Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.
For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.
I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.
* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.
* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.
* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.
* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.
and more.
My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.
Also in the area I'm in plenty of people don't speak English - I just went to an eye doctor and they didn't speak English although to be fair that's the first time it's happened to me in 2 years.
But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.
That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.
And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.
This is a decent piece for the data side of that claim: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration
I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US
Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.
That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.
There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.
Buying Twitter isn't spending money, it's exercising power.
This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.
Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists
This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.
> crime rates beyond most first world countries
Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.
> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions
We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.
> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.
If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
That's doubly important if your points are good, since by posting like you did here, you discredit them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?
Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.
The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.
> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work
This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?
Crabs in a bucket.
From that:
- 60k for capital gains tax
- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children
- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).
That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.
And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement?
Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?
$10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.
>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.
Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.
Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.
We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.
$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.
Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.
Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.
>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.
So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.
The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.
Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.
And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.
Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.
Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.
(I imagine Musk thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)
I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.
Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
gee, no matter how many times Europe has told the Jews that they are not welcome, they've kept coming back, bringing ses penchants for assessing capital risk in middleman trade, and hedging financial risks!
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
Gambling and investing are very close together. You're only able to make rational decisions on perfect information which is not available.
So investing seems to be a sort of gambling to me, it's just part of a different societal institution.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.
The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.
Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?
Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.
How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.
It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.
https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...
Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.
It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Why oh why do Europeans in general choose to spend less than americans?
There are ~750 billionaires in total.
The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.
They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.
Easy! Why doesn't everyone do it?
Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.
“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”
I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?
Where’s my rich uncle?
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...
And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.
I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.
So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.
The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.
Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that
Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.
Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.
And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.
I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.
That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.
Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF.
There is a saying that Europe is better if you are poor and the US is better if you are rich or middle class. I think that is broadly speaking true.
Of course European countries don't allow poor Americans to migrate so the only people who would be better off aren't allowed to move.
Perhaps Amsterdam airport pricing is extensively marked up compared to local pricing (understandable). Geneva was just plain expensive.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
Your basis for how much people pay for groceries was how expensive a sandwich was at an airport?
You do need a car if you care about personal safety. A lot of the public transport network in many big cities are not safe for women anymore.
>healthcare is free
Can we stop with this lie that healthcare is free in the EU? It is not. You pay for it through your taxes and those taxes are downright confiscatory.
> Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
There is an ongoing housing crisis in many European countries so I am not sure how you can say that housing costs are under control.
Those in the liberal arts probably have it even worse, as their experience usually doesn't translate to industry at all.
No idea if that kind of "research" is funded the same way as hard sciences in the US though, it definitely is there.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
Yeah the dollar is stronger which is great to buy imports.
But you cannot import housing, most healthcare, most services like cooks, cleaners and bartenders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
See Agatha Christie's quote about how she couldn't have imagined affording a car before WW1, and couldn't have imagined affording servants afterward.
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
… a critical tool of which we’re currently dismantling…
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...
[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance
[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...
For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion
(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.
Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.
I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.
Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.
In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.
Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.
As for PhD from developed countries, it’s gonna be hard as you said.
And I said the web as we know it, not the web period.
It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.
The plus side was I was already making 10% more than any of my other friends and got another 7% for signing it.
He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.
His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.
https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-her...
People are just so surprised to find out he's a Republican that whenever it happens they assume he's a recent convert.
He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
"Both Sides" Citation, please. Really interested in learning more (but no paywalls if possible).
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.
That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.
First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.
Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.
This is wildly field specific.
So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.
if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.
The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.
would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...
The smart thing is to outsource pure science research where it's the cheapest, but commercialize it where it's most profitable - that's what China is doing and doing it very well too.
There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.
e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.
Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.
Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.