Comment by zkmon
2 days ago
It sounds more like a parroting of a popular sentiment as a conclusion, rather than providing a data-based assessment. What are the numbers? What's the real impact? How much lead does USA have over it's nearest competition?
The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-...
Far too early to know the exact long term effects but it’s definitely happening.
Is there any metric saying what the proper amount is or is it always “more”? Is there a point where others should do more and the US less?
> With an annual budget of more than $47 billion, NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world. In fiscal year 2023, NIH funding generated an estimated $92.89 billion in economic activity.
https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/impact-nih-research/serving-so...
The US isn’t doing the world a favor by funding this stuff. The country directly benefits from it.
It's totally valid to say we don't have the money to pay for this stuff, but to frame this as "others not doing enough" is hilariously juvenile. We do this because it's good for our economy, our people, and our global industrial dominance. Not charity, lol.
For the year ending May 2024, China released more scientific papers -in English- than the US [1]. We have been on a decline for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
[edit] I think that list is total, not just for a single year. Still telling though.
USA has a huge lead in the deployed technologies such as chips, software and defence tech. Research papers might not be a good metric.
That's the thing about investing in scientific research, especially toward the basic science end of the spectrum - the real benefit is seen years down the line after technology transfer to public-private partnerships and private industry. It can take many years to decades to see the long-term benefit, which is why it needs government backing. It's not sustainable for most players in the private sector to invest research that is high risk (with respect to applicability), long term, or both. This also makes it easy to cast doubt on the value of research being done now or recently - we don't have a ton of concrete results to show for it yet. The best numbers to look at would probably be emigration / immigration of PhDs, papers published in top-tier journals and the universities associated with them, and where conferences are being held.
I suspect that's a little tricky to quantify, so we're left with anecdotal observations. I would be surprised if anyone looking around objectively could say feel the U.S. was gaining any ground.
Seems like a lot of people were getting a lot of easy money, and now they are unhappy.
>Seems like a lot of people were getting a lot of easy money, and now they are unhappy.
who? can you be more specific than your generic "scientists" response?
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