Tide of International Science Moving Against US, EU 302
explosivejared writes "The Economist has a story on the increasing scientific productivity of countries like China, India, and Brazil relative to the field's old guards in America, Europe, and Japan. Scientific productivity in this sense includes percent of GDP spent on R&D and the overall numbers of researchers, scholarly articles, and patents that a country produces. The article notes increasing levels of international collaboration on scholarly scientific articles in leading journals. From the article: '[M]ore than 35% of articles in leading journals are now the product of international collaboration. That is up from 25% 15 years ago — something the old regime and the new alike can celebrate.'" Note that the "old guard" are still firmly in the lead on these measures of scientific prowess, but the growth rate is higher in the newcomer states.
patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anybody in the US (Score:2, Insightful)
Ever done this [youtube.com]? How long would it take, do you think, it would take to rebuild a place like, say, oh, I don't know, New Orleans?
Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a great idea.
Instead of making college free like other countries, let's raise the cost of going to college so high that nobody can afford it.
Instead, we'll let them take out loans that will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.
We'll make the interest rates so high that they'll never be able to pay it off.
And to stop them from going bankrupt like businessmen or anybody else who is overwhelmed by debt, we'll make it illegal for them to go bankrupt.
(Note to self: Don't forget to underpay science teachers and destroy teachers' unions.)
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, one of the other measures of "productivity" was the amount of money spent. That's not what "productivity" means.
The number of published papers *that get cited by others* would be a much better metric.
Yep... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? Increasing a baseline of 10 by 1 is 10% growth. Increasing a baseline of 1000 by 10 is 1% growth. Even if the metric is valid, which would you take?
Re:Just too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's also have society not value science and let's put superstitious thought on equal ground - say "Intelligent Design" or some other such nonsense on par with Evolution. Or have folks poo-poo a rational explanation because the idea of reincarnation just fits the "facts" so much better. And when someone who tries to put the rational view forward and discount the superstition, let's call that person "intolerant" of others beliefs.
There! Now, I am going to pray to the almighty Zeus - the creator and master of ALL gods - so that HE'll forgive all this science non-sense and the worship of the mythical God of Abraham.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
We should support Teachers; however, My 8 year old student should also have the benefit of a Union.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The US needs to change its financial industry's philosophy of squeezing every penny out of its own people rather than increasing the productivity out of its real investments. People are not their investment, they are their junkies.
Re:But is anyone reading their output? (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the fact that China, India, Brazil and a host of other countries are trying to shed their 'third world' moniker, I would both expect and accept the fact that these countries are starting to do more research.
I'm not sure how anyone expects them to improve their technology base otherwise unless it's to simply to buy everything from the US / UK / EU. Where's the fun in that? Furthermore, it's not like the entrenched powers are keen on sharing much of what we know with other countries. So what the hell do you expect them to do? You can't download everything from the Internet.
And besides, the US really needs this to occur. We need some scary boogeyman (preferably foreign) to create some sort of gap that we have to fill lest the American Way of Life become endangered. I am really hoping that the Chinese get a viable manned space program going in a few years so we can 'catch up'.
Re:Just too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Chinese science (Score:5, Insightful)
It is well known in the academic field that if you keep sending your crappy paper to journals, it will eventually get published. And I can tell you that I review a LOT a crap those days. Measuring papers is stupid,, it won't discriminate good papers from bad papers. The editors are supposed not to publish bad papers, but eventually they will. There is no good (IMHO) to discriminate those. So let's not use the number of paper as a metric of how good countries are at science.
In which country do people go for their study if they ARE going to another country looks like a much better metric to me. And let's face it, no one goes to india, china or brazil. It might come and I wish that eventually they will. I wish those country will produce good science. But let's face it. Right now, they have 20 years to catch up.
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own, except where indicated as a group task or in cases where one needs it explained.
Not enough info (Score:4, Insightful)
I realize the linked article is in the Economist - but there's very little information regarding the methodology behind UNESCO's conclusions. What little that is there leads me to believe they're just doing bulk counting without regard to quality.
From what I've seen (FWLIW I work in a university engineering department), the top minds of countries such as India and China do their best to get out of there. They take faculty positions in the US; they go to Europe; or they go to Taiwan or Japan.
And while the article seems to imply that the lack of citation of China's journals from the western world might be some degree of latent racism, it provides zero evidence to support that conclusion. I am also left to wonder why Indian and Chinese scientists working in the west don't seem to have that problem.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"Making college free" - you mean using tax dollars to pay the tuition for... everyone? As it stands, probably 50% of the people who show up for class at university should have settled for trade school. Instead, they will spend 5-6 years getting a philosophy or art degree and then working as an assistant manager at Borders. I don't want to subsidize this any more than I already have to (interest deferred school loans).
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:2, Insightful)
"Likewise, school work is to be done on ones own"
Why? What if someone is actually helping you and explaining to you how to do the work so that you can later do it yourself? If they are cheating and merely copying answers without learning the material, it will show. It's their education and their own fault.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Has anybody in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Is concrete required in a steel framed building? And please, I hope you didn't expect the video to show every detail... The inspections could have been continuous throughout the process. For one thing, it's an early experiment. Improvements will be made. You seem to believe that their past history is a sure indicator of future progress. Stagnation is not universal. It's highly localized when considering the global scale. Right now some people are entering a dark period, and others are just coming out of one. Personally I don't care who does these things. I just like to see it get done.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
People should be responsible for their actions. This includes the debt they accumulate. We shouldn't have to legislate to the lowest common denominator.
Re:some us schools think collaboration = cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, many teachers agree that student can work together on homework to figure out the approach to a problem, as long as they are not copying actual solutions (i.e. once the approach becomes clear, they stop and finish the problem independently, before moving on to the next problem). The vast majority of my teachers actively encouraged doing that, but were clear that merely copying solutions was very much unacceptable.
A few of them further specified that if while collaborating on the approach the the group as a whole finds the solution, a notation to that effect should be added to the paper, so the grader does not assume the basically identical answers are a result of copying.
One area none of the teachers ever touched was the collaborative process of checking answers against each other once everybody has completed the assignment. That is because that is a thorny area, and comes very close to the issue of simply coping answers. Done correctly, this process helps students find and understand mistakes they made, resulting in better understanding of the overall material, especially since by the time students get graded material back, and realize they made a mistake, the class has advanced far beyond that point, making students feel less comfortable asking questions, and also often just no longer care.
Who in their right mind would choose science? (Score:5, Insightful)
My father has a PhD from a fancy school in the US. (Genetics)
When I was looking at a career path, he warned me off pure science. He was right.
Fighting for tenure and the climate towards R&D in general is nuts.
The days of Bell labs, PARC et. al were great - people forget many of the advances today came out of those investments made by public and private industry.
Now, increasingly, advances in semiconductor manufacturing, wireless tech - all comes from overseas.
Sigh.
Re:Has anybody in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
They may have been doing floor by floor inspections while the rest of the construction continued. There is little need for whole-building inspection for each construction phase, let each phase for a floor be inspected when that floor has completed that phase. That floor can then continue on to the next phase.
It is hard to know for sure, but it looked like they were using pre-fab concrete slabs inserted in the lattice.
The not pausing for settling is definitely a valid concern.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Perhaps we should find a balance, and understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it, and if you overtax people in those brackets, they have no reason to continue to invest in their companies (most of them ARE self employed). So you literally tax away jobs as well when you raise taxes on the "rich" to 70%. Keep in mind that people who make just $159,619 or more are in the top 5% of wage earners, but pay 58% of all income taxes. People who make $380,354 or more (1% of the population) already pay 38% of ALL income taxes earned. The "poor" people, making $33,048 or less may be plentiful, but pay less than 3% of all income taxes collected. I would instead say that we spend entirely too much on military, farm subsidies, and in general, while not investing OUR money in the right places, such as education and the sciences. "Rich bashing" is not nearly as productive as it is popular.
http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html [ntu.org] if you are interested.
Reagan said it best: "No nation ever taxed itself into prosperity." Paraphrasing Margaret Thacher, you could also say that "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money". In other words, you can't just tax rich people more and solve all the world's problems, and over-taxation will certainly cause a whole new set of problems.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
:D
Best series of responses, EVAR!
Thanks for the initial comment - couldn't have said it better myself. We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Re:patents/capita (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that, one of the other measures of "productivity" was the amount of money spent. That's not what "productivity" means.
In a world financed by consumer debt, that's precisely what "productivity" means.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
So why exactly both of you haven't realized the easiest possible solution to this "problem"?
(namely: focus on promoting hard science & engineering degrees ... as happens at my place, which generally does have free education - but, on top of that, recently many students of engineering studies can count on additional scholarship virtually just because of what they chose to study, as long as their results are decent)
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs. If you start from that perspective, then of course you don't want any competition.
I would be perfectly happy living in a world where everyone had a college degree, provided the degrees actually came with a real education. I also think the country would be a whole lot richer in that case, probably by more than enough to make up for the "fleecing" you mention.
In the real world, a more practical goal isn't to get everyone a college degree, but to make sure that talented people who could benefit from one (and consequently make us all richer) don't wind up flipping burgers instead 'cause they can't afford the tuition. Alternatively, we could just make sure that rich, dumb kids get all the opportunities.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PacRim Jim (Score:2, Insightful)
Those 'scare' graduate positions are filled with highly qualified students willing to work for less than minimum wage. I know - I did it, and there was no great line of equally qualified Americans waiting for my job. And if you think that we have no intention of staying, I suggest you look at the makeup of the faculty at these universities.
They the best people for the job, and significantly lower the bar for US students. I've been on recruitment committees - some places are allocated domestic ahead of time, others have 'score 40(US)/60(foreign)' type set ups. Oh, and Mr Taxpayer? Your taxes do not pay my salary/tuition. My work teaching your kids is what pays my salary - whilst my classmates went on to make six figure salaries. Go round up a bunch of US students with masters degrees in physical sciences and ask them to work 60+ hour weeks for 18k per year. See what response you get.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The value of a diploma shouldn't be measured by its scarcity, but by the knowledge acquired. The decline of that standard driven by a profit motive is the only issue I have with it.
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something similar in India where, I think, you're required to publish at least one refereed paper as an undergrad to get your degree. The result is a tsunami of really, really low-quality papers.
Exactly. A million appalling undergraduate-student papers published under duress don't come close to a single piece of quality research. The OP never really seemed to factor this in, it just looked at quantity. Heck, gimme a printing press and SCIgen and I can make Burkina Faso a world leader in science publication, at least until they run out of trees.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:2, Insightful)
understand that most people making $250k to $500k a year actually earn it
Sure they earn it ... just like the winners of Publishers Clearing House and Powerball earn theirs. Good hard work, and all that.
Re:patents/capita (Score:3, Insightful)
How about the number of non-falsified and non-plagiarized works? Suddenly China disappears! *gasp*
Re:patents/capita (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at lab time per dollar. You might find that the Chinese researchers put in ten hours, and we put in one for the same cost, and Europe is the same.
Like many bosses say: "Ten hours in the lab can save you one hour in the library". In my eyes, working hard does not beat working a little and thinking a lot. Research simply takes time.
Re:"Tide" of Science (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists in the US "accept the consensus" on global warming as much as any scientists around the world. It's the general public that has been misled by a well financed disinformation campaign.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that this is even possible indicates to me that there exists an inequity problem that NEEDS to be corrected through taxation.
So we should go back to the high taxes on rich folks like we had before Reagan? Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Sure, the 70's weren't so great when taxes were at 70%. But the 50's were pretty good when the top income bracket rate was 91%. So maybe the key is to get it back up to 91%.
Re:Has anybody in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the old army, now thy hire contractors to do construction.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:1, Insightful)
Yea, the 70s were really productive years for the US.
Maybe, maybe not. But the 60s, the 50s, the 40s, late 30s all were.
But these days when we're speaking of "rich" it's targeted at those making vastly more than 400k a year, because usually the only way to get to that level and maintain that level of income is at conflict with the interests of the public.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet the 1950's and 1960's were very productive and the top marginal tax rate was 91% until JFK lowered it to around 70% in the early 1960's. Tax rates, as long as they're not ridiculous, don't have much to do with whether jobs are created or not. Businesses don't hire people because you give them a tax break. They hire people because they think they can increase their income by hiring a person more than it costs them to hire that person. The costs to a business of employing someone are paid with pretax money and are deductible.
Re:PacRim Jim (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is it a puzzle? It is an excellent deal for the US taxpayer. Many graduate students and many postdocs = cheap research labor. If you tried to limit foreign researchers, you would never be able to fill the spots without hiring more faculty = expensive. There are currently roughly twenty postdocs (one to three year positions) for every open tenure-track faculty position.
As a side effect, though, you get fewer American researchers. Americans aren't going to train for 10 years of graduate school and postdocs to accept a 95% rejection rate. But if you are willing to leave the US after the postdoc then it is a good deal.
Re:Just too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think that religious fanaticism doesn't have anything to do with the (relative) decline in US scientific productivity, you haven't been paying attention.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is you're quoting two people known largely for their disastrous economic policies. America has been on a tax-cutting binge for decades and the result is economic stagnation. Thatcher turned entire regions of Britain into economic wastelands. Perhaps you could quote someone who has a shred of credibility.
Re:PacRim Jim (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:patents/capita (Score:3, Insightful)
America needs to invest in its education on ALL LEVELS, or the gap between the educated and the ignorant will continue growing and the USA is going to be on the losing end of that battle.
As other countries invest in education, we war monger and fund political campaigns. Our GDP should be spent on research, and education - not on war, and not on foreign oil. That is the only way to ensure long-term financial solvency in the US. Take for example the great space race of the 1960s, when Kennedy challenged this nation to reach for the moon. We educated ourselves and built up US industry and improved our GDP. And then we got to the moon, and became complacent. We need a new challenge for the 21st century. If Obama challenged the US to become energy sufficient - to not rely on foreign sources of energy, and backed that up with providing money for research to make the next generation technology today's technology not only would we invest in our future with education, but provide us with the cost savings in energy to actually bring down the national debt.
Meanwhile the ice caps are melting and congress is too full of itself to even come up with a climate bill. For shame on us, we should all look to India and China for inspiration, not incompetency.
Re:PacRim Jim (Score:2, Insightful)
Because the positions pay peanuts, the work gets no respect and you taxpayers throw fits at the idea of funding anything, much less making the position and prospects attractive to an American.
Re:patents/capita (Score:3, Insightful)
There simply is no good metric. You have to judge the quality of the papers and authors by reading them. Tht is not the answer accounting departments want to hear, though.
Yeah, and this mechanism hinders deep research. The problem is that the most interesting research subjects are also the riskiest ones. You cannot publish papers on failures, therefore you are highly pressed to go for the low hanging fruit. This means that journals will be full of the (n+1)th refinement of a well known algorithm/technology/formula/theorem.
We need more scientific risk-taking.
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind that people who make just $159,619 or more are in the top 5% of wage earners, but pay 58% of all income taxes.
Do by any chance the top 5% of wage earners also get an undue percentage of the total of all income?
Re:PacRim Jim (Score:1, Insightful)
Judging from an admittedly non-rigorous sampling of U.S. technical journals, much of the domestic U.S. corporate and university R&D is being done by Chinese and Indian nationals.
What does this mean exactly? Did you open a handful of journal issues you had lying around, look at the table of contents and decide "this name sounds like it belongs to a Chinese, this name sounds like it belongs to an Indian, this name sounds like it belongs to a good, upstanding American patriot"? Maybe I'm overly cynical, but that's the first thing that came to my mind...
Re:Here's the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
We've been doing it or 2,000 years, and it seems to have worked out ok..
I would submit that it really hasn't. One way of looking at history is as a struggle between people who wanted to keep education and related privileges exclusive, and other forces that pushed to open them up. We live in the richest society in the history of the planet in part because those forces are currently ascendant.
Past performance, future results, etc. But in a world of uncertainty it's one of the safest bets I can think of.
wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
It didn't have much to do with tax rates, it had to do with back then we had a wealth production/creation economy. Today, we have a wealth skimming/transference/re-arranging economy.
Classifying "financial products" as the same thing as industrial products is simply insane. Letting your "financial products" sector of the economy skim off the bulk of the wealth is nuts. Using word plays to try and equate the two as being of equal worth is again, nuts. Ripping off the middle class and offshoring still useful jobs to other nations for short term profits held within under 1% of the population is the surest way possible to collapse your economy and go bankrupt as a nation.
If artificially created pseudo products had any real value, Las Vegas would be the top of the heap all the time economically, and wouldn't need any influx of outside money to stay afloat, but gambling games just rearrange past produced wealth, they don't create any new additional wealth. The same with 99% of Wall Street "products", the ones that get the most attention and government support today. It dwarfs even the military budget, which is the ultimate broken windows fallacy "wealth creation" economic metric.
You don't need a convoluted tax rate scheme, you need to ban the bulk of those wall street "products" (that will take care of those top 1% today getting too much for too little effort) and re emphasize actual manufacturing again, with actual horizontal and vertical production inside the nation (this reinvigorates the middle class). There's a reason the BRICs are doing so well, and that is because they make stuff and do things besides "financial products".
Re:Just too bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Religion /per se/ may not be the problem, but I can tell you as an American, that religion in this country is most *definitely* against science. You need look no farther than the creationists (aka, intelligent design proponents) and those against stem cell research to see just how strongly religion opposes science in America. It doesn't help that anti-intellectualism has been ascendant in America for (at least) the last three decades. Even ignoring the flat out obvious real world examples, all religions posit to have the answers. Why perform research or experiments when you already "know" the answers by faith?
Citations given. (Score:3, Insightful)
So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 years if it includes Noah's flood and young-earth crap). I found this with 30 seconds of Google. If you look through amazon.com for creationism you'll find hundreds of books on the subject so creationist books conservatively cost the US millions a year in direct costs, but this is then multiplied greatly by the cost of correcting the falsehoods in those books. Multiple creationist ministries (Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, etc) have multi-million dollar annual budgets that are devoted entirely to obfuscation of well established scientific fact through the creation of those ignorance-promoting textbooks, science and educationally-hostile political advocacy, and legal battles, again amplifying those budgets to create a much larger drain on the US. These groups wield enormous political power: in 2008 multiple Republican presidential candidates (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo) and the Republican VP nominee (Sarah Palin) declared their support for creationism. If you look through Republican state party platforms you'll commonly see support for damaging education by incorporation of creationism. Widespread and politically powerful opposition to evolution is something that our foreign competitors have much less of a problem with: in one survey of selected countries we only beat Turkey [nationalgeographic.com] in terms of acceptance of scientific fact. Considering evolution is of critical importance in biotechnology, pharmacology, medicine, etc. this is a grave threat to the USA.