> I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that

Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.

Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.

> Emigrate where? And why do you assume that the country you're gonna emigrate to will have the funds necessay to fund the research?

If the choice is between $0 in the US and >$0 someplace else, you emigrate to >$0 if you want to continue your research.

Europe is the obvious answer. As others have posted, your numbers here are way off. And on the flip side, there's now some major programs actively encouraging this with special grants, support, relocation bonuses: e.g. ATRAE in Spain, EURAXESS, "Choose Europe For Science", Max Planck Transatlantic Programme.

>I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that

Way off, it's way closer, even if we're just talking EU. EU (the body) alone is about 200 billion/year. EU member states are like 1-1.5 trillion/year.

1/10th?

US: $848B (2024)

EU: $508B (2024)

---

UK: $102B (2023)

Switzerland: $22B (2023)

Norway: $8.2B (2024)

OECD "Gross domestic spending on R&D"

That number is for the United States, not the United States government

Europe.

We fund science, research and we have accelerated programs for researchers affected by these kinds of things.

If you're interested, email me (see profile). I have been helping Americans emigrate to Europe (for free) for several years.

I think his main point was that the art of continually licking the right asses to keep funding going is not science.

> USG spends over $900 Billion every year

If you spend $900 Billions on BS you will lose to other countries that only spend 1/100th of that.

Quantity over quality doesn’t work in science because reality doesn’t care who paid how much.

the US used to spend. Now borligarchs decide.

Does the US spend that much anymore? How much are you willing to compromise the integrity of your research to get your slice of what’s left?

[dead]

It was better not perfect but there is value even just in keeping up the pretense

Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).

I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.

Yes but in ways whose solutions admit some level of creativity or ingenuity

These boots are made for walking!

If we aren't funding progress with our tax dollars then what are we even doing?

The chaos is affecting pretty much all areas of science, not just the controversial ones. I work in non-controversial, pretty run-of-the-mill chemistry research and the attacks on the NSF have certainly impacted our funding situation. Very long delays in proposal review, complete pivoting to AI, etc. I have co-workers panicking over the green card changes. And the overall morale is pretty grim everywhere.

Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.

Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.

Well if they want to stop all improvements to their electric car industry that is letting them out compete European, Japanese and US manufacturers, solar panels have clearly not been important to them, and their rocket programs don’t need anyone working on transfer orbits and god forbid anyone describes the materials they test as “diverse”…

You mean Vaccine researchers? Or renewable energy researchers?