Conservatives hate science. This is why they slashed budgets to science agencies, and put lunatic ideologues in charge of the NIH, NSF, and the environment, with the clear intent to cut the knees out from under science education and policy. Jessica Knurick is precisely right on this matter.
You can also see it in the staffing of all of these critical science organizations.
It’s like science got pushed off a cliff when Trump took office.
Perhaps you would like me to reassure you that once we throw the rascals out and elect responsible politicians who respect the role science has played in American prosperity, we’ll just hire them back. No, sorry, this isn’t like rehiring workers at the Amazon warehouse. A science hire is accompanied by a large investment in equipment and personnel. I’m at a small liberal arts college; when I was hired here, I was also offered tens of thousands of dollars in startup money to set up my lab the way I needed to be able to do my work. I was dirt cheap. I’ve known colleagues who were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even a few who got somewhere near a million dollars, to cover the ancillary costs of setting up a major lab.
It’s not as if a custom lab and technicians and instruments are sitting around waiting for someone with the expertise to do cutting edge research to show up. This stuff needs to be assembled at great cost to fill a need.
The people are also not generic tools you can swap in and out. We pay science staff peanuts for years, and we hang in there to do the work we love — we generally don’t have a massive financial cushion to weather heavy shifts in employment. Some of those laid off personnel are going to leave the country, looking for work in a nation that doesn’t disrespect science, while most are going to simply give up, get a job at that Amazon warehouse or switch to writing software. Their hearts are broken by the American science establishment. They’re not going to revisit this occupation shown to be willing to discard them if an orange moron gets elected or a con man with half his brain eaten by worms gets appointed.
That is a graph of disillusionment. It would take decades and a new generation to repair it, if we even had the will to bring science back. Given that the damage is being delivered right down to support for grade school education, don’t even count on a single generation being enough.
It’s not just a few people being let go. It’s the demolition of a cultural heritage of science.
The world changed at the end of WWII, when only the USA had both the resources and the will to invest in science. Every statistic now only looks back that far, and we NEVER look back to before then.
This is like that. Future generations will only look at science as post 2025. Our 80 year history of leadership will cease to be even a memory. The economic stimulus from it will not come again in the lifetime of any American adults. Sad.
Like so many other things, science takes a hit when capitalists try to run a state like it’s a corporation. If scientists were so smart, after all, they would be the CEOs, not scientists!
This will always be the advantage a country like China has, with a strong central authority that actually values scientific progress.
Mentioning China – when this communist power with > 1 million in concentration camps send taikonauts to the moon, it will signal the American Century is finally over.
In theory this could motivate another “Sputnik scare” and massive investments in science and education… only it will not.
.
Even the Republicans know China is not invading USA. And as the wealthy clique is insulated from the economic slump as China takes over, they have zero motivation to do anything, beyond inviting Chinese oligarchs for business meetings.
This is the standard conduct of the local elite towards colonisers, except the Chinese are too smart to physically annex anything this side the pacific.
The USA used to be the destination for the worlds top scientists. This is over and will never be reclaimed regardless of whether we restore funding and the infrastructure for science. This was a key piece of US soft power.
I still have my copy of Chris Mooney’s ‘The Republican War on Science’ and I’ll be getting it out and re-reading it.
Beholder, please reconsider on the strong central authorities. Remember Nazi Rassenkunde, Lysenkoism and the insistence that all science must conform with Marxist-Leninist Dialectical Materialism. Capitalist Britain was home to James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac and Charles Darwin and others. When strong central authorities impose their rigid ideologies Science has to come to heel.
Once again, I’ll repost the article on how important science is to the USA.
If you’ve seen it fine, don’t read it again.
It’s basically, the driver of our economy and civilization.
This is how you increase GDP per capital.
Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a year ago) position in the world.
Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we will just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
@2. Trump helping Troll Beholder (THTB) :
There is ZERO chance this would be happening under a Kamala Harris, Democratic party Presidency and Congress.
We all know that. Even if you, THTB, never have the decency to admit it and face it or be honest here.
This is what YOU along with the other Trumpists including via Stein & other third party spoilers and non-voters caused.
This is on you.
Because of your Trump helping efforts for years here especially election years attacking the ONLY actual alternative non-fascist party and its leaders whilst deliberately ignoring what the Fascist party was & what it threatened and meant. Every bit of what Trump has done, is doing and will still do. You cannot say you weren’t warned.
Any regrets now Trump enabler & bad faith troll?
Still think the two and only two choices were in your words “equally irredeemably evil?”
You have oceans of metaphorical blood on your hands. Oceans of blood, pain, misery, horror that will only ever get higher and deeper. The continuing impacts on all of our shared planet and species and world for the rest of time are incalculable and beyond any superlatives and emphasis.
There really are NO words to do it justice.
But I guess Silentbob will now cry for you and attack me for telling this perfectly clear truth and trying to hold you in the slightest way accountable.
@ 3. birgerjohansson : Except the consequences of Climate Inaction and Global Overheating aren’t going to respect any borders and are coming faster than any of us likely appreciate and really know.
The PRC is fucked there.
So are the rest of us.
So staggeringly badly.
What I just posted explains the critical role of science in the US’s dominant position in the world.
Science isn’t just an important driver, it is the most important driver of our society.
It isn’t optional, it is absolutely necessary.
The tl;dr version.
.1. US GDP per capita has increased about 9-fold in the last century.
That is income and wealth in other words.
.2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.
.3. The link between science spending and progress and per capita GDP is simple.
Advances in science and technology are about the only way to increase productivity, i.e. output per worker.
Just increasing the number of workers doesn’t do anything. Output increases but output per worker stays the same.
By attacking science, Trump and the GOP will eventually wreck the USA.
In won’t happen all at once, but the USA will gradually just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
You can already see it happening. China, a few decades ago, a basket case failed nation, now leads the USA in a lot of areas.
More really bad news.
Thank you, Trump.
Thank you, Idiot Republicans.
Thank you, media owners who paved the way.
.
“We Just Crossed the Debt Death Spiral | 128% Debt-to-GDP and 2-5 Years Until Collapse ”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=_EjnkbBZiWM
What’s even more worrisome is the effect this will have a decade to a decade and a half from now — just beyond the horizon for what might be foreseeable (in detail) as “immediate scientific needs.” By suppressing the current research programs, we’re also suppressing the postdocs, the grad students, the ambitions of advanced undergrads… so they either won’t be there or will be lower on the learning curve themselves at precisely the time they’d be not setting up their own labs, but moving out of the setup phase into being “highly productive,” established, respected scholars ready to be mentors to yet the next generation.
tl;dr Infrastructure — especially infrastructure of people — takes time, and when it fails or isn’t maintained it leaves obvious-to-those-paying-attention but seldom-acknowledged chasms into which other things can fall.
Maybe if we had more science and better science/math education, whoever made that graph might’ve noticed the figures on the north side of that chart are all somehow lopped off to single digits.
It’s like science got pushed off a cliff when Trump took office.
??? Unless I totally misread that chart, it shows all the really heavy cuts happened in the last year of the Biden administration (or in the budget for the year before, taking effect in ’24).
@12, yes the top two values on the ordinate should be 10 and 15, not 0 and 5. Also I was at first confused by the labels on the abscissa. The last value represents the changes for 2025 from the previous year 2024, thus 2024 staffing minus 2025 staffing.