
Nearly a fifth of scientists are considering abandoning the U.S. - mvs
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/29/nearly_a_fifth_of_scientists_are_considering_abandoning_the_u_s/
======
mattzito
I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in
this country.

But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the
percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was
reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country
when Obama was (re)elected.

People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something.

EDIT: just to be clear, because a couple of the comments sound like maybe
think I'm making the opposite point: I think the metric of "18%" considering
to leave is a silly metric. I think that at any given time, even when research
is "good" or "better than now", you're probably somewhere near that number,
especially (as one of the commenters pointed out) a lot of people who do
research in this country are from other countries. The only way we could
actually derive meaning from this statistic would be to have a time-based
reference (i.e. compare what percentage plan to leave this year vs. 5 vs. 10
years ago), or to switch the metric - measure how many people actually left
last year vs. 5 years ago.

~~~
pyre
> the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama
> was (re)elected.

I don't get this. Most of these people were presumably conservatives, that
were unhappy with Obama's election, but at the same time, most of their
ideological/political views would seem incompatible with living anywhere other
than the US.

[ I realize that this is probably horrible stereotyping, but I would be
interested to talk to someone that held this view. ]

~~~
mattzito
It is mostly a twitter joke that idiots said, along the lines with the (fairly
small as an actual percentage of the american populace) who said, "Keep
government out of my medicare!" (medicare is a government healthcare program).

I was being more tongue in cheek than anything.

------
scythe
Story time? I'm a graduate studentat a US college. I study quantum computing,
and have for the past year. I went into quantum computing despite the primary
investigator being unsure of HHS funding situation, because it was something I
had wanted to study for a very long time and I liked the opportunity too much
to pass it up.

In July, my advisor told me that our funding had been retroactively taken by
the sequester. He had lost funding for 4 graduate students and two postdocs. I
am currently transferring to another school as a result of this.

The most promising locations are nearby Toronto and Madrid. _Spain_. They're
broke, but they still fund science better than we do. I guess.

~~~
mturmon
Sequestration has been a particularly blunt trauma. Because of the sudden-ness
of it, it hurt some areas particularly badly. Also, it was a particularly
stupid action, like a tantrum on the part of the Congress. Sorry about what
happened to you.

------
rayiner
What a shitty article. I hit "back" when the article went to the trouble of
putting up an entire chart to show: "spending on R&D has essentially been flat
since 2011 across several countries including the U.S."

~~~
lambda
Well, remember that the chart was "change in percentage of GDP". GDP is fairly
large, and scientific funding is fairly small relative to that, so the change
in the percentage of GDP is going to be a fairly small value. The US's GDP is
$14.99 trillion; so a -.05% change in scientific funding represents a change
of about $7.5 billion, while in the meantime, China had an increase in
scientific funding of close to the same amount (.1% of their GDP is $7.3B).

Now, they don't say how much that is relative to what the US or China spend
overall on science. But still, that's a fairly big change either way.

If you take a look at the linked report
[http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Re...](http://www.asbmb.org/uploadedFiles/Advocacy/Events/UPVO%20Report.pdf),
it's even worse if you expand the time scale. Between 2010 and the estimated
spending for 2013, there's a drop of more than $20B in scientific funding,
from nearly $160B to less than $140B. That's a noticeable change; and based on
the percent GDP figure, it's not just because the economy has been down, it's
gone down more than the economy as a whole.

In fact, in constant dollars, taking inflation into account, funding has been
declining since 2004, as funding levels were stagnant for a while and not
keeping up with inflation. Now they are actively declining.

------
beloch
It's not just economics. The key to excellence in science is to attract the
best, keep the best, and give them what they need to do their best.

Researchers start out as grad-students, and the U.S. is a lot less friendly to
foreign students than it used to be. Whether it's increased trouble with
permits or being treated like terrorists by the TSA, fewer foreign grad
students are staying in the U.S.. Many students considering a move to the U.S.
are dissuaded after just one conference on U.S. soil! Overly nationalistic
individuals from other countries can take some joy in this since it means
better minds for their own nations, but science is a global endeavor and what
lessens one nation lessens us all!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Researchers start out as grad-students, and even American-born grad-students
now despair of ever finding real research jobs in the USA.

~~~
beloch
That's common in most countries these days with very few exceptions. What few
post-doc positions exist are viewed as a transitory positions and aren't very
well paid (considering the qualifications required). If you want to do pure
research without moving around the world constantly you can just forget about
it! Either you get on the tenure-track or you go into industry and figure out
how to steal money on the stock-exchange or make people click on banner-ads.
Unfortunately, there just aren't that many tenured positions available.

You're probably a technocrat. I'm one too. I firmly believe the U.S. would be
far better off if they shut down the NSA entirely and sank those billions into
pure, curiosity driven research. Unfortunately, we are a tiny, tiny minority.
Most people are very risk-averse and would rather guard a hovel than build a
mansion!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Technocrat in the sense that I want to abolish democracy and have the
government run by smart science people in the interest of smart science
people?

No, I'm not. Bad Things start happening when you take self-governance away
from people.

EDIT: But that dodges the point! How can people have the balls to complain
about too little science being done while making life a miserable shlep for
those of us who actually choose to do science?

~~~
beloch
Democracy would be nice, but I'd rather have a technocracy than a plutocracy,
which is arguably what the U.S. really has right now.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I basically don't see a way to have a well-run country and avoid democracy.

A well-run country requires mature and capable people. People cannot really be
mature and capable without participating responsibly in the world around them,
including being able to make mistakes. It seems to me like people have to be
able to participate in government, or they eventually get degraded into a mad,
stupid rabble. The mad, stupid rabble then topple whatever oligarchical
government they have and their country collapses from an inegalitarian
oligarchical shithole into an _utterly insane and incompetent_ shithole.

Certainly I think that it would be better to have a form of government that
can quickly and rationally translate voters' expressed policy preferences into
consequences. Problem is, existing systems are bad enough at even letting
voters express policy preferences, let alone imposing the consequences quickly
and thoroughly enough that voters start learning how to vote!

And yeah, you could try to separate the "brain" and "heart" functions of
voting, by having voters vote on ideological/moral preferences and then
letting them be translated into policies by a technocratic government. That's
what the traditional notion of a democratic republic (and social democracy,
and really much of Western democracy) actually tries to do. Problem is, that
too has demonstrably led to a somewhat-more-benign form of oligarchy when
implemented, albeit one in which some of the oligarchs are reasonably
benevolent and it ends up being the politically degraded voters who ruin the
country by making bad value decisions (like the Tea Party!) for which they are
never held responsible.

And that doesn't even start into the problems of _malignant_ oligarchical
elites in our current democratic republics, who have largely decided, "Voters
are stupid, so I'm going to govern on the class interests of myself and my
social peers!"

------
ArbitraryLimits
Aren't more than a fifth of PhD holders in the U.S. foreign born? The story of
immigrants returning home is a lot different from a story of native-born
Americans abandoning their country.

~~~
wtallis
I think it's easier to not be alarmed about foreign-born PhDs returning home
(if that is indeed where they go when they leave the us) than if it were US
natives leaving, but I'm not sure that it's really that much less worrisome.
Either way, smart people are deciding that they can earn a better life with
their skills in a different country. If it's foreign-born PhDs returning home,
it really only says that the natives are staying because of the difficulties
of getting started in a new country, not that the long-term outlook of moving
isn't bad.

~~~
gwern
> I think it's easier to not be alarmed about foreign-born PhDs returning home
> (if that is indeed where they go when they leave the us) than if it were US
> natives leaving, but I'm not sure that it's really that much less worrisome.

It is a very different situation, and the meaningfulness is likewise
different. For a foreign-born PhD holder, they have family back there, they'll
become bigger fish in a smaller pond, they already know the language, probably
have citizenship, are acculturated, may not have kids and wives deeply
embedded into American culture & communities, etc. For an American-born PhD
holder, most of these will be false. The cost to an American of moving
permanently overseas is, on average, going to be vastly higher to them.

When you hear of some foreign-born PhD holders on the margin deciding to
return home, it's no big deal, and is adequately explained by very small
shifts in the rewards of being in the US and the rewards of going home. (And a
survey means even less.) People simply don't want to leave their home
countries for very good reasons. Think of how few Jews left Nazi Germany
before it was too late, even when the writing was literally on the wall (in
the form of anti-semitic graffiti).

When you hear of a lot of _American_ scientists leaving America permanently,
_then_ it's time to start panicking.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_When you hear of a lot of American scientists leaving America permanently,
then it 's time to start panicking._

I got the hell out of the USA to go to grad school.

One thing that really helped is that when I visited one of my two grad-school
options, the one _inside_ the USA, the current grad-students told me there was
no hope of ever getting a permanent research position, and that we could all
expect to just drift from post-doc to post-doc before being discarded.

And this was a _very_ good department for the field we were discussing. I
_adore_ these guys and their research.

At Technion, not only my advisor but other graduate students seem to feel they
can safely assume they'll eventually find a well-paying industrial, academic,
or governmental job with a Technion grad degree.

So, yeah, funny thing, making aliyah may well have been a good career move,
which _basically never happens_. Oh, and speaking of antisemitic graffiti,
once when I visited my cosmopolitan college town of Amherst, I found neo-Nazi
graffiti about the _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_ on an alley wall, and
learned that UMass Amherst has a secret neo-Nazi club.

Be a little bit afraid.

~~~
nandemo
Did you have to serve, though?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
You mean in Tzahal? I haven't been drafted yet, but I will be. It's really not
that much trouble.

------
wallflower
Economics -> Research priorities

"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me
can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to
war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized
that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and
promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to
World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world.
Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the
most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that
economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a
rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public
scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to
support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...

People believe these things...because they have faith."

From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner(and the genius inventor
of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".

Side note: The book, overall, is ok - some of the stories/opinions he holds
are "alternative" and a refreshing perspective.

~~~
galvanist
What are you trying to say about the linked story?

~~~
wallflower
Research allocations by discipline are politically motivated.

------
fnordfnordfnord
The turning point as far as I am concerned was when Leon Lederman resigned as
Director of Fermilab to work more on the LHC.

~~~
acadien
Yet another high energy physicist who thinks HEP is the only science being
done. /condensedMatterPhysicistRant

~~~
14113
ah, but HEP is the one where you can write the funding proposals for the big
shiny toys, which the uni can show off.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I want to make some clever/witty comment here, but science funding is just too
messed up these days. To be honest, we HEP folks (at my Uni) had to borrow the
toys from the condensed matter folks just to do our homework. They had several
SEM, TEM machines, we had none, the machines are quite handy. Also, condensed
matter folk make the best wires and magnets (ever see a 5HP motor that can fit
in your hand?), but, HEP folk try hard not to care about details like that.
Nope, if you want to see cool science-ey stuff, talk to a condensed matter
physicist or a material scientist, a fluid dynamics guy, or even (gasp) a
chemist. If you ask a HEP guy, he'll just show you pictures of himself
standing on a huge metal scaffold looking thing with a bunch of wires sticking
out of it. That's his experiment, which he visits two or three times per year,
and which is probably located in another country).

Here just for fun, a few more (non accelerator) HEP proposals:

    
    
      1. Let's dig a really deep hole, and fill it with big tanks of distilled and purified Perrier, photomultiplier tubes[2], wires, some soda straws, and the most expensive amplifiers[1] we can get our hands on. 
    
      2. Let's do it again, this time under a mountain.
    
      3. At the South Pole.
    
      4. And in Canada.
    
      5. At the bottom of the ocean?
    
      6. All of the above, but this time, in close proximity to a Nuke-yoo-lar Reee-acter[3]
      

(I worked in HEP for almost 10 years, but not as a physicist)

[1] Also, lots of FPGA's. No, wait ASIC's (FPGA's are too slow and expensive).
Oh, and High Voltage. Oh, and flammable gases!

[2] If you're Japanese, do it twice! (see: the Super-K PMT disaster)

------
RougeFemme
I'm confused. . .I agree that we should be spending more on scientific
research. And I understand that, according to the article, we have reduced our
spending on scientific research as a % of GDP. But. . .we are still spending
more in real dollars than any other country. So. . .where are those scientists
planning to go. . .when other countries are spending less in real dollars?

------
zeruch
I find the metric questionable, or maybe established poorly (there is a strong
difference between "considering the idea as a far flung possible track" and a
visceral near-line option)

------
daemonk
[http://vimeo.com/4798314](http://vimeo.com/4798314)

------
larrydag
That's great but what is the $ of private funding per country?

------
gmuslera
The remaining 4/5 of self-claimed scientists will stay because they must keep
denying climate change and defending intelligent design.

