The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
Staff being underpaid in academia is nothing new. Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money for funding academics? Instead of a new $100m "student center" and high-rise dorm buildings.
An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
Which tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.
Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
That is the mind hack. People will always assume that the administration has the United States best interest in mind. If people can drop that assumption, they might make a beginning with understanding the firehose of seemingly erratic policy.
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict."
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
So scientists shouldn't be allowed to hold their own political opinions, or organizational leaders shouldn't be allowed to exercise some autonomy with regards to the culture they foster, or educated people shouldn't tend to favor the political tribe that focuses on constructive solutions, or what? What is your specific critique here?
Whatever it might be, it seems like we could have instituted a targeted reform for that specific problem rather than self-immolating our educational institutions and continuing to hand the reigns of world leadership to China.
Have you tried researching the topic? Very quick search:
- Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi expressed a desire for her lab to reflect social justice and actively works to foster a diverse and inclusive environment following events such as George Floyd's murder. (also runs a chem/bio/med lab at Stanford)
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
Can you please name/educate us on some of those game theories and how they apply? (Please don't just point me to prisoners dilemma on wikipedia unless it lays out how it applies to research funding)
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it
Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies
Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company
Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)
Capital didn’t seek quantum mechanics which led to semi conductors which led to computers. Capital didn’t seek weather prediction which led to chaos theory which led to modern control systems for basically everything. And it certainly didn’t seek neural networks for the first half dozen decades they existed. So it seems like capital may have a poor nose for long term reach investment.
I ask again: How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
Capital seeks the best opportunities, like deliberately lying about asbestos in baby powder, producing fraudulent research and continuing to profit off poisoning individuals.
Who got punished for the J&J asbestos issue? Who got punished for cigarettes and their deceptive advertising? And how badly did the Sacklers get slapped for causing the opioid epidemic?
If you're making the argument that they should be punished proportionally to their effects then all of these cases should result in the individuals being jailed for life at bare minimum and their assets forfeited. Yet this hasn't happened. Why?
If it could be profitable, the private sector would fund it.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.
And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
Ehh... I was just making a crass joke that MAGA might end up making America so poor that Americans would be willing to work for terrible factory jobs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.
The state/local gov tend to be responsible for public education funding. in the US federal gov only does <10% of the funding.
US public education spending is also top 5 in the world so I don't think a lack of money is why "Johnny can't read or do math", something else is going on
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.
It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
> who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly
Realistically though, this has nothing to do with geopolitics. This wouldn't be happening if the research community were driving around in trucks with MAGA flags and sleeping with Dear Leader body pillows.
This regime is entirely transactional and it's a howler to pretend otherwise. The academic research community could be dealing literal tons of hard drugs and they'd get a pass as long as they were card carrying party members.
Increasing money supply vs taxation is kinda just misdirection. It's politically disadvantageous to increase the tax % versus just siphoning purchasing power out of cash holders pockets silently and through the back door of increasing money supply.
Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".
> Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.
That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.
I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
My question was from the context of non-research staff looking to provide financial and institutional support to research staff - looks like your resource is useful for researchers but not for me. thanks in any case.
Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.
There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.
DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
>the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.
They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
Children are not important. China has more than enough population to outdo the US in science. But also, the majority of US high end science is done by immigrants, not by people born in the US. Science is international, and the US has destroyed its trust and goodwill with the international community.
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)
A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.
We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).
Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had a very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment was slashed?
How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?
If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?
The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.
For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.
As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.
It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.
Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.
The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.
This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
Times have changed, also, it might be related to the field.
Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
Even if you’re looking outside your field, the prestige of a PHD is offset by the fact that they assume (accurately) you’d rather be elsewhere.
Staff being underpaid in academia is nothing new. Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money for funding academics? Instead of a new $100m "student center" and high-rise dorm buildings.
An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
If universities fund it themselves they might forego some of the usual 30% administrative grift and we get some 40 projects out of it!
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
Legitimate question: why don't you think universities already do this? It's not exactly a novel idea.
It can be proved by deduction based on the rate of increase in tuition
Which tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.
Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
What's not transparent?
We know this information because the colleges give it out. They are transparent.
There's not much the colleges can do if somebody is commenting without researching.
I didn't ask you to prove it. I asked why it wasn't already happening.
This is not how research grants work.
> Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money
That's going away too with the ban on immigration. A large amount of high margin tuition is from overseas students.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> Overseas students are not immigrants.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
No, the Trump administration needs to not cut funding for science that disagrees with their worldview.
They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
Do you genuinely believe that every single research lab is cheating and should thus be punished across the board?
Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict."
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
> Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America.
“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.
Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
I don't even think this one is a bipartisan issue. This just seems to just be coming from the White House.
The article said
> The Senate and House rejected the White House’s proposed budget cuts
Since WH can't control the budget they are changing how it's doled out by giving larger payments to a smaller group.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
> It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor.
Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.
> It helps business.
Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.
Scientists started spouting far-left propaganda. That’s when they lost half of the voters.
So scientists shouldn't be allowed to hold their own political opinions, or organizational leaders shouldn't be allowed to exercise some autonomy with regards to the culture they foster, or educated people shouldn't tend to favor the political tribe that focuses on constructive solutions, or what? What is your specific critique here?
Whatever it might be, it seems like we could have instituted a targeted reform for that specific problem rather than self-immolating our educational institutions and continuing to hand the reigns of world leadership to China.
I find it extremely hard to believe that basic medicine and searching for cures or relieving aging is either leftist or rightist.
Have you tried researching the topic? Very quick search:
- Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi expressed a desire for her lab to reflect social justice and actively works to foster a diverse and inclusive environment following events such as George Floyd's murder. (also runs a chem/bio/med lab at Stanford)
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/One-on-one-with-Car...
- Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science (which includes graduate biology) stops requiring diversity statements for faculty (i.e. they DID require them)
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-faculty-end-mand...
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
Can you please name/educate us on some of those game theories and how they apply? (Please don't just point me to prisoners dilemma on wikipedia unless it lays out how it applies to research funding)
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it
Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies
Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company
Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
awesome, thank you. You've given me some holiday reading at the very least :)
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)
Capital didn’t seek quantum mechanics which led to semi conductors which led to computers. Capital didn’t seek weather prediction which led to chaos theory which led to modern control systems for basically everything. And it certainly didn’t seek neural networks for the first half dozen decades they existed. So it seems like capital may have a poor nose for long term reach investment.
I ask again: How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
Capital seeks the best opportunities, like deliberately lying about asbestos in baby powder, producing fraudulent research and continuing to profit off poisoning individuals.
This is unfair: biotech/pharma companies do valuable work, particularly in translational medicine.
Don't forget tobacco companies lying about cancer and oil and gas companies hiding climate change research.
Sure, but that is an issue of ethics and regulation. Fraud is illegal and should be punished proportionally to it's effects.
Who got punished for the J&J asbestos issue? Who got punished for cigarettes and their deceptive advertising? And how badly did the Sacklers get slapped for causing the opioid epidemic?
If you're making the argument that they should be punished proportionally to their effects then all of these cases should result in the individuals being jailed for life at bare minimum and their assets forfeited. Yet this hasn't happened. Why?
So only opportunities with a path to economic profitability should be researched?
That is a very narrow view of advancing society
Research anything and everything on your own dime. if it's taxpayer's money, then yes, it has to have at least a probability of profitability.
If it could be profitable, the private sector would fund it.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
And if there is a probability of profitability then there is a market to sell that opportunity for capital.
But in a high interest rate environment some ideas just arent worth exploring.
generating private profits are the best use of public money?
As a taxpayer you should go after wasteful military spending, not scientific research.
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
No, they absolutely will not.
Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.
And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
Ehh... I was just making a crass joke that MAGA might end up making America so poor that Americans would be willing to work for terrible factory jobs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That just seems like the overt maggot plan though? Assuming our new Chinese owners will be willing to let us have factories, of course.
>As a taxpayer
So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?
The response (usually) is “OK but whatabout the $X billion we spent on the military?”
Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else
I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.
/r
[1]-https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-...
The state/local gov tend to be responsible for public education funding. in the US federal gov only does <10% of the funding.
US public education spending is also top 5 in the world so I don't think a lack of money is why "Johnny can't read or do math", something else is going on
fix the deficit and kill off the debt? he added $2tn by giving tax cuts to corporations...
I agree. Just because I agree with 1 thing "He" did doesnt mean I agree with everything.
So it's clear that cutting those grants was never about fixing the deficit/debt.
> We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways.
Zero sum thinking.
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
That is not zero sum thinking. It is a classic free rider problem.
The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.
It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
> who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly
Realistically though, this has nothing to do with geopolitics. This wouldn't be happening if the research community were driving around in trucks with MAGA flags and sleeping with Dear Leader body pillows.
This regime is entirely transactional and it's a howler to pretend otherwise. The academic research community could be dealing literal tons of hard drugs and they'd get a pass as long as they were card carrying party members.
1) Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?
Increasing money supply vs taxation is kinda just misdirection. It's politically disadvantageous to increase the tax % versus just siphoning purchasing power out of cash holders pockets silently and through the back door of increasing money supply.
Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".
> Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.
[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
work to restore public trust in science and technology. look at the ways that trust has been lost.
There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.
That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
Trust was "lost" through naked demagoguery.
Why is "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself" off the table?
Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?
It's certainly on the table, I'm only pre-empting it as a clever answer since it's one I'm already aware of.
Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
Become a politician or a lobbyist? Possibly work in a charity that funds research, as a fundraiser for them?
I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.
I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
Move to Europe.
Elaborate?
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/...
My question was from the context of non-research staff looking to provide financial and institutional support to research staff - looks like your resource is useful for researchers but not for me. thanks in any case.
Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.
Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.
There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.
No, they really haven't.
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.
optimizing processes =/= removing goals
DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.
I expect China will pick up the slack.
For basic research, which tends to be non-excludable/non-rival, this isn't even a bad thing! I hope India and other fast-growing nations join them!
Seems like they already do:
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
---
Specially when their research is more hard science focused and spend very little on the soft sciences that tend to get way more funding in the US.
Great. Can I start blaming China for not solving all the worlds problems yet?
Not yet. This is the transitional period where the US is blamed and laughed at and then finally abandoned for China.
Don't you worry. If they do, we will just call them copycats. /s
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
>the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.
They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.
>China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed
...the one that was changed a decade ago?
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
Children are not important. China has more than enough population to outdo the US in science. But also, the majority of US high end science is done by immigrants, not by people born in the US. Science is international, and the US has destroyed its trust and goodwill with the international community.
He was commenting on the use of the present tense word "has".
Yes present tense. The policy has been reversed, but the issue can't be except in the very long run, except possibly through immigration.
He didn't say the policy can't be changed. It was. The issue, not so easily.
???
Gotta stop those people who don't look like us, right?
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
"This programme is not available in your country." (i.e. USA) Oh the irony. You'll have to make the argument yourself, I guess.
What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)
It’s entirely performative
https://archive.md/F42n9
A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-...
Not if you’re a vaccine skeptic and personal friends with the CDC director https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/cdc-grant-controversial-...
More wood behind less arrows.
This is good.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.
We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
You might welcome them all, but you don't have jobs for most of them.
Trust me, every scientist in America has been clawing for every eurpoean research grant opportunity there is. Competition is stiff
> and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!
Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).
Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had a very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment was slashed?
> Everything can be "sold"
How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?
If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?
The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.
For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.
As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.
It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.
Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.
The amount of basic research funded by the private sector has been growing for decades. It is now a large percentage of the total in the US.
Government investment didn’t decline, private investment massively grew. Same thing happened in applied research decades earlier.
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m
Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.
It's like three body problem but fintech chuds are the sophons
Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.
Hey al-Biruni and Ulugh Beg did it, why not?
If you need links for the "substance" part. Investments of Sacks:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...
https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...
Trump relaxes cannabis classification:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...