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U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable' Prominent Researchers Warn
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The U.S. biomedical science system 'is on an unsustainable path' and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should 'confront the dangers at hand,' the authors write, and 'rethink' how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding."
It sure took you some time to notice the bloody obvious, folks. The only odd thing about this is why you only mention biomedical research.
Because pretty much all other fields have exactly the same problem: fairly massive over-production of graduates - in particular, people with a PhD. In times of shrinking university enrolments, and shrinking populations (in the West, that is). No one will ever need that many faculty. And for most jobs outside uni, that time spent in PhD comics land is not a good preparation. At all.
A bachelor in biology is no worse than a bachelor in some liberal arts field: you learn to read, write, and reason. There are lots of jobs open to you, just not in science.
There's also the tricky matter that PhD students get paid minimal wages given their schooling, whereas career scientists need/expect to be paid a living wage that can support a family and build a retirement fund.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The Western world decided to shift from a growth system, where women bear and raise children and the able bodied population slowly increases, to a system where the women enter the work force and children are few in number. If you measure it in years, they did this quite a long time ago. If you measure it in generations, it's only been a couple.
This had the consequence of dramatically reducing the number of "dependents" and increasing the percentage of people doing "productive work" as an economist would measure it. But, that only lasts till the generation that started the ball rolling retire and become dependents themselves. Then the spiral to oblivion starts, and you can't reverse it without death and destruction.
The women in the work force are no longer "bonus productivity", now they're essential resources to care for the dependent elderly. You can't even acknowledge and the situation and correct it at this point, unless you want to leave your senior citizens to die of neglect. But the longer it continues, the worse it gets, until eventually the people are so few in number that economies of scale break down and we regress to the lifestyle of primitives.
You don't need to have a PhD in Mathematics to understand this. Just a willingness to accept that everything you've been raised to believe was wrong.
Everything is in decline. It's going to continue this way for the rest of our lives. People will continue to refuse to accept the truth of what I've just said, and they'll point at a million different symptoms and call them causes, and we will go into further and further into decline until it collapses. Only at that point will there be people ready to start over.
I had a brief period in my youth where I worked as a life insurance agent, and got to see the proprietary data that makes up their actuary tables of life and death. I saw all this coming, spent my whole life trying to oppose it because I care too much about people to just ignore it, but all I ever got was sophistry, anger and people telling me how intolerant and stupid I was. But everything I saw has come to pass, and this is just another part of it.
Sometimes being a visionary means begging your foolish fellows to stop dancing and get the fuck off the train tracks, and getting run down by the train because you don't have the heart to let go.
I pity the younger generation. At least I got to spend the first half of my life in the shiny happy part. You young guys are in for a rough life. You get to try to measure up to a time of abundance that you will never experience for yourselves, and fail. That it will make it all the more painful, I expect.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Beyond that, working in research is pretty risky if you have a family. University labs are not allowed to have "war chests" much of the time, the professors get a grant, hire people, do the research, fire everyone when it is over. They play budgeting tricks to try to get grants to overlap enough that there is some continuity but if something is just a month off you can loose your entire lab and the collected experience of your people... which overall makes research slower, more expensive, lower quality, and holding on to good people more difficult.
Why does it matter? Is the global pool of money stagnating? Who cares if it is here in the US? So what? So people in other countries will take the lead. Its not really a big deal....we are all human; this my team your team BS is getting old.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Why do I ask? Well, look at your own statistics:
Worker-to-beneficiary ratio in the US: 16 workers to 1 beneficiary in 1950 3.3 workers per beneficiary in 2003 2.1 workers per beneficiary in 2033 (projected)
You do understand that this is real, right? This is all based on hard data and real world facts; I'm not making this shit up as I go along.
16 / 3.3 = 4.8 fold decrease in worker:retiree ratio in the US.
And yet, the system hasn't crashed yet.
3.3 / 2.1 is only a further 1.57 fold decrease, much smaller than the last few years
Why hasn't the system collapsed years ago?
1. An increase in general productivity (see http://www.epi.org/publication... for an interesting article in this regard)
2. Don't forget, these people do die and some leave behind considerable inheritances, which are taxed exorbitantly, even in the US.
Of course, some of this is paid for by US borrowing, which will have to taper off.