Good. The US is reaping what it sows, and other research institutions will become the new leaders. Stinks for Americans, but the world will be better off overall.
And I say this as an European, we’re miles behind really. You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
I actually agree with them that China is absolutely on track to surpass us, though the funny part is they never stopped to think about why that might be, nor what it will mean for Western countries and immigration going forward.
The writing is really on the wall for the death of "a country is an economic zone migrants should be free to enter and leave at will" line of thinking, but regaining the cohesion we once had and the previous pressure for migrants to actually assimilate rather than just forming closed satellite communities may take longer still.
And with an aging population and stagnant/declining productivity that seems unlikely to improve in the future.
If anyone is going to overtake the US, it will be China.
Literally everything the second Trump administration has done in office has made the Chinese much stronger in every possible way, and the USA much weaker.
The USA isn't completely doomed if we can get past the current madness somehow. However, while I don't know what post-Trump America looks like, the USA has permanently ceded political and technical leadership. Trump has sealed the US's fate.
Its not even so much as money not being spent, as money being spent badly. In the UK money is wasted on having too many universities and too many undergraduates. There are badly thought out commercial research subsidies. Schools are driven my metrics in a large scale proof of Goodheart's (Campbell's ?) law.
> You have to make a lot more fuck ups for us to catch you.
The main issue is the 40TN debt that the US has which will soon matter. But the expected action that they will do is to continue printing and debasing the US dollar until they cannot.
I am not so sure about this. Many universities in Europe are still really good (even if they market their research achievements much less aggressively than US-American universities). The problem that exists in many European countries is that companies or startups have difficulties commercializing these research achievements.
Knowledge spillover benefits everyone - would there be ASML (Dutch) without DARPA's monumental fundamental research investment in EUV? BioNTech (German) without NIH-funded mRNA research? Without American investment this research likely wouldn't have happened or would have come a decade later.
I browse science-focused social media and forums all the time. But the time spent doing that is never as good as going to a seminar presentation from somebody I've never seen before on a topic I never would have thought to investigate.
The world becomes poorer when these aggregation points are disaggregated. Reducing MIT's aggregation does not increase aggregation effects elsewhere.
I don't care if this happens at MIT in the US, or somewhere in Paris. Actually, I take that back, if the US continues its current authoritarian anti-open immigration policy, then I do care intensely that Paris or England or Berlin or wherever should become the center of academic innovation. Just as China's authoritarian closed policies make China unsuitable to be the academic center, Trump's authoritarian closed policies make MIT unsuitable. However Trump is weak, losing power, and in two years we can begin prosecuting all the people in his administration for their lawlessness, cruelty, and inhumanity. The US will rebuild, but it will take a while if we want to rebuild according to our constitution and laws.
Or the knowledge just goes away, the talent wasted.
There's really nothing good about it.
People go to the US because of an abundance of infrastructure and money. Which now goes down.
It's a loss.
If you want to do cutting edge research you need money.
Try to do it in Italy, where an entire university has only one MRI working at 400 Mhz.
Then you go to EPFL, Switzerland, and a single lab has 15, I repeat, 15 .8 GHz MRIs.
Each of those instruments is in multi million $ range and requires expensive staffing and maintenance.
Then you need chemicals, you need an order for 6'000 $ worth of chemicals.
In Italy that's a lengthy and bureaucratic process.
When I was in EPFL, Switzerland, not even as a grad, but master's student, all it took was a half assed email and I would get everything I needed. No questions asked. Zero.
Need lab equipment? Every researcher and student had a "credit card", you'd go to the university shop and buy whatever you needed, no questions asked.
Hell, when I was in EPFL all it took me to get a GTX Titan X from Nvidia was to fill a form with my university email stating I needed it for research (I didn't, I used it for gaming), I had one one weeks later.
Do the same with the university email from Tor Vergata? When you truly need it for research? Laugh.
In US this abundance of resource is even higher, and it compounds.
Need some grad to help you? Her'es the budget. Need this? Have it. Need the most precise instrument of some kind on the planet? Book it.
I don't want to be harsh, but you're taking stances and having opinions on stuff you simply do not understand.
This isn't researchers being greedy, this is researchers understanding that if they want to do meaningful work, unconstrained, or less constrained, by budget reasons there is just a handful of places on the planet, half of them in the US.
I'm doing a PhD in STEM in a major Western European university.
A belligerent part of the world. I hope the US gets better in that regard.