Why the United States has the best research universities
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So the mere fact of the emigration of European talent doesn't quite answer the question. The role of European conflict driving emigration isn't at question here. But what distinguished U.S. schools? Why were they better able to leverage this accidental human bounty than other systems? It's not like there was a complete dearth of higher education institutions in Latin America. In the first few decades of the 20th century Argentina and Chile were some of the most well-developed nations on earth, scientifically and politically.
[1] Circa 2003 I met a 90-ish-something Mexican born, ethnic Irish docent in the Bisbee, AZ museum. His parents fled Ireland to Mexico and worked a farm in Sonora, then killed in conflict between the Mexican Army and, IIRC, Apaches. He and his older brother trekked through the desert for several days to cross (illegally, I might add) to the U.S. I always thought that was a fascinating story--a nexus of different historical threads that, as an American, you would never really consider together.
The US was actively looking for key scientific talent in then devastated Germany to bring back home after World War II.
This concentration of talent, coupled with intense investments in fundamental research during the Cold War and better living conditions for scientists made it an obvious choice for any academic to relocate to the United States.
Even today, the US immigration system still has a preference for foreigners who can meaningfully contribute to the advancement of science.
Meanwhile the "American Germans" were welcomed, decided to make the US their new home and contributed heavily to the US space programme.
In the US the germans could build the rocket program by their own without much US interference, until Lyndon Johnson broke it up.
e.g. "Operation Paperclip was a secret US intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, [...]" -Wikipedia
IMO America has been the center of innovation with top universities because it is the top place where talent, globally, wants to go to make their fortune. This has been going on for more than a century.
Whatever country is the top magnet for global talent is going to have the top university systems as well as be the center of the world scene long term. E.g. if another country, say China, wants to succeed into this role it must be the top destination for global talent.
(Not to mention the gov was essentially giving away 160 acre plots to anyone who wanted to settle elsewhere, which created intense pressure to mechanize due to menial labor shortages, not to mention a broader based prosperity.)
If you look it up you can see for yourself that you aren’t saying true things.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7174996.stm
The UK’s GDP per capita was still massively higher than the US’s as late as 1870. It didn’t overtake until 1890.
And the US obviously had a relatively late industrial revolution and adoption of things like railroads because they began in other countries and were imported.
I don't think that alone would have made the US into the superpower it is today, in particular in terms of science. That was clearly a result of the two world wars that devastated Europe. If you look at the scientific discoveries the US really became the powerhouse after/during WW2.
It's somewhat ironic that the US which was founded on escaping the large "unfair" inequalities of old Europe and a strong anti-establishment/anti-elite basis has since become a beacon of a new elite/establishment and inequality. The "anti elitism" that was always part of the US psyche is now almost completely about intellectual elite (scientific/academic elite) not economic elite.
It's probably one of those cyclical things in life. Your former greatness ends up becoming a burden that keeps growing. Eventually it'll become so heavy that things fall apart. From the ashes rises a new greatness that eventually...
"The following comparison will illustrate my meaning. During the campaigns of the Revolution the French introduced a new system of tactics into the art of war, which perplexed the oldest generals, and very nearly destroyed the most ancient monarchies in Europe. They undertook (what had never before been attempted) to make shift without a number of things which had always been held to be indispensable in warfare; they required novel exertions on the part of their troops which no civilized nations had ever thought of; they achieved great actions in an incredibly short space of time; and they risked human life without hesitation to obtain the object in view. The French had less money and fewer men than their enemies; their resources were infinitely inferior; nevertheless they were constantly victorious, until their adversaries chose to imitate their example.
"The Americans have introduced a similar system into their commercial speculations; and they do for cheapness what the French did for conquest. The European sailor navigates with prudence; he only sets sail when the weather is favorable; if an unforseen accident befalls him, he puts into port; at night he furls a portion of his canvas; and when the whitening billows intimate the vicinity of land, he checks his way, and takes an observation of the sun. But the American neglects these precautions and braves these dangers. He weighs anchor in the midst of tempestuous gales; by night and by day he spreads his sheets to the wind; he repairs as he goes along such damage as his vessel may have sustained from the storm; and when he at last approaches the term of his voyage, he darts onward to the shore as if he already descried a port. The Americans are often shipwrecked, but no trader crosses the seas so rapidly. And as they perform the same distance in a shorter time, they can perform it at a cheaper rate.
"The European touches several times at different ports in the course of a long voyage; he loses a good deal of precious time in making the harbor, or in waiting for a favorable wind to leave it; and he pays daily dues to be allowed to remain there. The American starts from Boston to go to purchase tea in China; he arrives at Canton, stays there a few days, and then returns. In less than two years he has sailed as far as the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land but once. It is true that during a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brackish water and lived upon salt meat; that he has been in a continual contest with the sea, with disease, and with a tedious existence; but upon his return he can sell a pound of his tea for a half-penny less than the English merchant, and his purpose is accomplished."
--Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
http://resources.utulsa.edu/law/classes/rice/Jurisprudence/E...
Negative, you may have confused the US with Rome. The US is the beneficiary of tremendous natural resources, temperate climate across a vast geography, natural isolation from external threats, and mostly very stable governmental structures.
Surely you didn't think north America was terra nullis or that the natives just willingly gave away all those natural resources to European colonists?
Anglo-Powhatan Wars (3 separate wars), Pequot War, Kieft's War, Peach Tree War, Esopus Wars, King Philip's War, Tuscarora War, Yamasee War, Dummer's War, Pontiac's War, Lord Dunmore's War, Cherokee-American Wars, Northwest Indian War, the Creek War, First and Second Seminole Wars, Texas-Indian Wars, Comanche-Mexico War, Cayuse War, Rogue River Wars, Yakima War, Puget Sound War, Spokane War, Snake War, Nez Perce War, Bannock War, Sheepeater Indian War, Navajo Wars, Yuma War, Mohave War, Apache Wars, Black Hawk War, Yavapai Wars, California Indian Wars, Walker War, Paiute War, Goshute War, White River War, Red Cloud's War, Colorado War, Great Sioux War, Dakota War....
And I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch out. The US is definitely built on the spoils of war.
The native Americans didn't even know about most of the natural resources, and what they did know about, they mostly didn't make any use of. That's a big part of why they ended up losing the wars against the European settlers: the latter actually turned those resources into wealth.
May we have time to catch up with that knowledge.
The Pleistocene North American mass extinction, which wiped out the saber-toothed tiger and North American mastodon, was a result of hunting pressure about 10,000 years ago.
The positive stereotypes you are selling aren't real. They're largely the product of Hollywood (e.g. the "Crying Indian" ads), just like the negative stereotypes of the same peoples. Native Americans are people; given the opportunity they wreck nature, and once given guns and horses they stepped up their hunting of buffalo, for example, to levels that would have been unsustainable even if white people hadn't been killing the Buffalo off at far greater rates at the same time.
You can respect nature and still make use of natural resources. Even if native Americans did the former (see below--some did but many did not), they fell far short on the latter. There were many natural resources in the US that native Americans never made any use of, and European settlers did.
This is an example of the more general fact that the native Americans did not build very much wealth, while European settlers built much, much more. The native American cultures would never have built the medium through which we are having this discussion, for example. Or modern medicine, or modern sanitation, or all of the other things that have led to a huge increase in both average length and average quality of life.
> indigenous Americans had -a lot- of knowledge about their world, and how to care for it.
Perhaps some did. Many did not. Travel around the US Southwest and see how many sites there are where native American tribes lived and either died out or had to move on because they had mismanaged the local resources to the point where those resources could no longer support the tribe.
You could say that America was "expanding its empire" but there was not substantial growth after the Gadsden purchase and most of the growth of universities (and the bulk of American power) came much later.
Attributing research and production to the spoils of wars fought nearly a century ago is kind of a reach.
>but the United States has relied almost entirely on resources within its own borders to gain its power.
How did it attain control of those resources? You haven't addressed the parent's point.
In the revised edition of Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond tells us that the "agriculture package" sent from the Fertile Crescent 5kya arrived here late: 2.3kya - perhaps 1,000 years later than expected.
The purported reason: Jomon was perhaps the most sophisticated hunter-gatherer society ever. For instance, pottery was created by Jomon hunter-gatherers earlier than anywhere else.
In part, because of the sheer abundance of natural resources in Japan, the Jomon peoples had developed a rich society that agriculturism for a long time simply couldn't compete with.
The feature that matters is a free market.
The best thing a poor country can do for its citizens is move towards a free market economy.
There's something to be said for relevance. It may be true for nearly every society, but the amount of relevance varies. The US conquered an astonishing amount of territory in recent history, which makes it relevant.
The problem was lack of free markets. Free markets are the common thread among successful economic powers. Not population, not resources, not rivers, etc.
Though yeah, free markets are key.
Some people spin this narrative because they think it secures African-Americans' place as legitimate and essential builders of American wealth and power. And sometimes also to justify reparations. But that seems unnecessary and a reactionary narrative that is simply the flip side of the coin of American racist ideology. There's no need to justify, let alone rank, the contributions of any group in the U.S., especially when you do it by reviving horribly misguided economic theories.
Also, don't forget that slavery was endemic to European colonialism in the Americas. AFAIU, only a fraction (less than 10%?) of African slaves ended up in the United States. Brazil alone, for example, may have received upwards of 40%. If slavery were the secret sauce to economic development, the U.S. should be one of the poorest countries in the Americas.
I would love a source for this
>Also, don't forget that slavery was endemic to European colonialism in the Americas. AFAIU, only a fraction (less than 10%?) of African slaves ended up in the United States. Brazil alone, for example, may have received upwards of 40%. If slavery were the secret sauce to economic development, the U.S. should be one of the poorest countries in the Americas.
I don't follow this, why would they be the poorest? Is this based on your previous claim that slavery being a limiting factor?
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/domestic_slaver...
I haven't actually read much research in this area in particular. Frankly, it just seems intuitive to me based on all the literature I have read about American political, legal, and industrial development; the development of other countries, such as in SE Asia; and especially works related to the so-called "resource curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
How would this ever apply to the country with the largest economy by the turn of the 20th century?
For one thing, the Confederacy was crippled by its inability to supply its military. The Civil War was arguably the first industrial war, and the slave economy failed miserably at it.
(The USSR also captured a lot of German scientists, the results of which were the Soviet successes with rockets and jet aircraft, for example.)
So, sure the USSR might not have been stellar, but in the cold war the camps were already cut either way and you didn't choose the US or USSR.
You only chose to stay were you are or go for top entity of your block.
Top researchers may want to move to work with others in their field.
Europe produces a lot of high quality science. Research in US is on the other hand increasingly application-focused (something that EU is not very good at).
This is my observation as a former researcher who has experience in both regions; I don’t have references. It’s partly driven by culture, and economic system. The strong public system in Europe supports longer term research, whereas the strong private sector in US focuses on applications and commercialization. It wasn’t not like that in US few decades ago.
This model just doesn't conform with all those research university rankings.
American Visiting Researchers at CERN, since they remain attached to their Universities, probably count toward their institution's ranking. But a full time researcher at CERN doesn't.
The JPL at Caltech and the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT are the opposite of that. They do, what could be considered mostly government research but I'm sure 100% of their citation count goes toward their respective institutions.
Edit: Apparently I’ve struck a nerve. But this has been my experience working and hiring at two of the FAANGs. The teams doing the most scientifically challenging work are predominantly European educated and the team members that aren’t are from the most elite US institutions.
My experience is the following: I’m an European grad but did my PhD in the USA . In Europe tests were brutal and you had no help whatsoever from the professors. Your grade in a course was 80%-100% a single final test and lots of people would fail. Also, professors would not restraint criticism toward students.
In USA students seldom fail, grades are inflated in most universities and they not only depend on tests but also on homework and a variety of activities. They also spend lots of time doing extra activities and “leadership” stuff and learning how to self promote.
That being said, I feel that American students end up being much more driven and optimistic and many of them end up trying and succeeding at doing new things.
The usually grade depends on a single test, often oral which puts additional burden, plus, to even qualify for the test, students need to achieve well above 50% average on homework assignments.
The difference between the two regions is IMO mostly overstated. Especially in CS. Both the US and EU have institutions with trade school-style CS bachelors/masters as well as truly top research institutions with real Computer Science bachelors/masters degrees. Saying much more than that isn't particularly helpful.
NB: I'm willing to bet that most of the "hard core science" teams in Europe have Americans over-represented relative to other teams in the company. This says more about how immigration systems work than anything else.
Also NB: being on "hard core science" teams isn't the best way to maximize income/career trajectory at FAANGs, and isn't even the most secure... remember a buncha years back when Microsoft killed off its bay area research lab?
I think it is abundantly clear that research prowess really has very little bearing on how competent you are in teaching say Linear Algebra. Which is how we got the whole MOOC thing in the first place, there is no magic Harvard Linear Algebra but there sure are tons of social mobility barriers and they don't really care for the curriculum one bit as much as having that upper strata origin Ivory league stamp of approval.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/who-trains-best-comput...
Original paper
For reference, the title of the paper is "Computer science skills across China, India, Russia, and the United States"
I think that some elite US institutions provide solid CS foundations but the classes that supply this don’t also supply good scientific thinking. I think that the institutions thought that science and engineering requirements would have supplied this. However, that is very hit and miss based on the quality of the professors you happened to take for introductory science courses.
The second tier US schools are definitely trade schools. The professors do at best second tier research. The average student is weaker. Canada appears even more explicitly trade school like than the US with significant portions of schooling devoted to getting industry experience.
Also, the recent rise in compensation has relatively recently tilted even the elite institutions towards being trade schools. A greater and greater percentage of undergraduates at these elite institutions are majoring in CS.
In many European countries, the five-year master's is still seen as the primary undergraduate degree, at least in universities. (There may be other more applied institutes with shorter degrees.) When most students are expected to graduate with a master's instead of bachelor's, the program is likely to be more theoretical.
Elite schools are a foreign concept in many European countries. In such countries, ambitious students motivated by status and success are more likely to pursue a professional degree such as law, medicine, or business. The ones that choose an academic program such as CS are more likely to be motivated by the subject matter itself.
You don't see a representative sample of European graduates. Moving to another country requires huge sacrifices. Most people from wealthy countries are unwilling to make those sacrifices simply to get a better job. Those that do emigrate for work tend to be more career-oriented than the average.
The most well known universities in England, France, Germany, Switzerland are what you can call Elite Schools. Yes, even in technical fields like ETH, École Polytechnique in Paris, etc
Not sure why you're being downvoted, that has been my experience as well.
I don't know if what parent comment says is true at all, but if it is I think it's because historically universities didn't have a Bachelor's/Masters system in Europe. At least in Germany and the Netherlands you would study for 5 years and that is still the expectation. For less academically inclined students there are other options such as trade schools.
IIRC, UVA's engineering curriculum didn't require foreign language, had it's own writing course, most of the remaining cross-over outside engineering was hard science, with a small number of gen-ed electives (maybe 1/year or 1/semester?).
Compared to my Econ degree, which required 2 years of language, 2 semesters of writing, a mix of hard science and math, and somewhere around 4 gen-ed courses per year.
Probably because of the investor climate, and applied research is a good fit for companies.
Companies tend to fund applied research.
Funding in Europe, whether academic or industry motivated, is simply lacking across all scientific, engineering, and social science disciplines.
*Edit*. The question is why the united states has the "best research universities". That is a very general-level question and the Parent made a very general, and very wrong, claim in response. Regardless of whether some specific fields might have more industrial funding than others, it's easy to google the overall portion: and industry funding is quite minor.
https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/UniSource1....
GP never implied it was the largest contributor, and yes, depending on your field a significant amount of funding does come from the private sector.
Slow down there bud. Where did I say that?
Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
If I miserepresented you, then I am sorry.
> Unless you’re talking about AI/ML, then yes, university labs receive more from companies, than government funding agencies.
This is simply untrue. Companies comprise less than 10% of overall university research funding, and AI/ML is far from dominant. It's easy to verify this.
While I would tend to agree that private funding for research is way better in the US, Bell Labs is not necessarily a good example.
True, the tech. output of the outfit was amazing, but they had massive govt support (among other things, they were given an official monopoly by the USG).
This is a provocative comment ready to start flame wars.
Please tell specifics and not paint broad brushstrokes to flame the fires. I’m sorry to flag your comment.
Edit: One source we can look at the awards given to fundamental research. They’re overwhelmingly US-based. Fields, Nobel, Turing, etc. This contradicts the popular generalization.
Did anyone read the article at all?
This isn't really clear. For example, EU has generated about twice the fields medal recipients as the US. That's reasonable in terms of roughly equivalent populations, but does beg the question that if someone grows up in Europe, trains and spends early career in Europe, but ends up a professor in USA before being given a Nobel prize, where do you count the result?
I’d say, the entire article is flamewar prone. How can you say something is best?
Weird overreaction on your side tho.
How many of these were actually educated in the US, as in from primary school, and how many came to the US to complete a PhD after having received an education outside of the US?
For universities, they're admittedly the best by several objective measures too, but the willingness for self-promotion helps :)
I hope I won't offend anyone here but there's a story that seems quite appropriate:
When I was still living in the US, an acquaintance of mine once asked me, "So don't you think the United States are the best country in the world?" I was absolutely baffled. Putting aside for a moment that the US clearly did not rank "best" on so many scales, the question (to me, as a European) didn't even make much sense in the first place: What metric are we talking about? And what's the point of comparing countries on an absolute scale in the first place? No matter what metric we choose, it will never convey the full picture.
Sure, I enjoyed living in the US. But I've also come to enjoy living in other countries over the years and I know there are many more that I would absolutely love to live in. In any case, I don't think it would even occur to a European to call their country "the best". Our continent's history is so complicated and riddled with grave mistakes, wars and crimes, that a claim that one country were "better" than the other would just seem… strange. Everyone here knows that their neighboring countries are at least as beautiful as their own and every place and every mentality has its pros and cons.
Anyway, I ended up explaining my POV to said acquantaince and also said that, if he so insists on ranking countries in a such an absolute manner, then we would also have to talk about all those things in the US where there's still… room for improvement. We ended up having a long and fruitful discussion and he started agreeing with me (or so I thought) that the question might not make that much sense after all. Still, after an hour of discussing all this, he goes, in a very matter-of-fact way: "Everything you said is certainly correct. But I still think the US are the best country in the world."
At this point the only explanation I had left was that he must have been brainwashed properly in school, pledging allegiance to the flag and so on.
To the Americans reading this: Where do you think does this sense of "living in the best country in the world" come from? Where did you "learn" it? I'd really be interested in understanding this phenomenon better.
Now, that said, many Americans have a totally unhealthy level of self-esteem that turns into nationalism, white supremacy or near-fascism. TBH I don't know how to deal with those people, but by my logic above it might be more successful to help them consider the impact of their beliefs rather than why their beliefs are wrong.
If we forget that the US has more people, they are the best at many things. Science, GDP, sports, and so on. That's probably what he means when he says "best".
It'd be like calling Google or Apple the "best" tech companies even though you can make more money at some small startups. It's true in some sense (they're the biggest, dominant, etc), not necessarily true in the per-capita sense (I might have a better time somewhere else).
But also, America is the best:
1. American Breakfast
2. American Coffee
3. McDonald's
4. Best Movies
5. Most Jacked
I could go on and on.
What I find interesting is that Americans are most proud of their culture at home, and when overseas that tends to be moderated. Whereas some immigrants always say their native country has 'the best X'. I'm thinking in particular about some Greek immigrants I've known, but then in the next breath they'll tell you about corruption back home.
Have you travelled much outside the US? It’s seems so weird to hear “USA the best because breakfast, coffee, and McDonald’s”, it sounds like a cliche.
What do you mean by jacked?
I went to an undergraduate university that would be wouldn't be considered highly ranked, but was nationally known in one subfield. I remember being surprised at one point to see a number of articles in major science media sources from MIT about a 'breakthrough'. I read the articles and they were 100% describing something that we did on a regular basis in undergraduate labs. I read the underlying press release and the underlying paper and was decidedly meh but man did it catch a news wave. I've always attributed it to being from MIT more so than truly novel. Not a shot against them...just an observation of the power of self-perpetuating narratives.
I now work at a different internationally ranked 'best researchy type' university. The research is better for a lot of reasons. The ability to attract the best people helps, but that comes from the reputation of having the best people and the resources to attract the best people. That is intermingled with the resources to have support, PR, media relations, and the brand name attraction for grad students.
We have pretty much the same distribution of undergrad intellect as other engineering schools I have worked with. It skew more academic and less practical...I'll be honest if I was a VC I would look at other universities for the next founder types. But the resources and money available for students to pursue entrepreneurship are outsized compared to the talent.
But the myths about our excellence are pervasive - and drive behaviors from people who have no basis for actual evidence. It means we get students brand shopping and not wanting to do the work (we literally had a case of an international student being expelled for the person in classes not actually being the enrolled student).
I don't think this article is wrong per se but the virtuous circle argument is inseparable from the self-perpetuating circle one. And I am unsurprised that the American Economic Association isn't talking about that piece. Objective functions are great, feedback loops are also an element of a control system.
It's a bit like an article circa 2006 about the awesome strength of the US stock market.
Don't waste your time looking, there are none or almost none.
EU is simply not geared (anymore) for this type of endeavor to succeed:
- finance infrastructure for this is non-existent (VCs are a joke in Europe, both in terms of size and in terms of the type of stuff they invest in)
- risk-taking is simply not a cultural value anymore
- administrative burdens (taxes, labor laws, cost of labor, hyper-restrictive regulations, etc ...) are such a gigantic drag that most people potentially potentially capable of starting such things either walk away, or move to a place where they can actually conduct business (historically, the US, although it's not as good as it was).
- at least in Western Europe, (Germany, France), people are so very comfy in their social cocoon (social security, retirement, social programs), the whole notion of "making it" (e.g becoming truly financially independent) is *very* hard for them to even understand. Net effect: no motivation, no GOOG/FB/AMZN/TESLA/SpaceX
- the US has a "let the tree grow first, we'll regulate once it bears fruits" attitude towards emerging and potentially disruptive tech. The EU on the other hand has a "oh, my god, this is potentially very disruptive, someone ought to legislate, and quick".
There is no true independence in any society, apart from autocracy, and externalities always exist.
There doesn't seem to be much value attributed to 'having a lot of money' etc, for a lot of people, having a fulfilling job, family and life is enough, and having the security of knowing that you can get sick and go to the hospital without being bankrupted, or knowing that you will be able to provide for your family directly or indirectly in almost all scenarios makes this whole "I need to be a billionaire to live" notion very non-existent here.
You don't need a VC to be happy, you don't need to create a startup and you don't need to take a lot of risk to create value. This is of course directly related to the social cocoon; and knowing the value of that makes for very little need to take big risks for a chance of making things 'better' (whatever 'better' might be...).
That said, there are a lot of self-bootstrapping businesses that function just fine. They don't go public and mostly don't make more than a couple of millions each year, but it is enough, or better: it is plenty. There is no rat race, you have plenty of vacation, you can travel the world, and if something goes wrong there are buffers to catch you. (but those aren't comfortable enough to just slack off in to and 'do nothing', but that'd be unfulfilling for most people anyawy).
There is no value in risk in itself.
For example, taking a high risk of attempting to create a unicorn startup for the low reward of having more money isn't really worth it here. That's because the barrier at which point 'more money' makes your life 'better' is much lower. Same goes for prestige, it doesn't really get you all that much here.
Together, that means that taking larger risks doesn't really have a lot of benefits in general, unless you personally enjoy it.
This is different form the need to have a 'big' change requiring a 'big' risk in order to make your life measurably better (monetarily, prestige, perceived power, or otherwise).
There are endeavours that pose significant risk, but have a significant reward to match; think ITER and CERN; it is a considerable effort and monetary investment without knowing what the true outcome will be. All you know ahead of time is that something will come out of it. (while those two aren't exactly comparable; a single-purpose project vs. an organisation with multiple projects; it's about the concept of risk, investment and possible outcomes or returns)
Say a particle accelerator take a lot of time, labour and money and can be used to make discoveries, but you don't know what discoveries. That means you have a huge investment but no guarantee that you will be able to produce something that has the value of the investment (or more). But there is the chance of significant scientific discovery, which makes it a project that countries are willing to take the risk for.
Expanding on my own word salad: perhaps personally I'd say that in my environment collecting money or 'stuff' in itself isn't seen as valuable, but being able to maintain a good life and have a fulfilling life is. At the same time, in a larger context, things like discovery, exploration and research are valued as well, but boasting or broadcasting about it isn't seen as very valuable. I suppose that also makes for an environment where space exploration is seen as a good thing but ironically without a big PR machine it can't be funded. It's like having a goal without the means.
I ask because, without heavy, heavy, megatron like heavy, investment from the government none of the technologies that now feed this ecosystem would have been developed (semiconductors, internet, etc, there's more, probably even in seemingness fields). Do you imagine any entrepreneur in the USA would have gone "yeah let's just feed this tree some millions to grow the internet"? Or many other industries.
Then there's some other things. Google tried to sell itself for what, 1M at the time? To Yahoo (if I'm not mistaken). They were a search engine. If their proposal would have been accepted there wouldn't have been any google as we know (probably). And we could say that all other examples are heavily, government invested, under or over the covers.
I ask because I'm tired of hearing narratives that leave out of the equation so many important details as to not have any semblance to reality.
Because I could come up with a big list of reasons why the US would be a bad place to start a company with. It is a good place to start, but even then most of the top high-earners companies are located into 2 or 3 very small geographical areas in the whole US.
China has many more impediments/bureaucracy than the EU (though maybe in different areas) but they have $$$ so problem solved.
Also Americans are very blind to what happens "on the other side of the pond" especially the non-English world. Mojang was bought for $2.5B JustEat/Takeaway is $13B Marketing Cap
The recent trips to Europe I have been so intrigued by how different the apps people use for many common commercial tasks are to the ones I use at home. I'm assuming there are logistical, cultural, or compliance reasons at play but I can't speak to it.
Over-emphasis is definitely and American trait and it leave precious little room in the language to aptly describe the really good stuff
Likewise, Europeans may seem standoffish and aloof to new world types -- people outside their social circle -- because they are! Don't expect work and social circles to mesh.
You might like to read: https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
US science benefited from a huge influx of European scientists and then sustained itself with large scale grants motivated by the cold war.
The US doesn't have great academic freedom but reasonable academic freedom compared to many places and US achievement is the gold standard for many things in many places so a lot of the best people come here and indeed, sacrifice to be here even as lots of money flows into universities - allowing that money to be effective even when some portion flows into pork also.
It's paradoxical which allows things to seem "better than ever" and "worse than ever" simultaneously.
In some countries, you have to choose between a trade school track and a college track around the time you enter high school and there is little to no opportunity to change tracks at a later date.
While president of Harvard, he was recruited to run the National Defense Research Committee which gave him authority during the war to pour massive funding into key Universities (most notably MIT and UC Berkeley, but numerous others as well) turning them into government research labs just as companies were turned into government armament manufacturers. Oh yeah, the NDRC oversaw the Manhattan project as well.
After the war he continued and expanded this program as part of the Cold War effort. You can see this at the major research labs today: MIT, for example, is barely a "University" in the educational sense; it's really a large, mainly government-funded research institution (like the European ones) with a small school bolted onto the side. Education is less than 15% of its budget.
Conant also promulgated the SAT BTW; his buddy developed it and also made a fortune on training people and running the test. The usual OB network.
University grading systems are the truest expression of american cultural imperialism, shaping education systems all around the world.
1) The variety of people from different backgrounds cross-pollinating with each other. This takes places in other countries, but not nearly to the same degree.
2) An open and unregimented society, relatively speaking, allows for more cross-pollination with other layers of society. For example, how many other countries make it possible to study under the "Steve Jobs program"?
How about the following articles from Nature that paint a differnt picture instead of that assumption?
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03318-w [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01922-z
In US, even if research doesnt pan out, there's lots of industries to pursue. Also, universities in US/UK have fees and actively pursue students from abroad, whereas this barely exists in continental europe. I doubt there's something structurally superior in US universities, the main reason seems to be that US in general gives the best opportunity to those who are capable, and also, money
Also, what even constitutes "best" (not good) research? Nobody knows.
I find it super difficult to come up with a hard set of criteria that measure the performance of an educational institution. Number of graduates? Number of research papers published? Amount of grant income? Can all be gamed.
Strength of character and depth of personality of graduates would be a good metric, but is impossible to measure.
So if you could such a metric, it would reflect which university manages to attract the best highschoolers, not which university is best at educating them (i.e. which university is likely to improve you most should you choose to go there) or producing research results.
Yeah, it’s uncomfortable that often the fame comes before the actual quality, because they gamed it. But then there got to be a start. Self-PR is one major critical weapon in the country that pushes freedom to the maximum extent.
"The emergence of it [tenure] in the US, in fact, helped place the US on good footing to compete at research with Europe, which does not have that institution as much."
because AFAIK many European universities had something like tenure already. In Germany (like today) professors were government employees that could not be fired. I think this had been the case since Humbold and was part of having academic freedom as a pilar of the system. I think both French and British universities had a similar concept. So it is weird that tenure is being painted as something special to the US.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
It's always nice to point out the things that are doing great according to some metrics, but when put in perspective, what does it end up doing for the people? It shouldn't mean that "unless it benefits blue collar workers it doesn't need to exist", but you'd expect tooting one's own national horn to be put in context a bit better.
Or is the interviewee just discussing historical global factors that gave US universities an edge over the past centuries?
These knee jerk reactions whenever anything vaguely positive is said about the US have gotten a bit tired.
Agree, but then you've got to dig deeper: where does the money come from?
“Historical reasons” is weaksauce if you can’t actually say what they are.
1. Probably, based on nobel prizes https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/teaser/19646.jpeg
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
More than half of the Ph.D. students in US came from abroad.
You guys have it really bad in terms of workload, length and insane costs.
Tons of research funding happens in the US because corporations lobby Congress to give money for research, which props up the status of those schools, and more research comes out.
US draws more foreign students than I suspect any other country with all this research money, which in turn draws more status and money.
However, despite its immense economic prowess, the US did not play a major part in international affairs, often explicitly choosing to stay out of European debacles. (This is often called isolationism, but that's not a wholly accurate description of foreign policy). For its part, Europe also generally ignored the US: a posting to the US would have been seen as a punishment rather than an honor, taking the person involved outside of the social circles of Europe.
When WWI strikes, the US stays out of the war in the initial phases before changing its mind and getting involved. As the only party involved which didn't eviscerate its population by war, it gained a lot of leverage over the peace treaty... which it promptly squandered by going isolationist again and staying out of the European squabbles. During WWII, Roosevelt again takes a leading role in dictating the terms of the peace treaties and post-war diplomatic order, with the US actually staying in the role afterwards, unlike WWI.
The term "superpower" is usually only used to analyze the roles of countries in the post-WW2 order, with the US and the USSR (and, briefly, the UK) afforded the role of superpower since they dominate the world political sphere. Before WWI, the analysis is in terms of great powers, and is mostly looking at their influence within the idea of the "Concert of Europe." Here, despite the US's economic strength, its noninterest in Europe renders it outside of most discussions of great power politics. And between the wars, pretty much the only analysis people care to do is in how the stage is set for WWII.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the answer to your question is "no."
(Now keep in mind that the prospect of a peaceful 20th century Europe is unrealistic. Europe was a warring tinderbox at the time, and even if WWI and WWII had not happened, a conflict of similar scale likely would've broken out in Europe regardless. Any number of destructive conflicts could've broken out, including a Soviet invasion of Germany and Western Europe. In short, it's really hard to construct a timeline where the USA wouldn't have been catapulted into superpower status due to war in Europe)
compare this to pre ww1 Europe, which was a tinderbox thanks to multiple empires (with a major history of going to war with each other for resources or people) becoming rapidly industrialised and waiting to get back "their land/people" from a precious war.
https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/who_pays
Socialist tendencies in the EU are a 20th century thing.
Europe was far more capitalist in the 18th and 19th century.
Name one successful (as in: >1G$ cap) company started by INRIA researchers.
You won't have money for fundamental research if you don't have a huge focus, as a research institute, on economic output.
I know both sides, EU and US approaches to research and research funding, and I think both have their strengths and weaknesses. But either way I think measuring research performance by the amount of money made is the wrong measure.
With research I refer to fundamental CS research, not how to squeeze 0.00053% more out of imagenet or making photos of young people look old, or solving problems of logistics in driver scheduling.
It just means the one has little to do with the other. Orthogonal.
I know excellent scientists who are rich and equally excellent ones who are poor. I also know some intellectually less well endowed folks who are crazy rich.
Money and research success have little to do with each other. All I’m saying.
Where are the successful, world-changing company spinoffs?
Is it though? I guess that's the difference between Europe and US in CS. In the US they find a way to make money on the innovations.
Yeah, that's kind of known.
2. Because they won the WWII and took by force the best scientist in Germany that was the leader in the world in science and technology at the time. The other half was taken by the Soviet Union. The lingua franca in science was German, not English.
3.Because after the war, Europe was devastated and living conditions in the reconstruction were very poor(with things like having to work for free for the Government X hours a week) for scientists(and the rest of society) while crossing the Atlantic conditions were much better so the best scientist did.
4. Because after Breton Woods and Marshall's plan, the US became the hegemonic power in the world with the biggest market in the world and started transforming scientific ideas into products that generated wealth and became cheaper as they were mass produced.
5. Because they didn't have a socialistic economy like most of the world had and the best, most ambitious and brightest minds from socialistic countries fled there expecting to share some part of the wealth they created and have the freedom they lacked in their countries.
Remember in the block countries being educated in the old bourgeois system,having accumulated wealth in the past or being son or grandson of one who had was a crime, making you a candidate for suspicion and prosecution (and eventual extermination).
Stalin had a plan to exterminate all Jews in Russia(almost all revolutionaries like Lenin or Trotsky had Jewish origin), he did not complete his plan because he died before he could.
It is incredible that making an analysis they could not see the most obvious and basic geopolitical events.
Look at any top US university’s STEM faculty? What percentage are native born? It is shockingly low.
If these brilliant people had the option to do this in their home country, they probably would. Moving to a completely different country is difficult.
The U.S does not have "the best research universities," it simply has the most "prestigious ones," that continue to survive and thrive due to centuries of compounding network effects (and a little of help from the 19th century American middle class and a lot of help from the wholesale philanthropy of our robber barons).
Research had been considered a dilettante endeavor, meant only for the betters, until those lower down the ladder decided "I want that," and went off to try and "learn" their way into becoming cultured (see: gentlemen).
And not even a single mention of how the real "university revolution" (where being an academic is now a middle class job, instead of simply an upper class past-time), were spear-headed by Fred Taylor and Fred Gates. Both of these preachers-turned-family-office-managers were vital for the adoption and expansion of "scientific" and "medical" schools of thought (in order to fuel the industrial and allopathic medical industries -- to make more money and get more bodies).
Skin-deep this article is.
Yoda you have watched lately?
SCNR