Brain Drain
Audio Recording by George Hahn
The Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S. government initiative to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did, relied on hundreds of brilliant scientists from leading universities. Many of them had fled fascist regimes in Europe and found refuge on American campuses, including Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Purdue, and the University of Minnesota. In the end, Adolf Hitler didn’t come close to developing a bomb. But if the rivers of talent had flowed in the opposite direction, the world would look dramatically different today.
In the eight decades since World War II, collaboration among the federal government, academia, and industry has unleashed unprecedented prosperity and economic growth for America. No other country has been as successful. Consider the list of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. Eight are based in the U.S. Research funded by the federal government has paved the way for a long list of breakthroughs, from the internet to GPS to mRNA vaccines to Apple’s Siri.
Yet rather than building on this foundation, the White House is determined to destroy it. The administration is attacking science and slashing research funding at universities under the false flag of fighting antisemitism. The demands are more thought control than civil rights. An assault on progressive ideology vs. bigotry. The results could be devastating: The river of knowledge may flow in reverse. Loath to get in the way of an adversary making a mistake, global competitors are eagerly shopping at the greatest yard sale of human capital since German scientists bolted for America in World War II.
China Calling
Soon, China won’t need to engage in theft of U.S. intellectual property. It will become the primary source. After the White House in March moved forward with plans to lay off thousands of researchers from leading U.S. facilities, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chinese recruiters jumped on social media to tout career opportunities in Shenzhen.
The Boston area is home to Kendall Square, which may be the most innovative square mile on the planet, and boasts universities including Harvard, MIT, and Tufts. In March, a Turkish doctoral student was arrested by masked federal agents, a year after she co-wrote an op-ed criticizing the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza. The governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, said: “China is on our campuses right now” recruiting scientists and faculty members. “That makes America less safe, less competitive, and has tremendous ripple effects for our economy.”
By many measures, China is already a scientific superpower. In other areas, it’s gaining ground quickly. The number of universities in China and Hong Kong ranked in the top 100 doubled to 12 over the past five years, while the number of American universities slipped to 38 from 40, according to the annual Times Higher Education list of more than 2,000 institutions. A different ranking of the top 500 showed that the number of Chinese universities tripled between 2010 and 2020, amid a slump for U.S. institutions.
Departures of Chinese scientists from the U.S. have also been accelerating, fueled by a 2018 program that sought to curb Chinese espionage. Although the Trump-era “China Initiative” was shut down four years later, reports of high-profile scientists of Chinese origin returning to China in recent months have raised concern. I believe there are likely numerous Chinese nationals who are spies, and … it’s worth it.
Rivers of Talent
Imagine a football team that receives not one, but 31 of the 32 first-round draft picks. Every year. Now imagine the owner harasses the rookie quarterback, cleans out his locker, and threatens to have him and his family arrested and deported, sending a chill through the ranks of promising college players.
That would be … not smart.
This is what the White House is doing. When you hear the term brain drain, you think of America as the primary beneficiary. The country has long been the envy of the world when it comes to attracting talent. But we can no longer take this status for granted. Last week, we wrote about the rivers of financial capital reversing and flowing away from the U.S. But the change in direction of human capital may be even more important. In a March poll by the journal Nature, more than 1,200 American scientists — three-quarters of the respondents — said they were considering leaving America. The journal’s job-search platform saw 32% more applications for positions overseas from January through March 2025 vs. a year prior.
Gigantic Miscalculation
European leaders aren’t wasting any time in exploiting America’s dramatic research cuts, restrictions on academic freedom, and funding freezes. The European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, earlier this week announced an investment of €500 million to woo international researchers, highlighting the EU’s values of freedom, openness, collaboration, and diversity. Without directly mentioning Trump, she said that undermining science and research is a “gigantic miscalculation.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, who joined von der Leyen at Sorbonne University in Paris, said his country would commit another €100 million to attract scholars and make Europe a “safe haven” for science. Macron said: “No one could have thought that one of the largest democracies in the world would erase, with a stroke of the pen, the ability to grant visas to certain researchers. No one could have thought that this great democracy, whose economic model relies so heavily on free science, on innovation, and on its ability to innovate more than Europeans … would make such a mistake.”
Many other countries see an opening, too. In the U.K., the Financial Times reported that the government is considering a £50 million program to court researchers, while Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway are progressing with their own plans. Regions within nations are jumping in as well: Catalan President Salvador Illa unveiled a €30 million effort — the “Catalonia Talent Bridge” — to finance posts for more than 70 American researchers facing restrictions to their academic freedom.
Slash and Burn
At my own institution, NYU Stern School of Business, I’ve seen firsthand the talent the rest of the world is racing to attract. The brightest scholars from the Indian Institutes of Science and other universities pace the halls of Stern. In sum, they dominate: exceptional scholars, teachers, and (American) patriots. To think that the U.S. is shutting off the tap — it isn’t just depressing, it’s fucking stupid.
Even if the White House is sparing artificial intelligence and quantum research from its slash-and-burn strategy, it has requested cutting the $9 billion budget of the National Science Foundation by more than half. The government agency, a major funder of basic science, math, and engineering, especially at universities across the country, terminated more than 1,000 active grants over a two-week period.
Waging war on universities and reducing federal funding for scientific research will weaken America’s economic competitiveness. Economists at American University found that a 25% cut to public R&D spending would cut gross domestic product by 3.8%. That’s comparable to the decline seen during the Great Recession, which ended in 2009. A 50% reduction in funding would lower GDP by almost 7.6%, making Americans much poorer.
Oppenheimer
The U.S. can’t rely on the private sector to replace the government in funding science. No corporation can match the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, which has played a critical role as an engine of American innovation. Early-stage research is risky and requires massive capital — and patience — investments companies focused on quarterly earnings can’t justify. Prosperous nations play the long game. The world’s most valuable firms have one thing in common: They were built on technology financed by American taxpayers via public-private partnerships — government and universities.
They also excel at bringing the government, universities, and companies together. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Berkeley and Caltech scientist and “father of the atomic bomb” and General Leslie Groves were crucial Manhattan Project players, as everyone knows thanks to the performances of Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon in the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer. But hundreds of others — and dozens of companies, too — played supporting roles. As physicist Niels Bohr said in 1944, the government wouldn’t have succeeded without “turning the whole country into a factory.”
Golden Goose
It was fear of Adolf Hitler getting a bomb that drove Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project. But it was hope that spurred the president to write to Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in November 1944. Roosevelt asked Bush to come up with a set of policy recommendations to sustain America’s wartime innovation during peacetime.
America’s innovation supremacy wasn’t an accident or birthright — it was earned through deliberate investment and intense collaboration among the world’s most exceptional minds. Now we risk throwing it all away. We’ve spent 80 years building a nearly unassailable lead, only to suddenly decide the race is optional. Our universities still dominate global rankings and our tech firms command unprecedented market power, but we’re actively dismantling the foundation that made it all possible. I believe America is being run by a mob family. That’s bad. What’s worse is that Michael Corleone is running the grift, and Fredo is running the government. America has become the textbook definition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I was in Hamburg last week presenting at the OMR Festival (Online Marketing Rockstars), and the general vibe is bewilderment: How could a superpower be this stupid?
Life is so rich,
P.S. I enjoyed my conversation with Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and staff writer at the Atlantic, about the rise of kleptocracy in America. Listen here on Apple or here on Spotify, or watch it here on YouTube.
It’s difficult to fknd experienmced people in thos partifular topic,
however, yyou seem like you kbow what you’re talkijg about!
Thanks
I get paid over $130 1 to 3 hours working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I’d be able to do it but my best friend earns over $27k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heress———–> rb.gy/tzkwnx
I get paid over $130 1 to 3 hours working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I’d be able to do it but my best friend earns over $27k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heress———–>
hy
5rzif7
US, Qatar deals to generate $1.2 trillion in ‘economic exchange’, White House says
We going to mention those rivers of financial capital or, nah
Great delivery. Sound arguments. Keeep uup thhe amazzing work.
Trump says US adding $1 trillion of investment with Saudi trip
We going to mention that or nah……
Main problem is the underlying issue goes even beyond Trump, it’s a break-down in institutions and culture that made him possible, due mainly to a worsening anti-intellectualism, outrageous levels of inequality even worse than the Gilded Age, impossibly worsening costs of living for the most basic things (housing, child and senior care, healthcare, college, food), the idiocy of the exceptionalism delusion that prevents effective action, failures to effectively even measure our economy (GDP has become useless as it’s bloated by things like our crumbling waste-filled healthcare system), massive legalized bribery and corruption of the political system and a general break-down in educated discussion worsened by social media. And even Obama and Bush also misused the dollar reserve privilege before Trump with misuse of dollar-based sanctions pushing the world further away from its use. But as general phenomena the nasty attack on science and the brain drain Scott talks about here, it’s one symptom of a much more deep seated disease, a terrible rot in our institutions and a failure to address even basic issues necessary to run a functioning society, like preventing elections from basically being bought by oligarchs and providing basic healthcare.
There’s a direct connection between the corruption and rigged casino decay of the US stock market, with companies like Tesla getting rewarded with ridiculous P to E valuations of 200 even with sharply declining performance, and oligarchs like Musk basically bribing and buying up the US government. We’re now a failing oligarchy not unlike Russia and many 3rd world countries. Part of my family came from a country like this, a once great power that got too arrogant and conceited with its own sense of exceptionalism, allowed its oligarchs too gain too much power and got hollowed out from the inside, eventually drowning in debt and collapsing, and a climate of dogma and intellectualism, chasing out its scientists and best and brightest soon enough happened there too as it declined. That’s why this crisis isn’t temporary for the US, it’s a product of much deeper seated failures of institutions and the break-down even of our out-moded, increasing failing 2-party system itself. Unless those deeper structural issues are addressed, and soon then this already permanent damage to our country, it will become insurmountable.
And that harsh attack on the rule of law and severe erosion of basic American institutions that protect people from arbitrary misuse of state power, all the while threatening the very sovereignty of Canada and other allies is also direct attack on the very things that once gave both Americans and non-Americans confidence in the US as a place of stability and good rule. This is permanent, unfixable damage to the USA and it isn’t going away, because even if the country was to put in someone better after 4 years, the rest of the world knows another Trump would be in 4 or 8 years after that to wreak more damage. We’ve become bipolar, completely unreliable and potentially dangerous and this is especially damaging to scientists and researchers, where the career horizon for projects and fellowships now is often 10 to 20 years, and these kinds of interruptions are fatal to not just career progression, but basic survival and paying the bills.
Marty, with due respect that’s the problem this is not a temporary issue, Trump’s attacks on US norms and basic functioning are a hit to our most fundamental foundations in a way that’s never happened to the country before and the damage to US science and intellectual efforts is a permanent victim of that. As part of my team’s own work for varied reasons for example, we have to monitor the bond market and something that’s never happened before, the most sober holders of the capital are quietly (to avoid a bond rout and loss of the coupon value of their holdings), but steadily and permanently moving their funds out into ex. francs, bunds, renminbi, yen, gold and whatever else they can find because Trump is clearly pushing debt re-structuring and weakening America’s full faith and credit that’s tantamount to default (either overtly or through a soft default of massive inflation from ex. a corrupt take-over of the Fed) and worse, the US checks and balances have broken down, Congress and the courts failing to do their basic jobs and separation of powers. The US is no longer a safe haven and all this while the tariffs and Trump’s arbitrary misuse of executive authority and the US dollar as a reserve rips up trade deals and agreements even he himself negotiated.
Will somebody start screaming “it’s temporary!?” We’ve had aberations in the past,but sanity has always prevailed. We’ve survived Hoover, Andrew Jackson, and we will survive “Donny 2 shoes”. Just look forward to Jan. 27, and the impeachments every month (or week).
Imagine a football team that receives not one, but 31 of the 32 first-round draft picks. Every year. Now, imagine that one of those 31 picks takes the game plans and the plays for every game and turns them over to the other teams. In order to win a game our team would need to deport…er…fire that one player and retain the rest, not just assume that the false recruit is “worth it.” He isn’t. (If the Manhattan Project had included one of those “worth it” recruits, we would all be speaking German…if we were speaking at all.)
qaq5el
Great
I only need two words to make my point: LIV Golf. Is LIV a word?
The Saudi-backed tour lured top PGA talent by offering compensation at an order-of-magnitude premium over the incumbent tour. Brooks Koepka alone reportedly received a $100 million signing bonus — an amount easy to rationalize, even for the proudest purists.
Yes, China made a play with its Thousand Talents Program, but those offers were more in the realm of 3–5× compensation, not transformational wealth. Now imagine a LIV-style campaign targeting the world’s top academics: $20–50 million signing bonuses, seven-figure annual salaries, and open-ended research budgets. How many of the top 100 minds would go to Shanghai or Beijing?
For the Chinese Communist Party, recruiting 100 world-class scientists would be a rounding error. And yet, the intellectual fallout could be profound.
That’s what scares me.
PS: Remember the line from The Right Stuff about actual rocket scientists; our Germans are better than their Germans.
they were legit nazi war criminals – read “operation paperclip”
Well, at lest you will have the best hotels and golf courses known to mankind.
You’re being purposely dense on the outrages that have led to this problem
I’m a successful engineer, dozens of patents. My entire grad school education was funded by DARPA and the NSF. Same is true for dozens of my classmates.
I notice what company is not in the list of companies getting government funding ……Nvidia good for Jensen
I received my PhD in 1979. It was fully-funded by a federal grant. Everything. Room, board, tuition and book money. I never had to teach a course or be a research assistant. That was followed by a post-doc that also paid all my expenses. A half century ago, if you had the talent, you got the resources to go as far and as fast as you could go. By the time I was packing to leave for my Congressional Fellowship on Capitol Hill, a lot of my classmates were moving to Palo Alto to work for Apple Computer. On one side of the America there was a micro-computing revolution. I fell into the mortgage securitization boom on Wall Street that provided the capital to house the Baby Boom generation. I feel like Trump is handing the torch of technological innovation off to China and the rest of the world.
Having been a COO of a global digital media agency which was reliant on the talent from many of the above mentioned institutions who often Visa sponsored talent who we would pay for the immigration and citizenship costs to maintain the talent was key to developing the audience targeting methodology. I can only say that the caliber of foreign students/talent educated by our US institutions where federal research dollars supported advancement was key to our success.
This administrations destruction of the administrative state including all the points you so simply articulate will most definitely impact our leadership role in advanacemt across many sectors and slowly diminish our leadership position in many ways. In my experience, the discipline, ability and capacity of US hires in these areas is not on par with foreign students who have significantly higher inner work standards. Removing funding and immigration from our institutions will decrease creativity and our standing in the world. Period!
My son who is a PHD was at the NIH. We know what happened to those folks. He is now looking to the countries recruiting for Europe and Asia. What a waste. When will I ever see him again?
facetime exists – and good for him!
Scott- big fan and I don’t think I’ve missed a newsletter post since launch. Newsletter increasingly feels political vs the smart business trend insights that you’ve been far ahead of the curve on…maybe I’m off but would prefer we stick to the origin roots?
Politics is business. Lack of skilled talent is a business issue. Clients seeking non-US vendors is a business issue. This whole article is about the trouble businesses are in
This is certainly a business insights post. This post won’t tell you about next week’s stock move,emits, but it is certainly a post for long term investors
I understand DARPA was important, and so was Bell Telephone Labs: “…The achievements of the Bell Labs researchers have been recognized by nine Nobel prizes and four Turing awards, the best-known inventions being the transistor, laser, charged-coupled device, and photovoltaic cell. Bell Labs was the birthplace of information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language.” This basic research was supported by allowing a “public monopoly” to charge a small surtax on each phone bill which was directed to basic research. I remember the picture on the front cover of Scientific American showing the first Integrated Circuit and the article was coauthored by Bell Labs, Fairchild and (?) Texas Instruments. I don’t remember DARPA mentioned…
From the golden perch of an Ivy faculty lounge, everything is horrible. Why, freedom of speech is dead! Wait, conservatives have been muted, or attacked, for a decade.
Racism is rampant. Wait, white males have been excluded en mass as Air Traffic Controllers. 1000 people have filed a Class Action suit against FAA. Asians held to higher standards than blacks or Hispanics. But, you cannot be ‘racist’ against whites. And, more recently, hard working Asians.
Research money is being stopped, money that saves lives!. Wait… from ChatGPT ‘Surveys and expert analyses suggest that up to 70% of research from academic laboratories may not be reproducible, highlighting a significant challenge in scientific research’
From your perch, you likely cannot see the ‘average’ taxpayer who cannot afford to send their kids to college. Watching Washington lavish money on Ivy schools who are sitting on billions in their endowments. And to see that most of the research money is for personal glorification and not for the public good.
Fix academics. And, we are teaching rich MBA students how to manipulate poorer, less educated to buy crap they don’t need. Utilizing OUR tax money. A problem that seems not to be one to the woke/left.
Communism, populism morphs itself in new ways. No, competent Asians, and whites are not suffering, it’s a fox news fantasy. But don’t worry, the destruction of America by the hordes of incompetent zealots currently in charge will be stopped. In the mean time, I’ll continue to enrich myself with the obvious opportunities of this chaos…
your a clown – how does it feel to have trumps balls so far down your throat?
Too right!
Notice no link to support this statement: “After the White House in March moved forward with plans to lay off thousands of researchers from leading U.S. facilities”. The word researchers is not supported by data. Most of the lay offs and voluntary departures were non-research positions. None at the FDA for instance.
Stupidity is defined as when an attempt to hurt others inflicts more harm on oneself; I use it very sparingly. It is a term that is increasingly directed at one man, but I think it should be more accurately directed at the American education system, and the very large numbers of voters who elected that man. Narcissistic Personality Disorder describes the behaviour of someone who cares not a fig about the consequences of his actions on others – only the attention received!
American scientists and scholars are seeking jobs in Canada and elsewhere by the droves. Wouldn’t you?
well, you know, you have to fund Bible studies and that is incompatible with science. Sigh!
It’s the same theme over and over, America is in trouble with Trump.
What happened to you, not America?
There is an anti-Semitic problem, and DEI mandates ruined the integrity of grants.
Get over Musk being the man. You hate that, imo.
You dont even live in America.
The Internet comes from CERN and so is not American. And your list of companies and their links is mostly accurate, but here also not quite … I do however and of course agree to what you say. It is a typical “how stupid can you get”. The basics of MAGA is that America at the moment is not great. Who thinks such a thing? But hey – if the US voted for someone to destroy the US, who am I to regret it? MAGA = Make America Grab Again – as you say, the mob is here to stay!
The internet is simply a network of networks that use a standard communications protocol (TCP/IP). On top of the internet sit various services. When the internet started to take off in the early 1990s, such services included Archie, Veronica, Jughead, WAIS and Usenet. The only two services that remain quite popular today are email (SMTP) and FTP (a communications protocol that allows large files to be transported from point A to point B).
And there is one more service I need to mention: the Web. The Web is not the internet, the Web uses the internet as its underlying transport system. The Web was invented at CERN (which is in Europe, in the US) by Timothy Berners-Lee. He did most of the initial work: HTML, HTTP, URLs, and web servers.
What made the Web useful and thus popular was the web browser. The first popular web browser was Mosaic, development of which was led by two undergraduate students at the University of Illinois (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina).
So except for the Web, almost every other aspect of the early internet was developed in the U.S.
Thanks for pointing out the Web is not the Internet!
Most things yes but as another counter-example, PHP one of the programming foundations of the early public Web was developed by a Dane, Rasmus Lerdorf then working mostly in Canada. A lot of the OS infrastructure of early Internet (even before Android) ran off Linux servers, originally developed in Finland by Linus Torvalds. Many such examples, the early Internet development was multi-national even if yes it was mainly lead by centres in the US. In that said, none of it changes the fact you all are right, the early Internet and Web were largely fruit of efforts from government funded work in the US, Europe and other countries. All the companies that got rich off the Internet owe their success to the public funded efforts came first, like Scott mentioned at top.
It is incredible. We are destroying what made America great. America fell for a demagogue/ populist because of growing distrust in government caused by bloat, inefficiency , and corruption. Trying to pass Biden off as competent while forcing woke ideology was the straw that broke the camels back. What have we done…
This hits hard (tough love) — and it goes deeper than a brain drain. What’s really at stake is a coherence drain. The alliance between science, government, and society that made the Manhattan Project possible wasn’t just smart policy — it was a leadership system built on trust, long-term vision, and shared purpose.
When that coherence breaks, the system starts working against itself. Talent is still here, but the container that made it matter is cracking.
Scott, you’re doing what more leaders need to do: not just calling out bad decisions, but making visible the deeper pattern underneath. The real risk isn’t just who we lose — it’s what we stop believing in together.
Besides not having the money, much of the federal funding goes to projects that will never be worth anything. It seems to be a form of academic welfare. As the VC/PE industry lives off of this research and has $ trillions to invest let then take up the mantle of funding research.
That’s the point—basic research is risky, a leap into the unknown, and not all of it will pay off, by definition. But it is what underlies all scientific progress.
Absolutely, this. Well said, Susan. That’s the whole point here, much if not most basic research won’t be profitable but we just don’t know, it’s why we have to do it with public funding. Private industry and investment is of course limited by what will eventually turn profit and return on investment. So the riskier, early stage things have to be part of government industrial policy, otherwise we’d have very little innovation because the most interesting things often don’t bear fruit for years and years. Computers took centuries to develop, starting from the earliest computing work by Pascal in France and Liebniz in Germany in 1600’s long before any practical application known. A lot of societal progress depends on this, going ahead on and doing the research long before any profit is possible or even conceived of. That’s what China’s been smart about over the past 40 to 50 years, they have very long term industrial policy and thinking instead of just next quarter, and seeds of their new science and technological dominance, coming into form in just the past 2 to 3 years, were lain decades ago. China now dominates things like EV’s, batteries and renewable tech because they went ahead and did the early research and investments so many decades ago long before any profit could be seen.
I was paid to make a presentation to the Polish Project Management Institute 20 years ago. When I submitted my paper, I was asked to “dumb it down”. It was too sophisticated for their current state of professional development. When I was invited back after five years, I was amazed by the progress. There is a thirst for knowledge. I don’t see that drive in America beyond the drive to make money. Making money is not bad but it should derive from development of value, in the case, knowledge and skills.
I partially agree with Scott that getting the best human capital is crucial to maintaining long term competitiveness. But as usual, Scott use that as pretext to one dimensionally attack Trump Administration policies.
America has many structural issues that are handicapping us from winning the future. The biggest one is actually the DEI and bureaucratic policies pushed by the Democrats. The key human capital we need are mostly of East Asian descent, and specifically Mainland Chinese who (used) to make up the largest body of foreign students in the USA. However, DEI actively discriminates against them blocking their max potential in our society thru the bamboo ceiling. This incentivizes them to take their talents home.
Taiwan’s own world (and consequently American) beating semiconductor industry was created from returning Taiwanese engineers who got limited at the American corporations they used to work for.
So to win, we need to incentivize the top talent by allowing them to achieve their max potential in our country while at the same time continue the successful tradition of our defense industry acting as the successful seed investor in emerging startups.
Your response and prescriptions to return to a previous policy, However one only augmented By excluding DEI Policies. Is well taken. But celebrating the trump administration is a non starter.
Bingo. DEI is exactly the same as affirmative action at universities, but Leftists bend over backwards to argue how it’s different and how it somehow isn’t racial discrimination.
Scott, You continue to “bat a thousand” with me, you’re so bad it’s fun to read your one facet diamond analysis (No one buys those!). I missed where you state that the federally funded grants are managed so well, accountability is transparent. We’re $36 trillion in debt!! Grants are only a part of our country’s problems no liberal wants to fix.Get all of the scientist who are “considering” leaving the US to use their alchemy to get rid of that debt, getting us to a Federal Surplus. We need THAT science ASAP!!! You mentioned the Euro’s funding to get scientists over there from here. Rightttt! Move closer to a war zone, to a country the United States of America has and is protecting? The Euro’s want us to defend them, American tax payers pay for it, then they spit in our face. Tell the prof.s I said “Adios, enjoy that party!” If that grass is so much greener, why don’t you head on over there yourself? It will be quite a surprise when YOU come up with a solution, and then go get it done.
The costs of research are a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of that $36 trillion US national debt, actually now more like $37 trillion so basically a rounding error. Compare that to the costs of the war in Iraq, $6-8 trillion to the US national treasury and rising due to the severe wounds our soldiers got and veterans care from a war we failed and got defeated in due to Bush and Cheney’s incompetence, and caused us too to lose focus and get defeated in Afghanistan costing us even more trillions. Not to mention the trillions still spent on what’s basically an imperial military that we don’t need and trillions wasted on things like fraud from the PPP program, or billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos dodging their taxes.
Research spending is a tiny fraction of that, just a drop in the budget bucket. It’s an irony now that US budget deficit and national debt is getting worse despite those Doge cuts because it was all a sham anyway, failing to actually make reforms in the big costs to the US with the imperial military and billionaire tax dodging that costs us trillions. Yet research gives massive return on the investment so it’s penny-wise and pound foolish in worst way. And yes more top American minds are going overseas, some to China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Japan of course but also yes many to Europe, and your description is way off the mark. (If anything the US is at greatest risk of Russian attack with their designs on Alaska, lightly defended and all the subs menacing American coasts)
Part of my family comes from Russia and the country is self-destructing before our eyes, they can’t even maintain their positions in southeastern Ukraine much less go farther west, they’re defaulting on their debts and bankrupting from costs of the war, can’t get basic spare parts to fix equipment, housing is breaking down, banks are going bust and country is falling apart. Young Russians don’t want to be cannon-fodder for the hated oligarchs there and millions have left or leaving, ironically even some of our cousins we haven’t seen in many years, are now reachable because they’ve left Russia and in Brazil. So much that Russians are now a top immigrant group there and Argentina of all the places, that’s how bad it’s gotten.
As usual your political views, and your personal feeding at the academic trough, have clouded your judgement (or is it the edibles?), By your own list everything was funded by DARPA, not a single thing by a University except Google—who cares.
Scott, you really need some TDS rehab. Maybe a couple of months somewhere warm.
Your writing is losing its authenticity as it depends so greatly on finding fault w Trump as its basis.
Look at the last 10 things you wrote and see if it isn’t channeling James Carville.
You need to step back. Take some krav maga or buy a punching bag. Channel all that pissed-off-ery.
You used to be better than this.
Cheers.
JLM
I wondered how long I would have to scroll in the comments to find one of the “yOu hAvE tDs!!!” guys. Turns out, not very long.
No kidding. Beyond me why these peeps continue to carry water for a deranged at best evil at worst president. Facts seem to rouse the maga nest every week.
Because he does have TDS. And so do you.
You’re not quite right on this.
1. Institutions that sponsor research suck gobsof faux overhead out of every grant — some more than 50%. So, the amount of actual research is vastly less.
This massive overhead is not an expense of research; it is just a markup, what the world knows as “legal corruption.”
2. Much of research grants is not focused on tech or science, but is blatantly liberal arts. This research is virtually worthless and has no ability to build upon itself. It is fluff and liberal arts profs are not necessary to keep the US on the bleeding edge of tech. Not sorry.
3. DARPA (and to a certain extent in cybersecurity and encryption, the CIA) is driving research that is focused in much the same way as the Manhattan Project. Much of this research is specced out by DARPA and executed by colleges/universities or industry and commercialized by others after the military or intel rackets suck off what they want.
Why did the world come to embrace GPS? Weapons targeting tech initiated by DARPA.
4. If one researches why the Germans did not develop an atomic weapon, you will find they took an “academic” approach rather than a Manhattan Project approach — task oriented in one place with an extraordinary conglomeration of talent working at break neck speed with vast funds.
This is exactly reminiscent of what is going on today with artificial intelligence by private companies — PRIVATE COMPANIES.
Cheers.
JLM
Most of your assertions can be dismissed with five minutes of Googling. For instance, STEM v soft studies grants are approximately 95% to 5%! Overhead costs aren’t a scam. Sure, anything involving money can and has been abused, but it’s legitimate to charge for the cost of running and administering a lab. That’s a large part of the cost of almost all serious research. Your fabric of assumptions about funding research is wrong-headed. The D in DARPA is “Defense”. It’s not “sucking off what they want.” It’s the opposite. The Feds (i.e. we) pay for defense related research and projects, and countless benefits redound to the public. Your example, GPS has been of immense value to the public and to countless sciences. The military benefits were substantial too, but it’s been an economic miracle. Every dollar DARPA spends directly pays 3x to 10x back to the economy, and indirectly vastly more. I don’t understand all this hostility towards research–it’s literally the reason we’re rich, and almost entirely the reason we can bitch about it on the WWW. I seriously doubt it would be possible to spend so much on research that it became a net cost.
Looks like someone brought facts to a MAGA party.
I’m surprised and dismayed at the tone of the comments. SG isn’t some foaming mouthed Marxist–what he is saying should surprise exactly nobody. This isn’t a “liberal” position–it’s a three-digit-IQ position. If anything, to my way of thinking, he’s erring to the conservative. A vast amount of influential research that wasn’t funded by the federal government was by the phone company that had a deal with the feds to fund Bell Labs, and Xerox and others who wrote the research costs off on taxes. Modern operating systems, computer languages, solid state research, etc. poured out of these sources, enabling every technology the world has, and building the pool of Americans, both born and imported, who make it happen. For 80 years the American model has been, “toss your bread on the water and get a freakin’ bakery back.” That is where we want to cut?! That vast techno-scientific empire is a vast ecosystem of relationships among people, organizations, and governments. We shall see how it responds to clear-cutting and defoliation.
Thank you had been thinking something similar, another example how the US 2 party politics system and ideology, is just destroying the country and our ability to see things clearly. I found Scott’s comments too as fairly neutral and reasoned, if anything somewhat conservative at least in the way we think of AEI and Heritage Foundation and stating the obvious. And it’s true that the damage to the US institutions is way deeper than Trump, and started well before him. The Afghanistan and Iraq War defeats were Bush’s failures not Trump’s. Biden was too disconnected from the people, too hung up on economy stats like Robert McNamara but didn’t realize how frustrated Americans were with cost of living, and uncontrolled borders. And I still maintain one of America’s biggest policy mistakes was under Obama, the massive and disproportional sanctions and fining of BNP Paribas for the Iran dealings over an issue that was not a direct threat to us–until the current mess, this was the biggest misuse ever of the dollar’s status and done more than anything to destroy the US dollar as a reserve currency. But everything’s so polar and divided, even Scott’s neutral assessment ruffles feathers. And yes the Murdoch press is a big culprit here.
250 years ago, Benjamin Franklin insisted our new country be committed to establish the Academy of Arts & Sciences with the purpose to advance the sciences and the study of the humanities (create new knowledge) … Franklin favored this as an important strategy for supporting the country’s long term global competitiveness. Franklin was right!
Today; U.S. university research likely contributed $1.2–2 trillion to the USA economy from 2015 to 2025, driven by $800+ billion in R&D expenditures, multiplied by regional economic effects, and amplified by patents, startups, and workforce development. Why are people saying to defund them?
You lost me. You used to be must read and over the last year you’ve become can’t read. Too damn political. No longer balanced reasoning. Bummed.
I agree with Guy. Universities Humanities and Liberal Arts departments have succumbed to the woke rot. Too much grift. University science funding will return once the rot is eliminated!
The logic here is way off… say if it was learned that Enrico Fermi, a brilliant professor of Physics at the University of Chicago was gay, trans, or whatever… thus be denied resources (by your logic) to research and explore and ultimately create the first controlled nuclear reaction (when Hitler scientist were trying to do the same during that same time), you’d be okay with holding back science advancement (which is unrelated to WOKE or whatever) just to punish because you happen HATE certain types of people who are unlike yourself? That is pathetic.
And because you don’t like Art or the Humanities, you want to punish all the development efforts for advancing cancer cures…all because you think it supports your prejudice.
Is all altruism “woke”? If not, how do I determine what is “woke” and what is just something short-sighted selfish people think is a treat to their well-being at the cost of helping someone else?
Politics are a driving factor that is changing the world right now. If you’re looking for punditry without having your beliefs challenged, maybe you’d be happier over at ESPN.
Robert Fulton got restless waiting for Napoleon to demonstrate M le Bayonet’s blade to Talleyrand. Fulton moved on to Great Britain. Talleyrand reminded the emperor, “You can not sit on it.” ever SA
I subscribed to your articles because I want both sides.
I am a moderate who has voted Repub mostly during my adult life, but I reject most of what Trump is doing. As a 38 year Vet. of the USMC who fought for Democracy 57 years ago, I think Trump is a draft-dodging dirtbag who wants to establish an authoritarian society.
That said, I do NOT accept the leftist crap that is being promulgated.!!!
DEI and anti-semitism, whether by the ignoramus students or elsewhere makes me want to vomit.
I also think the Administrative State needs cleaning up. I practiced law for 30 years and encountered many ignorant administrators who were clueless.
GW Jacobson
Port Orchard, Wa
Would you like to hear both sides about why air traffic control is a good idea? Would you like to hear both sides on whether or not lives should be saved by innovation in cancer research? Would you like to hear both side of the history of tariffs on our nation’s economy during turbulent times?
There aren’t smart arguments on both sides for every issue.
GW, I appreciate your comments, especially on the Administrative State, I saw a report on the Newark airport where they were so inefficient that the number of flights need to be reduced. The obvious solution is to cut their funding. A navel airplane cost 62 million dollars fell off an aircraft carrier. If you cannot take care of our airplanes. We should cut the Navy budget until they prove the can spend out money efficiently.
You can’t see the big picture. Iran was considered one of the most developed and _liberal_ (read this again – LIBERAL) countries in the Middle East before the 1979. Then oopsy happened – they were so liberal and welcoming that allowed Islamic Revolution to happen and everything went to shit. I get it, Scott, you quite old and want to live in this rosy open border liberal diverse happy land thinking all we got is to enjoy life and share love and happiness with the rest of the world. Sorry to poop on your happy retirement parade, most of the Americans don’t see themselves submitting to sharia law. Could ICE move more surgical ? Yes, just like Israel could have done better job targeting terrorists in Gaza. But sometimes you have to move fast at risk of loosing big time and accept the unfortunate cost of unnecessary damage.
Pendulum always swings too far. It’s a shame we didn’t have those same professors and researchers standing up to the anti semetic students last year that helped Trump get elected
I suggest it’s more than antisemitism; we do have a national debt problem and all these elite schools have large endowments, plus the percentage universities scrape off the top of these grants is excessive. I’ll bet a smart university President (not a pun) could negotiate a deal with the administration fairly easily by saying, a. we’ll scrape less, and b. we’ll contribute a percentage to each grant – perhaps a small matching amount, like 10%. Wouldn’t that be wiser than verbally attacking and suing the administration? What you say is correct but you also need to address our debt. No one, even you, wants to see all this antisemitism and destruction of property; that’s not who we are. We have freedom of speech but I was taught in law school that there are usually countervailing rights to consider, such as the rights of the non-protesting students, the rights against bodily harm (including threats) by the protestors, and the institution’s right to not have property damaged. Everyone knows that there’s a correct way to protest, but these pro-Hamas people are far beyond the correct limits.
That’s actually a fair point, as dumb as most of these research cuts are, it is fair to ask why some especially rich universities with these huge multi billion dollar endowments, don’t pony up more to support their own research? What you mention seems reasonable, even just around 10 percent of the costs would be easily manageable with all that endowment money, very little cost while doing some of the sharing with grants costs, that could then be more available to other institutions with less funding. As for the protest talk this just seems like a non-issue here and distraction. I was working at one of those Ivy League universities amidst the protests and despite all the social media mess most of the protests on both sides were calm and reasonable. And most were criticizing the violence and suffering on both sides. There was great sympathy for the Israeli hostages and their families and anger at the mistreatment they suffered, and also anger about the suffering of the Gaza civilians. Overall reasonable and civil, so kind of ludicrous to use that as an excuse for the research cuts. Especially things like NSF or med and environmental research that have nothing to do with it. And why also cut FEMA, or Medicaid? All of which won’t do anything to help balance the budget, while we waste trillions of dollars on weapons systems for an imperial military, on PPP-program fraud from COVID, billionaires dodging trillions in taxes that really would make a difference?
enjoyed column, but no mention of the hypocrisy at the Milken Institute Global Conference which is a joke unto itself given Milken was a greedy thug in the Junk Market, plead guilty, then pardoned by Trump!! I know Wall Street is amoral, which is an embarrassment in itself – no though to the “greater good”. read NYT pg 3 today quoting a little moron, Tony Minella who believes “….there is a lot of excitement in the world right now…..” !!!! tell that to Ukraine, Gaza, West Bank, Hungary, Argentina, El Salvador, Africa, blah, blah, blah…..I’m not even mentioning the capitulation of Congress (who’s that?), ‘Big Law’, CEOs, Ackman et al….. They all like Bessant, the dumbest Treas Secty ever (save for Mnuchin) – watch his answering a question about who pays tariffs – mind boggling. we’re fucked, but yet the stock market, bitcoin, gold continue upward – no question (in my mind) U.S. is Germany 1935, and the populace has no clue. Great Salt Lake drying up due to UT Repubs being as stupid as can be, and our great farmers who are using up its water without any regard for the future. u may or may not read this, but if u do – it’s a very sad situation only to get darker, except for the deplorables who will happily follow this asshole right into their grave!
The race card. Until LBJ signed the Civil Rights legislation into law. Black people were denied, threatened, murdered and abused.
DEI is and never was about black people. It’s about the lgbtq agenda, unfortunately pederasty and mass incarceration have pushed our culture down even further.
Donald Trump is a Nazi. But he is better than Obama Biden, Harris.
Yeah I study and read the bible.
I am a protestant and I believe in God
God blessed the Jews. And history reflects that.
It also reflects that many Jews rejected God. And were disobedient.
I direct your attention to the book of Jeremiah.
given how the elite universities have evolved the money should go to DARPA instead and let private enterprise develop the commercial aspects.
The venture builder model that empowers emerging technologies upstream of readiness level two—when backed by principled private equity within a public-private partnership (P3) framework—signals the future of commercialisation-as-a-service. Investors and policy advisors who recognize this shift will not only lead in the global economy but also help advance domestic economic sovereignty.
Think you are far too negative. Trump may well be a menace but it will take a constant steam of stupid policies over many years to beak the American spirit. The U.K. voted for a permanent withdrawal from Europe the US has voted for 4 years of Trump. If the Democrats are unable to field a decent candidate next time and Vance becomes President suspect you are correct but it’s too early to judge.
This doesn’t seem like a Republican vs. Democrat post to me. What has come in on the back of Trump is hardly a classic Republican attitude towards policy. Also, JD Vance is hardly a real MAGA if you look at how he voted before he became a candidate to add credibility to Trump. I suspect the most incompetent of the Trump team will be gone if/when Vance takes over. Vance may be funded by Thiel but he is, generally speaking, a self-made man who was a fairly reasonable person before the populist crazy train pulled into the station. Tariffs, for instance, are a Peter Navarro thing and no prominent Republican took him seriously until he found an empty vessel in Trump.
It isn’t just 4 years though, you realize he’d been voted in for 4 years before, and was re-elected even after over 30 felony convictions, 2 impeachments and the Jan 6 coup, and a long record of stiffing creditors and bankrupting businesses, even casinos? Compare this to Brazil where Bolsonaro was kicked out when he tried the same. Not to mention the dangers here to the US do have much deeper roots than Trump alone. The US has suffered maybe $10 trillion in costs from the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and that was all Bush-Cheney and neo-cons, not Trump. And the break-down in American institutions that made the current corruption and oligarchy possible pre-dates Trump. The Supreme Court legalized bribery in Citizen’s United over a decade ago, oligarchs like Musk are do different than Russia’s oligarchs destroying that country but Musk has sent it to over-drive here. The US is the only country in the world where people go mass bankrupt from medical bills, no family leave and child care is unaffordable, this mess has been brewing for a long time. It’s hardly just Trump, in a certain kind of irony he may help by exposing the bleeding wound in our institutions so it can’t be denied.
America is FAT—65% are obese– not 41% as the Media wants to publish. This means that Elly Lilly will continue to GROW just as we have so this is one area we will dominate .