are seriously considering it. The proof is in the pudding - many would-be scientists are fleeing to medicine, law, business, etc. Meanwhile, new bright students are voting with their feet and avoiding science careers in the first place. That is why our numbers are declining. Of course, wages will eventually equalize as we flood those other markets.
I think this has more to do with foreign competition than anything else. Our wages are being dragged down and our unemployment is growing. Big American corporations have pretty much stopped creating new science jobs in the US (they do hire as replacements for retirees), while opening up 50 or 100 scientist centers in China and India by the dozen.
I posted the OMB data for actual money spent on R&D. It is not decreasing, and in fact has gone up significantly in the last decade. It probably won't increase much or perhaps even decrease this year, but given our current budget problems this is something everyone across the political spectrum has to deal with.
No jobs in the big city. No jobs in small towns. Virtually all the jobs are in small cities (50k-250k) randomly flung across the country, in such desirable places as Mt. Vernon, In. or Midland, Mi. You will have the skills for maybe a dozen companies and be lucky to get two job offers.
I know several dual-professional couples who managed to follow each other based on the doctor's flexibility, for example. This is close to impossible for a scientist. Either our spouse follows us to Midland, we quit our career track to follow him or her, or we split.
You just made my point. I'd take a $200k debt and double my future salary in a heartbeat. Even figuring in interest and the doctors higher taxes, it would take no more than 5 years of using that salary differential to pay off the debt. The 70k difference is pure profit for the doctor for the next 30 years.
Actually, the real difference is not so big (probably closer to half a million than two), but the point is the same. Doctors make a lot more money. They also have more job flexibility (they can work in almost any community they want), and don't have to worry about Chinese ending their practice any time soon.
quite a bit higher than those of a scientist. I don't have time to dig up the numbers tonight but it is quite significant (several hundred thousand real dollars). The time commitment from undergrad to finishing residency is similar to a PhD/post-doc route.
A PhD scientist barely beats out a BS engineer in lifetime earnings precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Trust me, it is hard for me sometimes to see my engineering friends pulling down $60k while I am still struggling in the low twenties. They have cars, homes, babies, IRAs, 401ks, and a zillion other things I cannot possibly afford.
a scientist makes quite a bit less than an American scientist, but as much as a Japanese doctor and more than a lawyer, typically.
I agree, this has a lot to do with comparitive advantage. Unlike law and medicine, science is easily moved across oceans. Hence, American scientists are competing against Chinese and Indian scientists, while American doctors and lawyers are not competing against their foreign peers. Scientists' wages are driven down, relatively, causing Americans to switch away from science.
The tough question is what (if anything) we should do about this.
It is possible that it is becoming more difficult to get grants, because the number of applicants is increasing faster than the funding. This does not imply funding is decreasing, however!
a majority? I am completely baffled. Seriously. Having been raised in a completely backwoods part of the US, I can testify that the Bible-thumping fools you seem to think are the majority are in fact quite rare even in such places as my hometown, and almost non-existent in more suburban or urban areas.
These people have almost no effect on day-to-day science in the US, and the media blows their silly comments way out of proportion.
I have no idea why you think scientists would be better off overseas. In the states, we get paid more, have better facilities, more research money, and many of the best people from around the world to collaborate with. Btw, I am one of the rare American scientists working overseas. I am not doing so for the sake of science, but for the international experience. I could do better science at home.
In many cases, it is easier to pollute and clean than not pollute.
Case in point. It is much cheaper to plant a tree to soak up the CO2 you breathe out than it is to waste society's investment in you by putting a bullet in your brain.
I'd love to know what your solution is. We cannot produce a viable (by which I mean big enough, safe enough, and powerful enough to attract significant customers) that does not produce NOx, at any price.
There was a recent wide-spread report indicating prestige of various professions, and scientists were number one! Lack of respect is not what is driving kids away from science, it is lack of cash. As I have posted here numerous times, a smart person can make a lot more money in law, business, or medicine, all without having to stay in school until one is 30 (or older, depending on the number of post-docs you have to grind through).
Unless this changes, we aren't going to have lots of home-grown scientists. It is that simple.
I am a chemistry post-doc at a highly-regarded university, and have every reason to consider myself a highly intelligent person. I work my ass off (60h/week...a REAL 60h). I am nearing my 31st birthday.
I have never made more than $22,000 in a single year.
Do you see the problem?
And I won't even bother to elaborate on how slaving 60h+ each week in a virtually all-male environment inhibits one's social life.
We have gotten almost nothing but a few pretty pictures out of NASA in the last thirty years, at a price tag of hundreds of billions.
Let's let the market put these engineers to work doing something useful.
And don't give me the "NASA invented X,Y,Z" crap. If that was our goal, we could give 1/10th of NASA's money to NSF, which unlike NASA, isn't spending the majority of its money on $600 hammers, and the majority of its research money on projects that have little direct impact on the average citizen.
How about GE's wind division? Hell, just about all the chemical and petro companies are pouring R&D into alternative energy, which is at least a decade from becoming a blip on the bottom line. Or how about GM? It's been working on fuel cells for years, and they are STILL a decade away.
The length of time is irrelevant. All that matters is the ultimate payoff, adjusted for interest and risk. If you can convince a company that your research will turn $500,000 today into $5,000,000 (inflation adjusted) fifty years from now with high certainty, you will get your research money.
I've done university/industrial partnerships, too. Unlike my PhD work, they got results, and have been applied in the real world, and are making people money while providing a better product. My PhD work will be read by a few dozen people and promptly forgotten.
Honestly, most PhD projects are nothing more than "well, no one has tried it before". Usually, there is a damned good reason for that...
If you go to a nice surburban school with lots of AP classes.
Try going to a poor rural or inner city school, or any small school, and you will quickly learn that there is not enough money or bright kids to fill an AP class.
In any case, you are also forgetting about grades K-10, when everyone is together most of the time.
I do feel that our efforts to help our worst students hinder our efforts to build our best students, who are often given a free pass to perform merely adequately. Teachers overwhelmed with keeping order among the hoodlums rarely have time to challenge the geniuses.
of why the Democrats lost the last election. Lots of people have stupid ideas, you and I included. Screaming "I have the facts" and insulting people is never going to advance your argument or change anyone's minds.
Respect is the first step in having a fruitful discussion.
application, in any time frame. If you can't come up with a bad excuse as to why your research is important and write a one page bullshit blurb at the beginning of your proposal defending such, then your research almost certainly is worthless.
and don't believe there is a whit's worth of difference between "basic" and "applied" research. Also, any discovery in modern science is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of previous discoveries, which were funded by just about every type of organization imaginable. This does not imply that without one particular source of funding, the new research would have been impossible because its foundations would no longer exist. Rather, the foundational work just would have been done by someone else.
The private and public sectors spend approximately the same fraction of their total income on R&D. Hence, the government has little net impact on the total R&D performed.
Yes, professors spend about 80% of their time grubbing for grants, but you can be assured that the money does get spent by their research group (mostly graduate student stipends/post-doc salaries and equipment, with some extra for conferences), not the football stadium.
How much is classified? None that I have ever seen - and I have worked on military projects. In any case, so what if it is?
No scientist in his right mind is at all discouraged from his or her career by right wing (or for that matter, left wing) whackos who howl when ideologies and data collide.
We are discouraged from our careers by the simple fact that our salaries are lower than that of alternative careers for bright people, such as medicine, law, or busines.
A lawyer finishes school at age 25, starts at a salary of $70k, has good job stability, has tremendous upside potential for huge salaries, and has lots of options concerning where he or she wants to work (big town, small town, etc). A scientist doesn't finish his or her series of post-docs until around age 30 (or later!), will start with a similar salary to what the lawyer was making five years before, has less upside potential (few scientists are rich, and if they are, it is business, not science), is under serious competition from low-cost alternatives in India, China, etc, and is relatively limited in his or her choice of job location.
that Japanese, in comparison to English, has far fewer sounds and a completely alien grammar. It simply takes a huge amount of effort for a native speaker of one of these languages to learn the other.
which came long after the invention of the printing press. There has not been a change in the underlying logic.
Again, note that releasing your songs for free MAY be a good idea for some bands some of the time, not all bands all of the time (and almost never a good idea in the case of a book or movie, which is only used once, typically). You cannot escape from the necessity of a copyright system, and therefore the means to regulate one.
According to your own source, sales last year were flat, and last year was the best year in the last five.
Clearly, the industry is facing smaller sales, despite the fact that populations are increasing and incomes are increasing. What is causing this? An amazingly-coincidental batch of crappy music (people have been making this claim for as long as there has been music)?
There is a difference between legal and illegal file sharing. Yes, you are correct. File sharing CAN be beneficial to many bands, in many circumstances, in a variety of forms (complete, snippets, streams, etc). No one is arguing against file sharing - we are arguing against illegal file sharing.
It is up to the artist and his or her representatives to decide which data to give away, and up to you to respect their wishes.
Quit whining and pay for your music (if the artist asks).
bands, who make what little money they do from their gigs, not their CDs.
Different models will work for different bands, and it is up to them to decide what is the best way to attract an audience and for them to make a living.
In any case, we are again talking about marginal stuff. Most of the stuff flying around EDonkey and Kazaa is not your local band, it is Britney.
Slashdot Mirror
are seriously considering it. The proof is in the pudding - many would-be scientists are fleeing to medicine, law, business, etc. Meanwhile, new bright students are voting with their feet and avoiding science careers in the first place. That is why our numbers are declining. Of course, wages will eventually equalize as we flood those other markets.
I think this has more to do with foreign competition than anything else. Our wages are being dragged down and our unemployment is growing. Big American corporations have pretty much stopped creating new science jobs in the US (they do hire as replacements for retirees), while opening up 50 or 100 scientist centers in China and India by the dozen.
It is skyrocketing increases in applications, not decreases in funding, that is causing the low odds.
Grant Applications
I posted the OMB data for actual money spent on R&D. It is not decreasing, and in fact has gone up significantly in the last decade. It probably won't increase much or perhaps even decrease this year, but given our current budget problems this is something everyone across the political spectrum has to deal with.
No jobs in the big city. No jobs in small towns. Virtually all the jobs are in small cities (50k-250k) randomly flung across the country, in such desirable places as Mt. Vernon, In. or Midland, Mi. You will have the skills for maybe a dozen companies and be lucky to get two job offers.
I know several dual-professional couples who managed to follow each other based on the doctor's flexibility, for example. This is close to impossible for a scientist. Either our spouse follows us to Midland, we quit our career track to follow him or her, or we split.
You just made my point. I'd take a $200k debt and double my future salary in a heartbeat. Even figuring in interest and the doctors higher taxes, it would take no more than 5 years of using that salary differential to pay off the debt. The 70k difference is pure profit for the doctor for the next 30 years.
Actually, the real difference is not so big (probably closer to half a million than two), but the point is the same. Doctors make a lot more money. They also have more job flexibility (they can work in almost any community they want), and don't have to worry about Chinese ending their practice any time soon.
quite a bit higher than those of a scientist. I don't have time to dig up the numbers tonight but it is quite significant (several hundred thousand real dollars). The time commitment from undergrad to finishing residency is similar to a PhD/post-doc route.
A PhD scientist barely beats out a BS engineer in lifetime earnings precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Trust me, it is hard for me sometimes to see my engineering friends pulling down $60k while I am still struggling in the low twenties. They have cars, homes, babies, IRAs, 401ks, and a zillion other things I cannot possibly afford.
a scientist makes quite a bit less than an American scientist, but as much as a Japanese doctor and more than a lawyer, typically.
I agree, this has a lot to do with comparitive advantage. Unlike law and medicine, science is easily moved across oceans. Hence, American scientists are competing against Chinese and Indian scientists, while American doctors and lawyers are not competing against their foreign peers. Scientists' wages are driven down, relatively, causing Americans to switch away from science.
The tough question is what (if anything) we should do about this.
What the heck are you talking about?
NSF Budget
It is possible that it is becoming more difficult to get grants, because the number of applicants is increasing faster than the funding. This does not imply funding is decreasing, however!
a majority? I am completely baffled. Seriously. Having been raised in a completely backwoods part of the US, I can testify that the Bible-thumping fools you seem to think are the majority are in fact quite rare even in such places as my hometown, and almost non-existent in more suburban or urban areas.
These people have almost no effect on day-to-day science in the US, and the media blows their silly comments way out of proportion.
I have no idea why you think scientists would be better off overseas. In the states, we get paid more, have better facilities, more research money, and many of the best people from around the world to collaborate with. Btw, I am one of the rare American scientists working overseas. I am not doing so for the sake of science, but for the international experience. I could do better science at home.
In many cases, it is easier to pollute and clean than not pollute.
Case in point. It is much cheaper to plant a tree to soak up the CO2 you breathe out than it is to waste society's investment in you by putting a bullet in your brain.
I'd love to know what your solution is. We cannot produce a viable (by which I mean big enough, safe enough, and powerful enough to attract significant customers) that does not produce NOx, at any price.
There was a recent wide-spread report indicating prestige of various professions, and scientists were number one! Lack of respect is not what is driving kids away from science, it is lack of cash. As I have posted here numerous times, a smart person can make a lot more money in law, business, or medicine, all without having to stay in school until one is 30 (or older, depending on the number of post-docs you have to grind through).
Unless this changes, we aren't going to have lots of home-grown scientists. It is that simple.
I am a chemistry post-doc at a highly-regarded university, and have every reason to consider myself a highly intelligent person. I work my ass off (60h/week...a REAL 60h). I am nearing my 31st birthday.
I have never made more than $22,000 in a single year.
Do you see the problem?
And I won't even bother to elaborate on how slaving 60h+ each week in a virtually all-male environment inhibits one's social life.
come and wave her wand, and solve all of our problems with her magic?
Do you not know that thousands of people are working on the very thing you suggest, including numerous people at Toyota?
We have gotten almost nothing but a few pretty pictures out of NASA in the last thirty years, at a price tag of hundreds of billions.
Let's let the market put these engineers to work doing something useful.
And don't give me the "NASA invented X,Y,Z" crap. If that was our goal, we could give 1/10th of NASA's money to NSF, which unlike NASA, isn't spending the majority of its money on $600 hammers, and the majority of its research money on projects that have little direct impact on the average citizen.
Oh, lets have some fun counter examples.
How about GE's wind division? Hell, just about all the chemical and petro companies are pouring R&D into alternative energy, which is at least a decade from becoming a blip on the bottom line. Or how about GM? It's been working on fuel cells for years, and they are STILL a decade away.
The length of time is irrelevant. All that matters is the ultimate payoff, adjusted for interest and risk. If you can convince a company that your research will turn $500,000 today into $5,000,000 (inflation adjusted) fifty years from now with high certainty, you will get your research money.
I've done university/industrial partnerships, too. Unlike my PhD work, they got results, and have been applied in the real world, and are making people money while providing a better product. My PhD work will be read by a few dozen people and promptly forgotten.
Honestly, most PhD projects are nothing more than "well, no one has tried it before". Usually, there is a damned good reason for that...
If you go to a nice surburban school with lots of AP classes.
Try going to a poor rural or inner city school, or any small school, and you will quickly learn that there is not enough money or bright kids to fill an AP class.
In any case, you are also forgetting about grades K-10, when everyone is together most of the time.
I do feel that our efforts to help our worst students hinder our efforts to build our best students, who are often given a free pass to perform merely adequately. Teachers overwhelmed with keeping order among the hoodlums rarely have time to challenge the geniuses.
of why the Democrats lost the last election. Lots of people have stupid ideas, you and I included. Screaming "I have the facts" and insulting people is never going to advance your argument or change anyone's minds.
Respect is the first step in having a fruitful discussion.
application, in any time frame. If you can't come up with a bad excuse as to why your research is important and write a one page bullshit blurb at the beginning of your proposal defending such, then your research almost certainly is worthless.
and don't believe there is a whit's worth of difference between "basic" and "applied" research. Also, any discovery in modern science is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of previous discoveries, which were funded by just about every type of organization imaginable. This does not imply that without one particular source of funding, the new research would have been impossible because its foundations would no longer exist. Rather, the foundational work just would have been done by someone else.
The private and public sectors spend approximately the same fraction of their total income on R&D. Hence, the government has little net impact on the total R&D performed.
Yes, professors spend about 80% of their time grubbing for grants, but you can be assured that the money does get spent by their research group (mostly graduate student stipends/post-doc salaries and equipment, with some extra for conferences), not the football stadium.
How much is classified? None that I have ever seen - and I have worked on military projects. In any case, so what if it is?
No scientist in his right mind is at all discouraged from his or her career by right wing (or for that matter, left wing) whackos who howl when ideologies and data collide.
We are discouraged from our careers by the simple fact that our salaries are lower than that of alternative careers for bright people, such as medicine, law, or busines.
A lawyer finishes school at age 25, starts at a salary of $70k, has good job stability, has tremendous upside potential for huge salaries, and has lots of options concerning where he or she wants to work (big town, small town, etc). A scientist doesn't finish his or her series of post-docs until around age 30 (or later!), will start with a similar salary to what the lawyer was making five years before, has less upside potential (few scientists are rich, and if they are, it is business, not science), is under serious competition from low-cost alternatives in India, China, etc, and is relatively limited in his or her choice of job location.
Which would you choose?
that Japanese, in comparison to English, has far fewer sounds and a completely alien grammar. It simply takes a huge amount of effort for a native speaker of one of these languages to learn the other.
which came long after the invention of the printing press. There has not been a change in the underlying logic.
Again, note that releasing your songs for free MAY be a good idea for some bands some of the time, not all bands all of the time (and almost never a good idea in the case of a book or movie, which is only used once, typically). You cannot escape from the necessity of a copyright system, and therefore the means to regulate one.
Quit complaining and pay, please.
According to your own source, sales last year were flat, and last year was the best year in the last five.
Clearly, the industry is facing smaller sales, despite the fact that populations are increasing and incomes are increasing. What is causing this? An amazingly-coincidental batch of crappy music (people have been making this claim for as long as there has been music)?
There is a difference between legal and illegal file sharing. Yes, you are correct. File sharing CAN be beneficial to many bands, in many circumstances, in a variety of forms (complete, snippets, streams, etc). No one is arguing against file sharing - we are arguing against illegal file sharing.
It is up to the artist and his or her representatives to decide which data to give away, and up to you to respect their wishes.
Quit whining and pay for your music (if the artist asks).
bands, who make what little money they do from their gigs, not their CDs.
Different models will work for different bands, and it is up to them to decide what is the best way to attract an audience and for them to make a living.
In any case, we are again talking about marginal stuff. Most of the stuff flying around EDonkey and Kazaa is not your local band, it is Britney.