How the U.S. became a science superpower
519 comments
·April 15, 2025cs702
jack_h
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
I find it amazing that this is the conclusion when earlier in the article it was stated that "[Britain] was teetering on bankruptcy. It couldn’t afford the broad and deep investments that the U.S. made." The US debt is starting to become an existential problem. Last year the second largest outlay behind social security was the interest payment at a trillion dollars. This is a trillion dollars that cannot be used to provide government services. Over the next 30 years the primary driver of debt will be medicare and interest payments, the former due to demographic shifts and the US being pretty unhealthy overall. Our deficit is (last I checked) projected to be 7.3% of GDP this year. That means that if congress voted to defund the entire military and the entire federal government (park services, FBI, law clerks, congressional salaries, everything) we would still have to borrow. Those two things combined are only ~25% of federal outlays.
I also reject the idea that this government-university partnership is somehow perfect. Over time bureaucracy tends to increase which increases overhead. This happens in private industry, government, universities, everywhere. However, there is no failure mechanism when it comes to government-university partnerships. At least in the free market inefficient companies will eventually go defunct which frees those resources for more economically useful output. Universities will continue to become more bureaucratic so long as the government keeps sending them more money. All of these economic effects must be viewed over very long periods of time. It's not enough to setup a system, see that it produced positive results, and assume it will continue to do so 80 years later.
Really this reads like a pleas from special interest groups who receive federal funding. Every special interest group will be doing this. That's the issue though. A lot of special interest groups who have a financial incentive to keep the money flowing despite the looming consequences to the USD.
grafmax
The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy. Markets don’t account for externalities, they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power), and they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable).
As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
BobbyJo
Im afraid you'd need to be pretty liberal with your definition of rich at this point to dig us out of this hole through taxes alone.
AnthonyMouse
> The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.
> Markets don’t account for externalities
Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.
> they concentrate wealth (and therefore political power)
You're describing regulatory capture. This is why governments are supposed to have limited powers. To keep them from passing rules that enrich cronies and entrench incumbents.
> they routinely underprovide merit goods like education, healthcare, and basic research (things that benefit society broadly but aren’t immediately profitable)
Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those things. There are plenty of high quality private schools, high quality private medical facilities and high quality private research labs.
The real problem here is that some people can't afford those things. But now you're making the case for a UBI so people can afford those things when they otherwise couldn't, not for having the government actually operate the doctor's office.
> As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California). The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.
Meanwhile most of what the rich own are investment securities like stocks and US treasuries. What happens if you increase their taxes? They have less to invest. The stocks then go to someone not being taxed, i.e. foreign investors, so more of the future returns of US companies leave the country. Fewer treasury buyers increase the interest rate the US pays on the debt. Fewer stock buyers lower stock prices, which reduce capital gains and therefore capital gains tax revenue. Fewer stock buyers make it harder for companies to raise money, which lowers employment and wages, and therefore tax revenue again. Increasing the proportion of tax revenue that comes from "the rich" causes an extremely perverse incentive whenever you ask the Congressional Budget Office to do the numbers on how a policy that would transfer wealth from the rich to the middle class would affect tax revenue, and the policy correspondingly gets shelved.
TANSTAAFL.
roenxi
> Markets don’t account for externalities
But on net the externalities are just as likely to be doing more good than bad. I've yet to see anyone in the public debate tallying up the positive externalities of markets. "They have externalities!" is likely to be an argument in favour of free markets, without the positive externalities a free market generates we would be poorer and more uncomfortable - it doesn't take much looking to find a whole raft of spinoffs where free market activity generates positive externalities.
Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease where through no action of their own actors and musicians get a lot more money than in medieval times purely to represent the alternatives the market offers them.
sgregnt
>The idea that the free market will self-correct and optimize outcomes is a well-documented fantasy.
Could you share some sources to back this up? At least a sources to back up at least a few case studies would be curious. I'm interested in economics and never have been aware that free market self-correction is a well documented fantasy and would love to understand where is your claim coming from.
ekianjo
> As for how to address budget issues, the solution is simple: tax the rich.
The debt is so huge it does not even account for a fraction of it. People need to stop dreaming about easy solutions that fit on a piece of paper.
nottorp
> will self-correct and optimize outcomes
It does self-correct and optimize. But as you said it below, it optimizes towards
> they concentrate wealth
Monopolies or oligopolies.
WalterBright
There aren't enough rich people to fund the government at the levels it spends.
kensai
We should be thankful you did not write: eat the rich.
Retric
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.
Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
jack_h
Even if those attribution studies are 100% correct that doesn’t mean this system optimally allocates resources.
The ultimate issue with our social programs is due to demographics. An aging population whose replacement rate is projected to go negative (more deaths than births) within the next few years is catastrophic for the way we fund those programs. We absolutely should try and reduce their operating costs though; I agree with that.
philwelch
> US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results.
There's an assumption here that deserves some closer examination. If we are taking this as a justification for federal science spending, we would have to also support a policy of awarding research grants on the basis of expected long term return on investment, which is not the criteria applied now. Furthermore, we would have to justify this spending in competition with whatever economic investments the government could make elsewhere, or that the American taxpayers would make if we let them keep their money in the first place. From the standpoint of scientific research I don't think this is necessarily what we want, but even if it was we would have some hard questions about the last few decades of federal research funding.
rurp
The national debt is a complete red herring here. It's a real problem, sure, but that is completely unrelated to these cuts. The party implementing these cuts is currently debating how many trillions of dollars to increase the national debt by. They are completely unserious about reducing federal debt payments and there is zero ambiguity about what they are saying, drafting, and voting on.
That is also the same party that is actively attacking every single institution they deem too liberal. That's what they are doing here too: trying to destroy something they don't like, regardless of the consequences. The money being cut here is a drop in the bucket and the economic costs will almost certainly outweigh the savings. We shouldn't believe flimsy pretexts that are obviously lies.
jack_h
I posted elsewhere about my displeasure with what is happening in congress. A large chunk of the Republican base is not willing to address the national debt; the $5 billion in cuts from the Senate bill going into reconciliation is a rounding error in the national budget. This seems like a golden opportunity for the Democrats to be the adults in the room and propose a solution to the problem with numbers, charts, economic projections, and math.
We're not seeing that. The national debt is not the red herring rather all of the ideological arguments happening in this thread are. Politicians *should* be working on fixing the national debt, but their constituency keeps telling them they'd rather balkanize. So that's what will happen.
comte7092
The amount of money we are talking about for research is so small in comparison to the debt that it’s a red herring to even bring up the current debt level. As you’ve noted, even the largest parts of the budget are dwarfed by the total deficit. Researching is a rounding error.
There’s this thing called taxes. We’ve had thirty years of tax hawks intentionally creating this situation that we find ourselves in, because they’ve cut taxes without any sense of responsibility for its impact on the debt/deficit. In fact that’s been their plan all along, to “starve the beast”, cause a crisis, and force cuts to popular programs that they wouldn’t get political support for otherwise.
thatcat
Universities could pay for all of the research themselves theoretically considering they're the largest business in most states. Their portfolio income, the sports income, the donations, and the free real estate given to land grant universities that has been heavily monetized all add up. Of course I doubt they will allocate money to research, but they could if that was truely their purpose as an organization.
apical_dendrite
How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Britain was at a point where without massive aid from the US huge numbers of people would die of cold or starvation. The US has huge surpluses of food and energy.
The idea that we're in such a crisis that we have to eat our own seed corn (massive cuts to science research which is one of the main drivers of US economic growth) is crazy.
philwelch
> How can you possibly compare Britain in 1945 to the US today? By 1945 Britain had spent all of its gold reserves, it had stopped exporting anything due to the war but as an island nation needed massive imports to survive. It had a restless global empire that was costing huge sums of money to maintain and a massive military left over from the war. The situation was so bad that food was rationed for years after the war and there were coal shortages.
Up until you got to the rationing and coal shortages I think the parallels with the contemporary US are pretty obvious.
patagurbon
US research funding is not what you want to cut though. It is among the most productive funding possible and there is evidence aplenty that it pays for itself many times over.
University bureaucracy is by and large fairly small for research. When you get into undergraduate education I will agree the administration has been bloated by the current system. But research has been surprisingly lean in my experience.
Fomite
Echoing this as well - administration for research is fairly thin in every institution I've worked at.
In my career, there's only one position I can definitely point to as "That shouldn't exist" - ironically, it's both one that played well with "The university should be more like a business" and was also, in effect, a retention move for their massively productive spouse.
monero-xmr
I hear this about everything. “Don’t cut this thing because it’s the most efficient and productive thing ever!” Food stamps, homeless funding, public transport, public schools. Supposedly every single thing is the most efficient thing ever and we can’t possibly cut a dollar
contemporary343
Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.
If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.
pron
It's important to remember that government debt doesn't ever need to be repaid, sort of how an immortal man could indefinitely refinance loans. That he'd have to borrow again to repay the old loans (while maintaining the debt) is part of the mechanism. Such an immortal could have his debt grow indefinitely and still be fine as long as lenders believe he'll be able to afford paying the interest and that other lenders will be willing to refinance the loans when they expire.
That's not to say that government debt couldn't become a problem, even a serious one, but as long as the economy grows fast enough to support the interest payments, it's not an "existential problem". The danger isn't so much the debt itself but in the confidence in the US economy falling below the level required to sustain that debt.
I loan the US government money by buying treasury bills because I trust that when they mature, others would be willing to lend the US money. When this trust in the health of the US economy declines, then there's a problem with the debt, but then there are also other big problems. What you'll see is rising interest rates that is likely combined with an unpromising economy, and yeah, that's a serious problem. A high debt could definitely exacerbate it (and that's why it's helpful to slow down the growth of the debt or even reduce it if possible), but it's not its cause.
pron
P.S.
Another thing to remember is that government expenses are often investments. This doesn't only apply to health, education, law enforcement, and transportation infrastructure but also to social security. If people think they'll be left penniless at retirement, they'll spend less and save more. Borrowing to finance investment is a wise policy when the resulting growth can pay for the interest and then some, even if it means a growing debt.
If you invest well, leveraging your investment is exactly what you should do.
duxup
It seems like for all the silliness and inefficiency that comes with a decentralized system ... the decentralized nature of US science research allowed for more "possibilities" and that paid off economically in spades.
Like speech, ideas require an open field with a lot of garbage to hit many home runs.
Nevermark
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.
The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.
Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.
But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
duxup
I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures that later, and unpredictably, come together.
oldprogrammer2
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
prpl
>>> We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions
Can you define "many"? 100k reports? 10k reports? 1k reports? 150 reports? 15 reports? What's the incidence? What's the rate compared to the public and private sectors? What's the rate for defense contractors? Are we talking social sciences, hard sciences, health sciences? What's the field?
"many" is just intellectually lazy here. The reality is you read a few stories in the media and now have written off the entire model of research funding.
Failures (ethical or otherwise) are an everyday occurrence at scale, and the US research and funding model is at a scale unparalleled in the world.
jordanpg
OP, please grapple with this.
This is precisely why Ted Cruz, etc. go on TV and read out the titles of silly-sounding research about beehives and condoms. Because they know that most Americans have no sense of very low-N statistics. A few examples out of hundreds of thousands proves the point!
Of course it doesn't.
Do you understand that? If so, then why are you casually throwing around those talking points that are contributing to the destruction of scientific infrastructure and human livelihoods? This isn't a game.
throwawaymaths
Even if it's a few. Imagine if honest researchers start chasing the fraudulent results. Now you have several people's time wasted. If the honest researcher is junior (PhD or Postdoc), their career is almost certainly over. Worse, assume the junior researcher is dishonest or marginal. The incentive is to fudge things a little bit to keep a career. The cycle begins anew... inherent in our system there is positive selection (in the 'natural selection' sense) for dishonest researchers.
This should give you pause.
Without claiming that any given administration is taking any action with deliberateness or planning... What is even more counterintuitive is that if the dishonesty hits a certain critical point, defunding all research suddenly is net positive.
I would also suggest you keep your ear to the ground. Almost every scientific discipline is in a crisis of reproducibility right now.
ajross
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
I think everyone would be. There's a lot of bad science that gets funded. The point, though, is that you can't pick the good science from the bad without DOING THE SCIENCE.
The easiest thing in the world is to sit back and pretend to be an expert, picking winners and losers and allocating your limited capital "efficiently". The linked article shows why that's wrong, because someone comes along to outspend you and you lose.
amanaplanacanal
Ok... If it's not the most efficient way to allocate funds, it's now your job to design a more efficient way. Good luck and let us know what you come up with!
SubiculumCode
Sure, but what has that to do with the administration's attack on funding and independence? As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor. If we continue on this path, we will only get worse at science as a nation.
There are reforms that should be pursued: restructuring grants away from endless and arduous begging for money through the tedious grant process of today towards something more like block grants
Fomite
Echoing this. I've had two grants pulled in the last admin, and one in this one, and all of them were very sweeping - and wildly inefficient, killing projects during the phase of ramping up, rather than productively working.
homieg33
> As someone whose lost a grant award under the current administration's attack on science, I can tell you with assurance that this is more about political power and revenge than it is about improving scientific rigor.
I'm sorry to hear this, but curious what makes you certain of this? Revenge for what? I ask, because I hear this same template over and over with this administration. eg. DOGE isn't about government efficiency its about revenge.
matthewdgreen
The system isn’t really designed to be perfectly efficient at funding research. The inefficiency typically corresponds to scientists doing weird un-proposed research that produces new breakthroughs in other areas.
It’s not surprising to me that this post ends with an unsupported “so many reports” coda about research fraud. Research fraud is not zero but it’s extremely rare. It’s unsurprising to me that the “we really care about research integrity” crowd has joined forces with the “let’s defund all research institutions with no replacement” crowd, because it was always obvious that was where this would end.
JumpCrisscross
> I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds
Probably. But the solution almost certainly doesn't involve the federal government policing what is and isn't researched, discussed and taught. We had a system that worked. We're destroying the parts of it that worked, while retaining the parts that are novel. (Turning conservatives into a protected class, for instance--not even the CCP explicitly reserves seats for party members.)
fallingknife
Why would the people paying for the research not control what it can be spent on? Letting the people who spend the money decide is typically not a good system.
goldchainposse
Whether or not it's efficient isn't as much of a concern as if it's being gamed. Reports of growing university administrations, increase in the cost of an education, and biases in the publish-or-perish model show the old model is no longer effective.
numbers_guy
I guess the author is mentioning public funding to try to make a political point, but it does not fit the narrative, because publicly funded research is the norm worldwide.
The glaring difference in how the US approached R&D is rather the way in which they manage to integrate the private sector, manage to convert research into products and manage to get funded for these rather risky private projects.
Also, with regards to why researchers flocked to the US, post-WWII, it was for the same reason that other people were flocking to the US (and Canada, and Australia): the new world had good economic prospects.
tehjoker
I think the particular method probably pales in comparison to the fact that the US simply had so much more money and resources. The UK is an island nation that lost its empire and was playing second fiddle.
begueradj
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.
So that could be a political stance...
tkiolp4
Such a “simple” solution. Wonder why doing a PhD in the majority of european countries is equal to a poor monthly income. Just pay them more. I guess countries don’t like long term solutions.
makeitdouble
I was curious how much of a gap there is, and landed on about 100k in the US[0] vs 85k[1] USD in France for instance, in average.
That sounds on par with most other professions where the US salary is about a third higher, with a cost of living (health, housing etc) eating most of the difference.
Perhaps I'm also not buying that the US has a fundamentally better system, and not just a dominant position to begin with, with tons of money to invest and raise an army of researchers. Comparing to China could be a more interesting exercise, as it's also flooded with money now and is getting competitive in research.
[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Phd-Researcher-Salary
[1] https://publication.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/eesr/F...
xphos
Yeah, no PhDs in the US don't make 100K year. The stipend for an MIT PhD is about 50K a year half of what you're saying. Citing my wife who just finished their phd. MIT also makes it so everyone is paid the same as PhDs even if they bring in their own money like my wife did.
You definitely could make 70K if you worked somewhere and also won a research fellowship, but that is the exception, not the rule. I think it's amazing how much science the US produces, considering how low the pay is. Maybe I'm spoiled in CS, but it's crazy how little people in science get paid, especially considering I think their work is often fundamentally more challenging. Granted is also much more risky and hard to monetize
zipy124
Your ciation [1] shows the highest number as being approximately 70,000 USD a year, not 85k. That's 15,000 dollars less than you claim. Your [0] citation is not a share-able link and just redirects to the home-page.
In the UK (where I am based so I know the numbers well) a post doc is usually paid around 52,936 dollars a year, or a bit more if in london closer to 60,000 dollars a year. US postdocs seem to be somewehre between 60,000-90,000 dollars depending on institution, MIT [2] for example state a minimum of 69,000 and maximum of 90,000 dollars for a post-doc. This lines up well with your claim of a third higher, however the cost of living claim doesn't really check out, especially since tax rates are much higher in european countries than the US.
If we take your numbers for example with 100k usd, after federal taxes and NY state taxes (the highest I believe) you're looking at close to a 25% marginal tax rate so a take-home of 75,000 USD. In France on 85000 USD you would have a marginal tax rate of 38% for a take home of 52,700 USD. This is closer to a 43% difference not 33%, and does not include the fact that this is not disposable income. For instance my annual pay recently doubled, but my disposable income after council tax/bills/food/transport increased by about 900%, far above the 200% increase. Thus a 33% pay increase would be life-changing, not just some minor increase. (and the cost of living is really not that much higher in the US anyway, since VAT at 20% in europe is much higher than sales tax in most states, and health-care is included in many US jobs of the type we are talking about here, rent is the only thing largely more expensive in the US, but you guys actually have incredibly cheap property when normalised by size. In the us you are looking at a median of 2,500 USD per square meter for houses and somewhere around 5,000 for an apatment, whilst in france it is somewhere around 6750 (couldn't find a breakdown per type)).
[2]: https://postdocs.mit.edu/postdoctoral-position/postdoctoral-...
dr_dshiv
Total? Is this a lot? “Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies”
yubblegum
Let's assume say a handful of key domains (as in bio-medicine, computing, energy, etc.) are there in a modern society. This gives roughly around 600 new innovations in a given top level domain (say biology) every year.
ajb
There are orders of magnitude more patents in the private sector, but most are either not licensed or are licensed as part of huge 'pools' as private sector patenting is driven by the arms race between companies to have a large enough patent portfolio to retaliate if sued (there is a lot of patent 'slop'). And that's not even counting fake (troll) innovators. Whereas uni patents are probably more likely to be licensed out on an individual basis. So it's really hard to know the significance of counts alone. You'd have to look at a random sample of uni Vs private patents and assess each one.
ecshafer
There are a couple fundamental flaws here:
One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain.
Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people.
While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding probably helped a lot. Bringing in the Von Neumanns and Erdos of the world couldn't have hurt.
dataviz1000
This started when George Washington went to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island to speak to them promoting the 2nd of the 12 amendments to the Constitution, 10 of which became the Bill of Rights. Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution and this trip was to garner support to ratify the Bill of Rights which was to safeguard individual freedoms and limit the power of the federal government. Many of the Jews who first arrived in the United States did so in New Amsterdam whose families had pervious settled in Amsterdam after the Spanish Inquisition where they were forced to either leave Spain, convert to Catholicism, or be put to death.
Reiterating what the Hebrew congregation write to Washington he responded:
> For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [0]
It is a paradox that people living the United States with its freedoms can only continue doing so as long as they equally protect the freedoms of everyone else without bigotry or persecution.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...
reubenswartz
Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(
marcosdumay
Yep, some of the first things Hitler did when he took power was to reverse the ridiculous large brain drain from most of the world into Germany, and stall most research by the chilling effect of censoring random topics and fighting institutions that harbored people he didn't like.
bamboozled
Smart people are annoying and told us to wear masks though ?
yabitts
[dead]
blululu
Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire. The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war: Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).
boxed
> Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire
Per capita? The US had a larger population.
blululu
Being the leading power is about magnitude not intensity. The country that is twice as large and operates at a similar level of intensity will be the more dominant force (see also - China today). Per capita, I would bet on the Swiss (then and now) - though it will depend on the metric at that point and their output will be comparable to the Germans, British, French and the Americans.
JetSetWilly
> Penicillin
Invented and developed in the UK.
> Microwave communication
Lion's share of pre-war advances and development were in various European countries.
> Synthetic Rubber
Developed by Fritz hoffman at the Bayer Laboratory in Germany, 1906
Frankly, your comment is a massive self-own.
sinuhe69
Prior WW 2, the US had even no notion of quantum physics. How could it be the world power in science?
blululu
The US definitely had a notion of quantum physics prior to WWII. Feynman got his PhD at Princeton in 1942 in Quantum Physics so I would assume that John Wheeler had some familiarity with the topic back then. I would mention that the most significant result of quantum mechanics is solid state transistors, and Shockley was awarded a phd for quantum mechanical applications back in the 30s.
Dumblydorr
Michelson and his experiments on the aether not existing were enormously influential to theoretical physics. “No notion” is incorrect, they had numerous home grown talents in physics, on top of the huge influx of talent from 1930s immigration of European scientists.
The USA being a beacon of hope and enlightenment in those days stands in stark contrast to the isolationist, anti-intellectual, anti-research, and frankly xenophobic policies pursued by the current admin, courts, and congress.
timeon
Someone was reading too much of Mobi Dick.
Arubis
Being the sole western industrialized nation that hadn't just had most of their infrastructure bombed to rubble can't have hurt.
Permit
Canada and Australia are smaller but surely count as industrialized western nations (Canada is like 9th by GDP) whose infrastructure was not bombed to rubble.
someNameIG
Here in Australia we just didn't have the population to have a large global influence. We had a population of around 7.5 million in 1945, compared to the US that had about 150,000 million.
femto
We also emulated the British centralised model, with the Weapons Research Establishment. Like the British, Australia struggled to get research out of these centralised labs and into products: computing (CISRAC, 5th computer), satellites (WREsat, 7th nation in space), ...
klipt
The USA's huge population and large internal free trade area give it better economies of scale.
randunel
Canada's population was 10mil, maybe less, when ww2 ended.
apercu
Absolutely, but what did that give the United States, a 10-year advantage?
Last time I checked, WWII ended 80 years ago.
bee_rider
It kicked off a feedback loop. The best scientists and engineers wanted to work on the projects that were 10 years ahead. As a result US companies were at the forefront of new technology and developments… attracting the next generation of the best scientists and engineers.
This was quite robust until <group that disagrees with my political opinions> screwed it up for ideological reasons (fortunately, I guess, I can say this in a non-partisan manner because everybody thinks the other side blew it. My side is correct, though, of course).
laughingcurve
Schrödinger's politics
mixermachine
Science and progress are not a one off thing. The scientist are not used up after 10 years. They keep working and keep the advantages going. The advantage attracts even more intelligent people from every corner of the world.
frank20022
Bretton Woods is not a 10-year advantage. US had enjoyed pretty much free money until Vietnam, point at which had to kill the gold standard to enjoy free money some more.
yabitts
[dead]
VWWHFSfQ
The US provided billions in aid and resources under the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and especially Japan after the war. And provided billions again to Korea after the Korean War. Japan and South Korea obviously made the most of it with their massive science and technology industries in the post-war era.
croes
The Marshall plan’s effectiveness is more of a myth
VWWHFSfQ
I'm aware that Europeans think the post-war stimulus was a myth.
What isn't a myth is the billions of dollars given to them. The same billions were given to Japan and Korea and they actually used it to bootstrap an advanced, sustainable technology-driven economy. Europe squandered the opportunity.
slowking2
Also, being far enough from Europe that a huge amount of talent decided the U.S. was a better bet for getting away from the Nazis. And then taking a large number of former Nazi scientist's post-war as well.
The article mentions but underrates the fact that post-war the British shot themselves in the foot economically.
As far as I'm aware, the article is kind of wrong that there wasn't a successful British computing industry post war, or at least it's not obvious that it's eventual failure has much to do with differences in basic research structure. There was a successful British computing industry at first, and it failed a few decades later.
foobarian
And yet here we are with Arm cores everywhere you look! :-D
slowking2
Fair point! That's a great technical success; I didn't realize Arm was British.
If the main failure of British companies is that they don't have U.S. company market caps, it seems more off base to blame this on government science funding policy instead of something else. In almost every part of the economy, U.S. companies are going to be larger.
pizzalife
Sweden was not bombed.
randunel
But they were aligned with the nazis until close to the very end. It was easier to remember back then, but people have mostly forgotten nowadays.
lonelyasacloud
Indeed, although Sweden was officially neutral, they most notoriously permitted German trains to roll through their country to Norway with soldiers and materials both during and after its invasion.
metrognome
I'm surprised that there's been no mention of Operation Paperclip, neither in the article nor in the comments here. Seems like a huge part of the story to leave out.
mberning
Hard to overstate how much effort the US put into collecting all the best scientists in the post WWII world.
sinuhe69
Yes, including surrounded and forcibly brought them into US camps. But yeah, the Soviets did the same and we had the nuclear bomb race, the space race and the Cold War.
hliyan
This is the first thing that struck me. Dangerous to weave narratives where large scale phenomena are elegantly explained by a single cause. It's always a confluence of multiple factors: influx of Nazi scientists, the policy mentioned in the article, the fact that Europe was recovering from a war, and perhaps others we're failing to notice.
A favorite example of mine is the idea that World War 1 would not have happened if only Duke Ferdinand's driver had been told of the route change during the Sarajevo visit.
blululu
>> Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years.
Citation needed. The United States has been a scientific powerhouse for most of its history. On the eve of WWII the United States was the largest producer of automobiles, airplanes and railway trains on earth. It had largest telegraph system, the largest phone system, the most Radio/TV/Movie production & distribution or any country. It had the highest electricity generation. The largest petroleum production/refining capacity. The list goes on. This lead in production was driven by local innovations. Petroleum, electricity, telephones, automobiles and airplanes were all first pioneered in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can debate the causes of this but saying that the United States was a 2nd tier power behind the British or the Germans is demonstrably false.
jhbadger
Americans went to Europe for grad school and/or postdoctoral research in science (especially in chemistry and physics) before WWII, though. We saw ourselves as second rate. People like Oppenheimer, Rabi, Pauling, and just about every other early-mid 20th century chemist or physicist did all or some of their training in Europe, Now, at least until recently, it's been Europe (and the rest of the world) flocking to our universities.
timeon
Depends how you measure it. I vaguely remember that Germany had most Nobel prizes before 1930s.
ViewTrick1002
And now come back with per capita numbers.
blululu
A simple Google search would reveal: GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp... GPD Per Capita: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
US: 6134 UK: 5983 GER: 5544
The US would be even higher were it not for the South bringing down the average. Not really a surprise: America has always been a highly educated and highly skilled country.
stavros
Wouldn't everyone always be even higher if not for the low parts bringing down the average? That part of the comment sounds so biased that it makes me mistrust the rest of it.
MarkusWandel
It also didn't hurt that a certain European science superpower started purging academics based on ideology, said academics being more than welcome in the USA. Wait a minute...
koakuma-chan
I'm pretty sure the US is currently pushing for merit-based admission.
lawn
I'm pretty sure you need to start looking at what they're doing (selecting for obedience over competence) than what they're saying (DEI is the root of all problems).
asacrowflies
You'd have to be a fool to believe that.
koakuma-chan
Read third bullet point
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
switch007
I feel most people have absolutely no idea that the US had its very large boot in the UK's face with our face in the mud for much of the post WW2 period, and still has. We had to dance exactly to their tune.
It annoys me no end to read so many comments to the effect of "why didn't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?". Not that I'm saying there were not any economic failures by various British governments over the years.
Honestly, so many Americans have no idea about their country's foreign policy. I guess you have to be on the receiving end of their short stick to understand
b_emery
If you read nothing else in this excellent post, read the conclusion:
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
and:
> Today, China’s leadership has spent the last three decades investing heavily to surpass the U.S. in science and technology.
In my field (a type of radar related research) in which I've worked for almost 30 yrs, papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher. The Biden administration seemed to recognize this issue and put a lot of money toward this field. All that money and more is going away. I'm hoping to stay funded through the midterms on other projects (and that there are midterms), and hoping that the US can get back on track (the one that actually made it 'great', at least by the metrics in the post.
csa
> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
blululu
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
thrance
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.
stavros
> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.
In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?
xeonmc
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
stevenwoo
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!
fallingknife
I don't see any reason why specifically "indirect cost reimbursement" is anything to do with this. Sure, individually billing labs is administrative burden, but it's a tiny drop in the ocean of inane bureaucracy that university researchers already have to deal with today. And maybe if we got rid of the blanket overhead percentage, it would put pressure on universities to cut a lot of the crap. Researchers are much more likely to push back when they see a line item for how much that nonsensical bureaucracy is costing them.
Tadpole9181
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of research funding, and quite frankly repeating it without even basic research borders on negligence.
Universities use indirect funds for maintaining facilities, the shared equipment, bulk purchases of materials, staff for things like cleaning and disposal. It is pivotal that these funds are available in the right amount or research physically cannot happen despite being "indirect" (due merely to the legal definition of the word). And these rates are aggressively negotiated beforehand.
Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd. If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations. If you want to stop the science, you gut the financial viability of research.
bfrink
Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate? I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about the underlying drivers here.
fallingknife
I do not believe that sharing costs of facilities and equipment is so difficult that research universities can't handle it while every condo association in the US somehow manages to pull it off. I do not believe you that this is aggressively negotiated down by the government because private research grants come with much lower indirect costs percentages.
> Can university administration be trimmed? Can their heads be paid less? Of course. But the idea that that's going to happen is absurd.
Well I guess we just have to pay for endlessly expanding bureaucracy then, because apparently expecting research universities to be somewhat efficient with their resources is "absurd."
> If you want to stop that, you make laws and regulations.
Good idea! Maybe we can limit how much they can spend on overhead. Oh, wait...
bilbo0s
I don't know that I'd rely too heavily on midterms in 26. Gerrymandering and all that.
r00fus
Gerrymandering? More like scrubbing the voters of the right to vote (SAVE act) or voter intimidation (all those militias standing ready!)
sirbutters
I don't know why this is getting shadowed. You're absolutely right. Gerrymandering is a threat.
Redoubts
Illinois and Maryland look pretty secure on that front. Perhaps the Democrats can try to gerrymander NYS again, without getting slapped down by the courts
rayiner
What is the evidence of the connection between indirect cost reimbursement and outcomes? This is just blatant propaganda to justify public money being used to pay university administrators.
natebc
Without the university infrastructure around these Labs they'd EACH have to each employ their own construction, maintenance, housekeeping, legal, bookkeeping, HR, IT, compliance (and more) staff.
There will still be some research done if the cuts to the indirects survive the courts but it will be drastically reduced in scope as the labs staff will have to cover any functions no longer provided by the host university.
And you probably know this but this money isn't getting stuffed in to university presidents pockets or anything. It's paying (some) of the salaries of ordinary people working at jobs that pay about 20% (or more) less than they'd make in the private sector.
Fomite
Things indirect cost reimbursements fund at my institution:
- The research animal facilities - HPC staff, upgrades, etc. - Our BSL-3 facilities (the only ones for a long way) - Various and sundry research cores - New faculty startup funds
Those are all pretty tightly correlated with success, and very difficult to support via single grants.
nxobject
What “outcome” would meet your standards for justifiable research spending? Is a 26% cap on the percentage that indirects can go to all administration - all staff apart from researcher hours directly dedicated to the project - a sufficient “outcome”?
rayiner
I’m talking about the part where he talks about the government funding indirects specifically, not the research funding in general.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system
arunabha
The GP post explicitly mentioned the growth of Chinese research capability that they directly saw. It's no secret that China has explicitly and deliberately invested in ramping up R&D.
Also, requiring absolute proof in a system as vast and complex as R&D at the scale of the US leads to complete paralysis. It's a bit like cutting off your fingers because you want to lose weight.
pjc50
It would be interesting to see some discussion of how the Chinese research funding system actually works.
renewiltord
That makes the opposite point since Chinese indirect costs are 5-25%. e.g. this grant is at 25% https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/tab434/info94303.htm
1auralynn
We are killing the golden goose
linguae
While currently it’s open season on the golden goose in America, the golden goose has been under attack for decades. Academia has a strong publish-or-perish culture that I believe is stifling, and industry has become increasingly short-term driven.
Ironically, one of the frustrations I’ve had with the research funding situation long before DOGE’s disruptions is the demands from funders, particularly in the business world, for golden eggs from researchers without any regard of how the research process works.
A relevant quote from Alan Kay: “I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.” (from https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/)
I dream of a day where we see more places like the old Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and where universities strongly value freedom of inquiry with fewer publication and fund-raising pressures. However, given the reality that there are many more prospective researchers than there are research positions that potential funders are willing to support, it’s natural that there is some mechanism used to determine which researchers get access to jobs and funding.
mistrial9
dunno if it is this plain.. the regulatory capture in the last 30 years is not null. Especially in very niche, very profitable sub-corners of big-S Science.
bilbo0s
A reminder that in a democracy, it's probably best to make sure the gold is widely shared. Lest the poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold vote to kill the goose.
WeylandYutani
They could have voted socialist at any point in time. Americans could have had healthcare, 36 hour work week and a pension system.
That is the tragedy of the American empire- instead of improving the lives of its citizens all the money went to tax cuts.
DontchaKnowit
Could we have though? Last I checked neither majir party has seriously persued this. So how are the american people to vote for it?
csomar
> They could have voted socialist at any point in time.
> Lest the poorly educated masses of people
fifilura
Impossible since that would mean extreme left wing radical socialism. And communism.
neogodless
Unless there could be a less black and white option in the middle?
Like a bit more taxes on the wealthiest, a bit more social safety nets for the neediest?
insane_dreamer
Sarcasm detector has to be pretty high to catch this one ;)
But you've touched on the problem: any attempt to reform is immediately cast as "communism" (also without really understanding communism and equating it with soviet authoritarianism, but that's another topic).
bilbo0s
Sigh.
Unfortunately, your implications are spot on.
We, the people, are our own worst enemies.
apercu
Really? Is that your honest take? It's either late stage unfettered capitalism, regulatory capture and oligarchy OR communism?
Edit: I forgot theocracy.
fallingknife
Inequality isn't the cause of our problems in the US. It's basically the same as it was in the 90s https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.
saulpw
You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100 billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only 2.5x.
The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.
insane_dreamer
I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our problems.
But killing the golden goose will not help solve the inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more expensive and difficult to get into universities with top research programs.
itsmek
Gini coefficient may be the most commonly used statistic but it is not sensitive to current conditions in the US (https://www.investopedia.com/news/measuring-inequality-forge...). The palma ratio does indeed show increasing inequality since the 90s (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/palma-ratio-s90s40-ratio?...). Also wealth inequality is another place to be looking, especially if you're familiar with Piketty's body of work which points at it specifically (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...).
You know what they say about lies and statistics.
ckw
‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’
Plutarch
lvl155
Gonna state the obvious: freedom and peace. People mention money but money followed technological boom. And, yes, peace derived from military.
pphysch
You might clarify "domestic peace". America has been one of the most secure nations in history from large-scale domestic invasion (it's essentially never happened: Pearl Harbor, isolated terrorist attacks, and "open borders" don't come close). That said, it has virtually always been actively involved in foreign conflicts and shadow wars during its 250 year history.
And yes, it's domestic security that enables long-term investment in science.
lvl155
I would clarify it as relative peace. People simply left other parts of the world to pursue their dreams. If Europe weren’t basically war torn every couple of decades all the way up to the end of WWII, America might not have made it this far. And that’s why I don’t believe China will ever be that great until they reject pseudo-communist regime.
chiefalchemist
A better title would be: "How this one time the U.S. became a science superpower".
We all know the rule: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Two significant and obvious difference come to mind. I'm sure there are others.
1) WWII did major physical damage to Europe and Japan, to say nothing of the underlying economic damage (e.g., Britain's war debt handcuffed them). Sans any serious competition, of course the US excelled.
2) Along the same lines, the US then didn't have the trillions in debt the US has now. Many of the universities seeing their grants cut are well into the black. On the other hand, Uncle Sam is drenched red ink.
I understand the value of investing. But given the financial fitness of the universities, it feels more like subsidies. Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers. Yes, Sam can continue to buy success, but at what cost?
thfuran
>Subsidies that aren't benefitting Sam a/o US taxpayers
Why do you think that?
ajb
I'm glad to see this article because this topic is very much worth thinking about right now - by both sides of the Atlantic :-). But history is more difficult to do well than this. A lot of this article just assumes its conclusions. You need more than 'this is a difference and therefore it was causative', especially if it happens to align with current conventional beliefs.
Worth reading in its entirety. The following four paragraphs, about post-WWII funding of science in Britain versus the US, are spot-on, in my view:
> Britain’s focused, centralized model using government research labs was created in a struggle for short-term survival. They achieved brilliant breakthroughs but lacked the scale, integration and capital needed to dominate in the post-war world.
> The U.S. built a decentralized, collaborative ecosystem, one that tightly integrated massive government funding of universities for research and prototypes while private industry built the solutions in volume.
> A key component of this U.S. research ecosystem was the genius of the indirect cost reimbursement system. Not only did the U.S. fund researchers in universities by paying the cost of their salaries, the U.S. gave universities money for the researchers facilities and administration. This was the secret sauce that allowed U.S. universities to build world-class labs for cutting-edge research that were the envy of the world. Scientists flocked to the U.S. causing other countries to complain of a “brain drain.”
> Today, U.S. universities license 3,000 patents, 3,200 copyrights and 1,600 other licenses to technology startups and existing companies. Collectively, they spin out over 1,100 science-based startups each year, which lead to countless products and tens of thousands of new jobs. This university/government ecosystem became the blueprint for modern innovation ecosystems for other countries.
The author's most important point is at the very end of the OP:
> In 2025, with the abandonment of U.S. government support for university research, the long run of U.S. dominance in science may be over.