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China Set To Surpass US In R&D Spending In 10 Years
dcblogs writes "China is on track to overtake the U.S. in spending on research and development in about 10 years, as federal R&D spending either declines or remains flat. The U.S. today maintains a large lead in spending over China, with federal and private sector investment expected to reach $424 billion next year, a 1.2% increase. By contrast, China's overall R&D spending is $220 billion next year, an increase of 11.6% over 2012, a rate similar to previous years. This finding is shared by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. 'China's investment as a percentage of its GDP shows continuing, deliberate growth that, if it continues, should surpass the roughly flat United States investment within a decade,' it said in a report last month."
Sadly, the USA is not focusing on science and engineering education, except for paying lip service to the concept of STEM courses in college. There are even proposals to tie tuition payments to the popularity of courses: charge more for engineering courses and less for liberal arts (which is the opposite of the right way to influence it if you're trying to coax people into the sciences and into engineering). The idea seems to be that majors which will earn more money should have a higher tuition associated with it. China sends more scholars over here. Meanwhile we have been making it harder for the best students in the world to come here for political reasons and visa bias when it would make more sense to encourage the best of the best to come here to learn and to stay here and innovate!
There no point for the US investing in R we get everything we need from China.
Better focus on what we're really good at: creative financing
America has become an anti intellectual society
That much is obvious even to the densest dim-wits since the appointment of a "Christian Scientist" as the head of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, maybe.
Trouble is, they're building ghost cities, they build railroads with subpar concrete (hint, since it's not explicit in the NYT article: to make proper high speed rail concete you basically need a derivative of volcanic ash, and the amount thereof produced per year is lower than the amount needed to fit the needs of China's yearly consumption, which dwarves the consumption by that of all other countries; in other words, their railway infrastructure's lifespan is roughly 10-20 years, vs 50-100 in developed countries), they need to rebalance, and so many other things can go wrong...
It is cheating. Basically the culture in China right now is one of do whatever you want to get ahead. Cheating, lying, all ok, expected even. So it goes on in research all the time. Straight out fabricated results and such. The problem is, as Feynman said, Nature cannot be fooled. So you can have all kinds of results that say X causes Y, but if X doesn't in fact cause Y it isn't helpful.
It is a societal thing that will need to change before they start to produce more useful research.
Just to be clear, he wasn't just saying "a scientist who is a Christian". Lamar Smith is a member of the sect called "Christian Science", which is an anti-science movement. Among other things, they believe that researching into disease is one of the main CAUSES of disease- that the way to reduce disease is to reduce the number of doctors and medical researchers in the world. They teach their members to avoid medicine and surgery at all cost, and to rely instead on the power of prayer and psychic healers to cure illness.
Lamar Smith isn't one of these by accident of birth; he wrote for the church newspaper, and is married to a "practitioner". His religious beliefs are directly related to his ability to do his job. If your job involves figuring out the national strategy for funding scientific research, and you believe that scientific researchers are the cause of all the world's ills, you may just have a small conflict of interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_S._Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science
What does debt have to do with capitalism? There is nothing about debt that precludes capitalism.
Had we let the auto companies fail, what would have been created in its place? Nothing. The expense of setting up a new car company is unbelievably expensive. All we would have gained by letting them fail was the loss of over one million jobs and the death of the American auto industry. I fail to see how that helps capitalism.
You make a point of singling out unions but fail to mention all the banks that were too big to fail and have no unions. Should we have let them fail? By your logic, we should have. But by all accounts we would have entered a full blown depression (ala 1939). Keep in mind we were losing over 700,000 per month at the time. Are you pro capitalism at the cost of a depression? I hate to tell you this but unrestricted capitalism is what caused the problem in the first place. Saving the banks (as disgusting as that feels) is what saved capitalism. The reason social programs like medicare exist is to save capitalism. Study history and you'll understand why.
What most capitalism purists fail to get is that there are no pure systems and that includes the economic system of capitalism. Do you think the stock market is a free market? Not even close. Such things just don't exist.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
The fact is, the wealth of the world is being redistributed, and the US and EU are coming up losers.
The wealth of the world being rebalanced so everyone has more equal wealth is a good thing, in my opinion. I'm not sure how it isn't, in any way at all.
Now, if you're saying that corporations are taking most of the money, and distributing the wealth unequally, that's a different issue, which is a result of our current system, which they've adopted to some degree.
More equal wealth will allow manufacturing and farming to actually exist in the west without subsidies, too. At the moment we're clinging on to high tech specialised manufacturing, but I doubt that will last for that long.