

Some US scientists consider moving overseas to continue their research - ekm2
http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetraedupree/2013/09/25/us-scientists-are-leaving-the-country-and-taking-the-innovation-economy-with-them/

======
spodek
The writing on the wall became apparent to me with the 1993 cancellation of
the Superconducting Super Collider, when I was getting my PhD in physics. I
didn't know the numbers for a cost-benefit analysis, but I couldn't then nor
can I now see cancellation as helpful to the U.S. The U.S. would have stayed
way ahead of the rest of the world in particle physics and all the
accompanying jobs, discoveries, and innovation. Instead we look to the rest of
the world for leadership.

The Forbes article paints a picture of a United States full of ambition and
curiosity driving innovation. That part exists, but it has just as long been a
country of puritanism, self-righteousness, and fundamentalism.

The article points to politics as a major problem. That politics reflects this
tradition among the people. A large fraction of the population here genuinely
dislikes science, no matter how much they like the computers and cd players it
brought.

I grew up liking idealism because I thought I was right about so many things.
I since dropped my need to be right a priori in favor of _what works_ after
testing. Politics in this country does have an idealistic view of the
individual -- each person should do for him or herself and anyone helping them
will decrease their ability to achieve and lower their motivation. Healthcare,
welfare, education, and so on are viewed by a large block of voters as
detrimental to the nation. We, as a nation if not readers of this site, stick
to this principle in the face of nearly the entire world providing evidence to
the contrary.

We put down other countries for doing things against our ideals, saying they
don't work, even as they pass us in countless measures of quality of life and
community.

Choosing idealism in the face of contrary evidence of what works is a recipe
for disaster.

~~~
T-A
"jobs, dicoveries, and innovation" from particle physics? Really?

I'll go with jobs, but only tax-financed ones. I'll go, tentatively, with
discoveries, although everything to come out of the LHC so far is simply
confirmation of the same old Standard Model we've known since the 70s. The SSC
would have been able to probe higher energies, but as things are standing,
there is no indication of new physics; if it exists, it could easily be out of
range for both the LHC and the hypothetical SSC.

More to the point, the economic value of those discoveries is almost certain
to be 0, for simple reasons of scale.

As for innovation, what has particle physics brought which would not equally
well be brought by any number of other large scale technological projects? We
all know the "WWW invented at CERN" story, but surely we also all realize that
the physics input to the WWW was exactly 0, that any large organization
needing to handle large number of documents over a heterogeneous network would
have come up with something similar, that others probably did, and that the
real reason CERN's solution took off was it's being free open source?

Particle physics is a luxury. At best, it's pursued for reasons of
intellectual curiosity. Trying to portray it as an economic engine is not
going to convince anyone worth convincing.

~~~
TYPE_FASTER
You know...I just don't think that's the case. We can't predict what products
or societal changes particle physics will result in until we actually do the
research (the Schrodinger's Cat of research?).

One thing is for sure: if we don't do the research, we won't know any more,
and we won't have gained any further understanding of the universe. I just
don't think understanding our universe, and the world we live in, is a luxury.

------
yummyfajitas
This might be as bad as the time Bush was reelected and all the scientists
moved to Canada! Or when all those hardworking small business owners fled the
country after Obama's election - we still haven't recovered from that one.

In all seriousness, the title should be fixed. Scientists telling a survey
they might leave != scientists leaving.

Incidentally, here is data on science funding over time. For anyone wanting to
make political points (which appears to be everyone else commenting so far),
the data probably doesn't map onto your narrative all that well.

[http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf](http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf)

[http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf](http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf)

~~~
timr
_" For anyone wanting to make political points (which appears to be everyone
else commenting so far), the data probably doesn't map onto your narrative all
that well."_

Right. Because it's not like _you 're_ trying to make a (conservative)
political point every time I see one of your comments.

The problem with the data you've cited is that it actually shows the problem
you're dismissing: science funding has declined in real terms (let alone
inflation-adjusted terms) since the end of the Clinton administration. There's
been a huge bloodletting -- across the board -- over the last 13 years. An
entire generation of US scientists has been decimated by pointless budget
cuts.

If you don't know anything at all about science, you might look at the overall
trend of this graph and say: "science funding has gone up since 1976, so shut
up and stop whining". This is the simpleton's interpretation of the graph. A
more nuanced interpretation is that we invested billions of dollars into
training of new scientists starting in the Clinton administration (~1996), and
right about the time those new scientists hit the point in their careers when
they needed funding to really get their labs started (~2000), we stranded
them. There's an entire generation of scientists with structural under-
employment because of this phenomenon, and yes, they're leaving the country (I
personally know a few who have, and I can't fault their reasoning. You go
where you can work. If I were still doing science, I'd probably be gone, too.)

But that's not even the most important story. An _intelligent_ observer looks
at this graph and says: the US budget for 2013 is _$3.8 TRILLION_. We spend
_$600 BILLION_ on the department of defense, and nearly _$900 BILLION_ on
Social Security (aka: old people who contribute almost nothing to the growth
of the economy). Yet we're trying to "save money" by shaving a few tens of
billions (that's 0.8% of total federal spending, in case you're bad at math)
off of the one tiny part of our government that has consistently delivered
outsized real returns to the economy. Any economist -- conservative or liberal
-- will tell you that you don't make your budget by nibbling at the smallest
line items while ignoring big expenses.

This is what we call "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Stupid,
pointless, and definitely _not_ conservative.

~~~
yequalsx
Your response is excellent. I do however have one nitpick. Social Security is
not a budget expense. I know it's listed as one but it shouldn't be. Social
Security is an actuarially sound self-funded pension system. There is a slight
under funding right now however its payments are not budgetary items.

~~~
timr
A fair point. I just went to the FY2013 federal budget numbers, but didn't
think about the fact that social security has a rather large tax of its own,
and is therefore (mostly) "funded".

That said, every dollar we spend is a dollar that we could be spending on
something else, so I think it's still fair to consider the expense of social
security relative to other things we buy. We obviously can't abandon old
people, but if someone said to me "we should find a way to cut social security
by 0.8% to restore science funding", I'd be inclined to think it was a good
idea, all other things being equal.

I'm definitely not a doctrinaire liberal -- I think we should have a social
safety net (including things like single-payer health insurance), but I think
we have plenty of other places we can look to balance the books before we
start cutting into science and technology.

------
eliteraspberrie
The title isn't descriptive of the article. The author discusses serious
issues with decreasing funding of science in the US, but there is no exodus of
scientists.

Let's hope Mars can be the national (I include Canada because of the close
relationship) project that fuels science and innovation for our generation.

~~~
VLM
"there is no exodus of scientists."

If there's one thing American's like its creating their personal identity
solely using their job title. I believe the article assumes domestic readers
know this peculiarity. The article is full of "Fifty-five percent know a
colleague who has lost a job or expects to soon." and “I have just laid off my
technician and will lose my postdoc in six months,”

There are no open jobs, and those unemployed workers will have to do
"something" if they intend to eat and obtain medical care and shelter. So I
would assume once they're hired as day care workers or bartenders or waiters,
displacing the mere high school diploma holders, they'll no longer be
considered scientists, but be considered taxi drivers or whatever.

There should be data on numbers employed, or fraction of the population
employed, or salaries in those fields. For example if there were an extreme
shortage of biology grads, you'd expect to see starting salaries for the DNR
around $200K or so. Oh wait, most of those grads end up at Starbucks.

------
pazimzadeh
I'm having a hard time finding any data that support the conclusions of this
article.

My mom is an immunologist, and in 1999 my family moved from France to the US
due to better opportunities for her as a scientist.

~~~
anigbrowl
Sick and aging people are a growth industry for the next 20-30 years, thanks
to the demographic bulge the country experienced following WW2 resulting in a
large and wealthy generation known as the 'baby boomers,' who are now retiring
_en masse_. Other developed economies had similar demographic bulges, but none
large as the US or with the same sort of competitive medical services market.
As I pointed out above, funding for health research (through the NIH) has
tripled over the last 25 years.

The picture is not as rosy for scientists outside the medical field.

------
kaila
It's not just the funding. The politics in science (I don't know about
internationally, but definitely here in the US) can be pretty ridiculous.

------
VLM
In the old days, as a scientist, if you studied hard and worked hard, before
you got downsized for being too old, you might make local management rich.
They happen to own the government. No great surprise the feds back student
loans and encourage the myth of a STEM shortage, feed more minds into the
gristle mill. You don't need some kind of actively managed centrally
controlled conspiracy, you just need individual actors following their own
pocketbooks.

In the modern era, lets say post 1990, as a scientist, if you studied hard and
worked hard, before you got downsized for being too old, you might make some
factory owner in China who stole your idea and research, and the Chinese .gov
bribe takers, very rich. The local management makes all their money off non-
scientific stuff like social networks and chat programs, so they certainly
don't need science, they've pivoted out of the physical market and left it for
the Chinese. Because the rich guys own the government, the .gov also don't
care much anymore.

The best hope for modern scientists is to hope for sponsorship / patronage
from the Chinese government and hope they can outperform the more numerous
locals. Good Luck, you'll need it.

------
DanielBMarkham
Jiminy cricket, guys, enough with the linkbait on HN already.

1 in 5 scientists have considered leaving the U.S. That's the news here, if
there is news. By way of comparison, another recent study shows 9% of the
total population has considered leaving. People consider lots of things, and
surveys show all kinds of nifty trends, like the percentage of people who
believe we have been visited by aliens, or those thinking the moon landing was
faked -- both of which, last I checked, had more traction in the public than
the idea of leaving the country. People believe weird shit and hold
interesting opinions. Film at 11.

So the title doesn't match the essay. But wait! That's not all! The body of
the text, supposedly from a non-partisan viewpoint, is pretty much an attack
on one of the political parties in the U.S. I won't spoil the surprise for
you, but I bet you can guess.

Among the shifting and meandering logic, we get a nice confusion of whether or
not funding equals science (the two are not necessarily related) and a nice
slam across corporate America's face with the old "They're just in it for the
profits" routine.

All fairly normal and pedestrian rhetoric, but nothing much newsworthy,
nothing with a supporting argument for the thesis, and nothing, frankly, that
interesting. Unless you want to make a call for political action as part of
supporting some political message, which this author does. That's great, but
I'm not sure what to do with it on HN. Argue politics with all the usual
players taking up the usual roles? Not so much. At least for me.

