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Comment by polairscience | Hacker News Reader

We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

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China is not losing this decade, the scientific gap will add to the growing chasm of future outcomes between the two superpowers.

This reminds me the so called dark ages where western people just conveniently skipped through 1000 years of very productive knowledge of development and contributions from the Arab and Muslim world centered around Toledo, Spain and Baghdad, Iraq as it never happened [1].

The false narative is that it's straight from Greek and Roman era to the Renaissance era as if mathematicians and scientists were just fall asleep in the entire world where in actual fact in the Arab and Muslim world many thousands of books from Greece/Rome/India/China were painstakenly translated (no Google translate, no printing press) and many more new books were written.

[1] Toledan Tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledan_Tables

And this is just one of many ways the US is currently shooting itself in the foot (or, if you prefer, cutting off its nose to spite its face). Thanks, Elon! Putin and Xi must be cheering...

> Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

...until the extreme-right populists (supported by the current US administration) come to power there too?

Populism requires that you're popular. Brexit clones were extremely popular for the right across Europe right up until Brexit actually happened, and then suddenly they all remembered they'd never wanted anything to do with such a stupid plan and began scrubbing praise for it from their materials, back to "reform" and tinkering at the edges.

The trick is to be First. You can sell "Just do X and it'll be great" unless the people have already seen what a disaster X is.

In the places that already did X, it will limp along as supporters try to deny that they that they chose something predictably dumb.

Well, the AfD wants Germany to withdraw from the EU, and the only reason why ruling right-wing populist parties in eastern Europe (e.g. Hungary) don't do it is because it's the hand that still feeds them money (despite them continuously biting it).

TBF, Brexit was a particularly bad idea because of the Northern Ireland situation, so others can still feed the illusion that their *exit would be "cleaner"...

Reducing the problems of Brexit to the Northern Ireland situation is quite blinkered.

Businesses (especially smaller ones) have suffered immensely as a result of supply chain issues, lopsided bureaucracy and red-tape.

And AfD has topped out at 20% after Musk's "help".

> until Brexit actually happened, and then suddenly they all remembered they'd never wanted anything to do with such a stupid plan

Why is Brexit perceived so badly in the EU? Economically the UK has done about as well or better than the other big European economies.

Because Brexit solved nothing and made lots of things worse.

Can you show us some statistics to back that up? From the time of brexit until now seems like a good time period.

There you are:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

Only Italy has done substantially better, but that is recovery from the aftermath of the 2008 collapse.

Er... that chart shows the UK GDP per capita about on par with France's (even slightly higher) until 2018, and from then on it has been consistently below France - not by a lot, but still noticeable...

A tiny difference and the big difference was that the UK fell back more during covid in 2020. the difference fluctuates from year to year it was only $300 (a 0.5% difference) in 2022.

What makes you think the UK is doing better? Most reports have found the opposite, with costs in the hundreds of billions range versus where the economy would otherwise have been:

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/12/brexit-here-is-...

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/london-mayor-says-brexit-ha...

https://news.sky.com/story/brexit-new-report-suggests-uk-311...

One potential confound is that the UK was starting with a strong position so if you just compare it to, say, Portugal it’s still looking better but that doesn’t tell you the gap wouldn’t have otherwise been even wider.

Look at raw data, not media reports. I posted a link already. The UK's economic growth is very similar to comparable EU economies.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

That’s one metric but it’s not enough to answer the question and misleading in key ways. Average GDP is not the same as the average person’s income, and you can’t say whether that’s good or bad without also looking at the cost of living. If your income is not going up at the same rate as your expenses that positive trend turns out to be a mirage and that’s where much of the reported pain for Brexit has been since introducing trade barriers makes goods and services more expensive.

GDP is adjusted for inflation.

Some trade barriers have also been lowered since Brexit, reducing costs - e.g. EU protectionist tariffs and quotas on things such as oranges and rice which reduces the cost of living.

The effects of Brexit are tiny compared to the lingering effects of Covid, and the increase in global prices caused by the invasion of Ukraine.

Given that European countries and the EU except a few outliers runs on proportional representation it is way harder for the extreme right to win a majority.

We’ve been dealing with our own extreme right parties for the past 20-30 years. They generally bounce between 10-25% of the vote depending on where in the political cycle they are. Like all parties do.

Never enough to dictate policy, but enough to influence when at the top of their cycle.

Compare with the US where only ~25% is needed to take over a party due to abysmal turnouts and electoral system.

These 25% can then win an election allowing the extreme right to dictate policy, as we now see in the US.

> Given that European countries and the EU except a few outliers runs on proportional representation it is way harder for the extreme right to win a majority.

Harder, but it still happens. That's why Trump is a big fan of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party:

Fidesz won a supermajority in the 2010 election, adopted national-conservative policies, shifted further to the right and became Eurosceptic. The 2011 adoption of a new Hungarian constitution was highly controversial as it consolidated power with Fidesz. Having set Hungary on a path of democratic backsliding, its majority of seats remained after the 2014 election, and following the escalation of the migrant crisis, Fidesz began using right-wing populist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Following the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election, it currently holds a majority in the National Assembly with 135 seats. It has also held the presidency since 2010, has endorsed the election of every president since 2000, and it enjoys majorities in all 19 county assemblies, while being in opposition in the General Assembly of Budapest. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz)

Let's see how the United States will look like in 15 year's time...

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the US party systems.

The "parliamentary party" is probably to which you refer. The elected congressfolk and legislators.

The political party, the people who run the party, is often elected at the precinct and county level. No idea how European parties work, but I suspect something similar (the UK Conservatives are similar).

Americans may realize that they're a party member and they've never once voted for a party officeholder, and don't even know they can or should be. Whatever percent it is to take over a party, we actually don't know because there is rarely a public vote. They are able to because the leftwing propaganda (NPR etc) have made their consumers dumb as hell. It's a twisted self-perpetuating system with which we have little visibility much less participation.

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