Six Lines
Research Superpower
Last Friday, Ross Anderson wrote about the rise of China’s scientific research:
If China finally eclipses the United States as the world’s preeminent scientific superpower, there won’t be an official announcement. Neither will there necessarily be a dramatic Promethean demonstration, a bomb flash in the desert, a satellite beeping overhead, a moon landing. It will be a quiet moment, observed by a small, specialized subset of scientists who have forsaken the study of the stars, animals, and plants in favor of a more navel-gazing subject: the practice of science itself.
Worth reading in full.
My quick thoughts as someone who spent more time than most in academia doing research:
Measuring research quality is extraordinarily hard. Just counting published papers doesn’t do much more than encourage practicing scientists to aim for the least publishable unit. There are very, very few measures that I trust here, but the big one is employment data. Countries that employ and support STEM PhDs will have better research outcomes in the long run.
The STEM disciplines have been absolutely dominated by international students for the last 25 years. The only realistic path for continued American dominance in science is to radically change our current approach to immigration, both legal and illegal. This means opening up the H-1B program, finding some sort of reasonable compromise about the various categories of people affected by our historic approaches to illegal immigration, and making a cultural U-turn on just generally hating immigrants and minorities. No smart immigrant wants to live in a country that hates immigrants.
Systemic reform for research funding in the US could help quite a lot here as well. The grant proposal system has real problems that could be addressed if we were willing to try new approaches, but that’s sort of old news. The bigger problem is that it is impossible to trust that a future Trump-like administration won’t make similarly drastic cuts to research funding. So many research projects were killed in medias res that any serious scientist pondering a non-trivial, multi-grant line of research would have to consider options outside of the US. And countries eager to build research programs, including China, could easily make a better offer.
Systemic reforms for research positions in the federal government could also help quite a lot. The US government was once one of the absolute best places to work as a STEM-oriented researcher, and it was the only place to work for whole disciplines of research. That’s a much, much harder case to make now. As Ross points out in the article, tens of thousands of PhDs have left government service, voluntarily or not. The academic community will not forget this sort of employment shock.
The financialization of everything will continue to affect the STEM disciplines, especially basic research. People who can get a PhD in STEM disciplines and want to have some sort of job security or financial security are attracted to positions as quants in the many financialized industries. America is also the place to be for that sort of thing. We can argue about whether or not the financialization of everything is a good idea. In general, I don’t think it is. But the reality is that it’s a real competitor in the market to hire STEM PhD talent. If you’re asking questions about markets, ads, or crypto, then you’re not doing much in the way of basic STEM research.