      In the real world, a more practical goal isn't to get everyone a college degree, but to make sure that talented people who could benefit from one (and consequently make us all richer) don't wind up flipping burgers instead 'cause they can't afford the tuition. Alternatively, we could just make sure that rich, dumb kids get all the opportunities.

    5. Re:Here's the solution by potat0man · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People who make $380,354 or more (1% of the population) already pay 38% of ALL income taxes earned

      The fact that this is even possible indicates to me that there exists an inequity problem that NEEDS to be corrected through taxation.

      So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.

      Sure, the 70's weren't so great when taxes were at 70%. But the 50's were pretty good when the top income bracket rate was 91%. So maybe the key is to get it back up to 91%.

  5. Since were linking the Economist by pavon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Who in their right mind would choose science? by xtal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My father has a PhD from a fancy school in the US. (Genetics)

    When I was looking at a career path, he warned me off pure science. He was right.

    Fighting for tenure and the climate towards R&D in general is nuts.

    The days of Bell labs, PARC et. al were great - people forget many of the advances today came out of those investments made by public and private industry.

    Now, increasingly, advances in semiconductor manufacturing, wireless tech - all comes from overseas.

    Sigh.
     

    --
    ..don't panic