We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
theguardian.comIn all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world.
China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU
But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent?
I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.
Chinese is too difficult of a language.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
Real voices like this coming from English speakers are always interesting to me as a Japanese speaker, showing how the concept of "learning $foreign_language" to many isn't default expected to be another one of those complimentary bag of lemons. The first thing many Chinese learners among Japanese populace are keen to point out is that the syntax is "practically identical" to English, unlike European languages. Learners of e.g. French or German never make such a point but rather chooses to bring up complicated language quirks that they can't get the knack of. And everyone laments on pronunciations.> Chinese is too difficult of a language. > I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper. > Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English.Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.
Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
It’s true that learning Chinese as an adult—especially if you come from an English or other European language background—can be extremely challenging. I have several colleagues who have lived in Beijing for more than a decade, are married to Chinese spouses, and still can barely speak the language, it becomes even more challenging for reading.
This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.
Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
Since everything is essentially opening WebApps via QR codes on your WeChat/AliPay app, it's actually great for tourists. The apps have a built-in option to do machine translation of the screen to English, which I used when I took a trip to China. In the case where it doesn't translate some part of the UI, I could still use screenshot translation on my phone, so overall it's very easy to get around speaking/reading zero Chinese.
Can you explain how the rise of apps would make things more difficult for those who know little Chinese, as opposed to easier?
> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing
Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.
I actually love the smartphone appification.
Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.
It's not just about language. There's no common practical path to becoming "Chinese", either in a legal or cultural sense. Save for a few rare exceptions, you cannot move there, join the culture, become a citizen, etc even if you're fluent. The western systems arent perfect but they allow a greater number of people who really want to assimilate do so regardless of background.
Why would anyone want to become a Chinese citizen? How's everyone discussing linguistics while completely ignoring the authoritarian elephant in the room?
Because we hn people are used to reduce the world to a set of technical parameters. I am not intending to blame or shame anyone here, but to take it more broadly, the discussion around Doge showcased many such problems that arise from unawareness about the limits of our approach: context blindness, taking narratives at face value, narrow focus on technicalities, no consideration for ethics etc.
Tech people need to reduce complexity to make it computable, that's our job. Our strong points are the weak points too. Again: no blame or shame. Just wanted to point out we are susceptible in these matters.
It's not exactly a linguistics discussion, it's a discussion about attracting talent to live/work somewhere. Im not saying whether it's good or bad on China's part, that's a separate issue. Im saying that the possibility of integration is harder than just learning the language.
Because the vast number of people already live under some variation of authoritarianism.
Comparatively few people live under worse authoritarianism than the one in China. Definitely not enough to form a talent pool that would make any dent in whatever China already has. Especially when you factor in education quality.
> regardless of background
I seem to recall that is a problem with Switzerland too; people can be refused citizenship by bureaucracy at the local level. Yet people still flock there (perhaps because of the money).
Switzerland's draw is the money. It's true that a significant proportion of the population is foreign born, but the whole country is smaller than some tier 2 cities in China and many foreigners do not stay longterm. If China paid Swiss-level salaries there would be more people going for sure, but the country is so big that at a relative level I'm not sure if the proportion would change significantly
You can by marrying a Chineze citizen. It won't make you a citizen, but you can get long term residence permit, and your children will be Chinese citizen.
They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.
100% agree even as someone who grew up around people speaking mandarin. I still cannot write despite having taken the language in both GCSEs and IB, while also living in the country for 3+ years.
i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language.
Oh, just like English!
/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense
I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)
My favorite recent oddity:
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.
I've learned Japanese and I understand your point completely. I can't say for Chinese but in Japanese there are some words (and even kanji) that you can read even if you see it for the first time–if you get better at reading kanji. Some words just make no sense but that's true even for native speakers–especially for place names.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
> Chinese is too difficult of a language. I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Considering that there are a billion+ people capable of speaking chinese, with many million of them not speaking it natively, your generalisation might instead be a rather specific, individual problem.
> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language.
So identical to French then!
At least English has a good reason for the wacky spelling, indicating etymology. French is just... so French.
I have worked in with the Chinese now for two years in technical fields. I have a strict requirement that they learn English as it is a more technical and specific language and less prone to the use of metaphorical weasel words that slow progress.
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
Chinese engineers clearly have no problems building specific, technical things; just like Chinese surgeons have no problems carrying out specific, technical surgeries, etc.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
It's not related to Chinese in specific, but in civilian air traffic, the lingua franca is specifically English[0]. The reason for this is because other languages leave too much room for interpretation. One incident not mentioned in that page that's worth bringing up is Korean Air Flight 801; the crew recognized an issue with the instruments quite a bit before the crash, but because the flight crew essentially was too polite in notifying the captain of the issue, the captain instead asserted authority with incomplete information, leading to the plane crashing[1].
Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.
But that's more psychological than linguistic: The Korean language could certainly express, "we're about to crash"; and a foreigner in that cockpit would certainly have found a way to be more direct. It's much easier to break social restrictions in another language.
Malcolm Gladwell's description of that accident and amplification is simplistic and not very accurate. There were many errors made that caused that accident, including ATC failing to follow protocol.
English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
Mandarin is a courtly language full of back out vagueness and high context construction. This is simply a product of the society. It’s not a judgement of right or wrong it simply just is.
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
Say what you want about Sapir-Whorf, but it's just the reality that translation of anything to anything is generally gibberish. It's just a fact. The more literal it gets, the less coherent it will be. A complete word-for-word "translation" is just garbage out.
Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being borderline nonsensical/error-prone? The latter is kind of an expected behavior, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother if so...)
> I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
The "slows progress" part has some bits of truth in it. This is coming from a from-young bilingual chinese/english speaker. Chinese is harder to learn, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal (especially regarding exposure).
English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.
There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.
I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood. Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?
Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.
You are talking about culture, not the language.
Saphire-Worff is dead; but I think language matters more than we usually assume.
My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.
In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.
Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.
Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.
Can you be more specific about what makes it "hard to extend?"
It has a Root-pattern morphology in which words optimally derive from a set of 3 or 4 consonants. To some extend those roots can even be grouped into meta roots.
Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.
Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.
"the Chinese"
Skill issue.
China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].
At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?
[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...
Exactly. And what is the EU doing to attract American talent that doesn't want to live under the Trump regime with his ICE stormtroopers? Nothing really. Meanwhile, highly accomplished people in the US with Chinese ancestry are being wooed to China to do important R&D there.
For EU it's quite difficult since it's harder to outmuscle American money in the first place
Did you just compare Chinese immigration enforcement favorably against "ICE stormtroopers"? Foreigners in China have to tell the police where they live, even if it's just a stay in a hotel, and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes. There isn't a problem of illegal immigration in China because the police are so strict, nobody can get away with it!
Seems a lot more humane than allowing such things and then one day sending armed masked men to kidnap people from the street.
The major point being is that China doesn't have sanctuary cities. This wouldn't happen if the cities didn't safe harbor the illegals.
Most replies at this point will shift the goal posts stating 'due process', again keeping on topic, not available in China either.
>>and they get deported very quickly for minor crimes
As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.
Strict police does sound quite a bit less bad than fascist police...
You have to know very little about China to think that it is somehow more favorable to foreigners and minorities than the US.
What the US does is bad, but somehow Americans think that means everywhere else is better.
I don’t know but I and my friends still visit China regularly, but not the US anymore, because we have no clue what’s the expectation there to not be in a jail for weeks. I have quite clear idea what the expectation in China, but not the US. Maybe there is something to it.
China has a global reputational problem that will take decades to fix.
The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.
I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.
The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Whatever makes you sleep at night.
> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.
Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.
On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.
This is untrue: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/reddit-us...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-...
Reddit has far fewer users in most countries outside the US than facebook.
Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
No, it is true. You missed the "under 30s" qualifier. Facebook indeed remains incredibly popular in the 40+ category, which is dominant given demographics in most countries of the subset I mentioned: "youth speaks good English".
> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.
Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China
I don't think this is the case at all.
People already said that 25 years ago when the US started officially torturing prisoners. And 25 years later, highly qualified immigrants are still lining up to move to the US.
The Middle East wars were a reputational hit. The current issues are personal risks. Wildly different.
Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?
Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).
Maybe you've missed the things happening in the last year or two, but already most of the world is pivoting to China for stability, and there is presently a sharp and historic decline in US immigration now.
The sad situation is that neither is stable. China could be the new hegemon, but they would have to make decisions leading to the creation of a domestic consumer middle class that is not directly or perhaps even indirectly dependent on the goodwill of the party. Not to mention it would make some ridiculously wealthy people less so. They will not do that. So we are going to have no hegemon. No deep safe sink to store value. If you want stability you will have to pay a premium for gold or Swiss francs because neither can handle the volume demanded. The world will get messy and who knows how long it will last.
I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.
Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live. All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).
So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.
Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?
Yes on a personal level you are right, and that is a good idea.
Less true now that we've made several attempts to deport our own citizens.
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.
Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.
It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.
This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.
> As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation.
I find that hard to believe. Applications to top U.S. colleges and graduate schools are at an all-time high and acceptance rates keep falling.
No one that has an Ivy League offer or even a state school like UCLA or Michigan would go to Canada or Europe, except perhaps for Oxford and Cambridge.
> It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc.
This discussion thread is very specifically about the US vs China, however.
And his point is that's a false dichotomy.
>The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.
Only if you ignore everything the US has done to the rest of the world.
We're close to the tenth year of the era of Trump, so a decade of reputational loss has already taken place. It's the tenth year of leadership by men who should be home yelling at televisions and cheating on golf courses, not leading countries.
What nonsense. The "rest of the world" understands the message loud and clear: China shows up to do business. America shows up to bomb. It's a pretty reasonable choice. Anyways, people now ant a BYD, not a Chevy - because its a better car.
The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.
I think the corporate/globalist perspective looks at the liquidity of talent as well as cost. Having a native talent pipeline is possible, but it's expensive and takes a long time to create. On top of that, it's not very flexible if an industry suddenly shifts. Re-training is a much more difficult than simply hiring a different set of immigrants. It's important (at least to corporations) because it makes a significant difference for how quickly a company/industry can adapt and evolve to stay competitive in global markets.
Even more importantly, there's just a lot of people in China. New York City's population is approximately 8.8 million; that is the scale of a mid-sized Chinese city. The population exceeds 1 billion, which is difficult to comprehend in terms of scale. The reference I like to use is: 1 million seconds is ~11 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is ~31 years.
To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)
Size isn’t that important either, or else India would be rich and Taiwan wouldn’t be. It’s just not a numbers game.
It isn't just a numbers game or investment (money, reputation) game but both.
China is working multiple technologies hard.
Taiwan doesn't have the people to match that breadth.
India isn't matching that investment.
Well, China has a tremendous pool of people to pull talent from. Do they need immigrants? Or just continue the path of “building it in-house”?
China’s pool is smaller than it seems. China has pursued a development trajectory that focuses on the leading provinces first. That is reasonable. Better to get Beijing and a few other key places to the leading edge first, instead of trying to incrementally move all 1.4 billion people together at the same pace.
But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.
This is not true at all. China’s education system is nationally standardized. Although economic development is uneven with far greater investment concentrated in major cities than inland regions, the structure of education itself is consistent across the country. Schools follow the same national curriculum and use the same core teaching materials.
Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.
Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.
But even if you combine Tier 1 and New Tier 1 Chinese cities alone, their populations are around 200M. That's close to 66% of the US. Besides Tier 2 cities like Xiamen, Hefei, Foshan and Zhuhai are still excellent.
So quantitatively, China’s pool is still very strong.
Those third world provinces have the potential to be improved up to the standard, especially when you have first world provinces to draw talent/knowledge from.
Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient
US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigration... and PRC can push that 6m disproportionately into STEM.
But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.
> tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%
E: sentence meant 60% tertiary enrollment of which 40% is STEM... aka they're "only" throwing 1/4 of cohort into STEM with 2 denominators to raise.
They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.
If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?
> If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent.
I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.
> I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.
Mandarin is weird, because I don't think it's that hard to speak at a passable level, mostly because the grammar is so simple. Many people are spooked by tones, but I think their importance for simple communication can be a little overstated.
But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.
Even if I was fluent in mandarin, China still wouldn't be in my shortlist of countries to move to due to low salaries in engineering, poor working conditions (996), authoritarian government, etc.
I learned it in high school and university as European and I can speak decently. China isn't that good of a place for foreigner due to difficulty of getting permanent residency/citizenship. Hong Kong is the exception but the economy is not too hot there now.
I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.
>>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.
All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.
China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.
It may look that way on the surface, but they are absolutely no better than other ethnicities. The main difference is the culture of pragmatism and the constant strive to better their lives. Education is seen as a path to better opportunities, which becomes a major focus for their youth of all social standing.
> no better than other ethnicities
Contradicted by the research. You're just repeating misinformation. It doesn't matter if there's also a culture of striving because both things can be true at the same time.
China doesn't want as a prime goal to become world leader. They just want to expand their infrastructure, science, production, everything for their own prosperity. If there is no other competitor left, then world leadership will be a by product. They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal (see military presence, coups and secret diplomatic deals in foreign countries that the US was doing after WWII in order to remain at the top by all means). They don't want (until now) to spread their culture worldwide (see language, movies, video games etc) due to the language difficulty. They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
> They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal
They are just pacifically planning on invading Taiwan at the moment.
They also install secret police stations in foreign countries to chase and pressure Chinese citizens or people of Chinese decent into doing their bidding.
> They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal
Oh hell yes they do. Chinese overfishing is wreaking havoc across the planet [1], not just near Asia, but the reach of Chinese fishing fleets goes as far as Africa and South America. In the case of Africa, this has been one of the contributing causes for people to flee to Europe.
Then you got the stealing. America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level.
And finally, you got artificial subsidies. Solar, batteries, cars - the CCP is engaged in insane pricing wars backed by practically infinite funds. They already managed to "outcompete" most solar production and are on their best way to screw up our automotive industries as well.
> They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.
Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-rampant-illegal-fishing-enda...
[2] https://www.news24.com/business/china-puts-aggressive-terms-...
What are exactly the japanese fishing boats doing in the mediterranean?
I haven't found any references to Japan fishing in the Mediterranean, the only thing I could find is illegal fish farms in Croatia that farm fish to be exported to Japan and potentially "launder" illicitly caught Libyan fish [1].
While that is bad, it still is only a case of your typical piece of Balkan corruption - and actually being a Croatian citizen, I can only say one thing to these particular arseholes: jebo vam pas mater - and nowhere near comparable to what China is doing.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/ill...
>"Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired."
----------------
Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
Meanwhile, China has "genius camps" for young people, to skim off the cream of the cream of the crop, so they can go on to do amazing things for their country. It blows my mind what we've done in the last year, to damage our ability to compete on the world stage.
It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?
I just said it in another post today, but I had a family member recently die from colorectal cancer when they were on a list for a new treatment at Yale, which was canceled because of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" when they were stage 4 for like 7 years at that point.
BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline.
Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
This suggests that our executive branch has fallen under the influence of foreign agents through blackmail or coercion of some sort.
Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.
It's under the control of Israel, let's just put it how it is. The whole Epstein/Maxwell case was an Israeli honeypot to gather blackmail on the freaks at high level positions in the US. They have huge amounts of dirt on Trump, the Epstein files were like the tip of the iceberg lol
Watch as Trump will attack Iran again on behalf of Israel. Absolutely insane how the whole system is compromised.
The U.S. is under control of the Israel? We all know what you really mean.
How do messages like this end up on HN? Is it the Reddit sub we have that's attracting these types of people?
All monocausal explanations are wrong. (Except for this one, obviously ;) )
You are massively under-estimating the destructiveness of idiocy. It's more destructive than whatever your enemy or a compromise could achieve.
> US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies
Or maybe the rots are within? It's tempting to trivially assume it's outside. I'd say they are mostly come from within and beyond Trump admin.
... I can think of a lot actually. They could try to unilaterally reduce the nuclear arsenal and other military power, for instance. They could close down foreign military bases. A lot of those would even be more left-coded actions. A popular left-ish politician who had a platform of reducing foreign involvement wouldn't even need to hide their agenda.
I get the angle, and I'm not even ruling out that some of the BS is sabotage, but in the big picture it's too easy for me to believe the current admin really is that stupid.
You clearly haven't thought about that question at all yourself and are just repeating mindless political rhetoric. Why even say it? Other people have proposed obvious answers. I hope you learn those answers and stop asking.
In the US education for talented students is under attack from the left as well as the right (just in different ways).
have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings. Made schools better, have alternative paths for kids that are not excelling like some of their peers and find school hard to sit through.
It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.
How important can that be? America’s only real competitor technologically is China. And they’ve had essentially no immigration of “top talent.”
>America’s only real competitor technologically is China
this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.
if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.
Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self
And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
China has 3X more people, and America has a relatively terrible education system, so they have to import talented people who were educated elsewhere.
America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.
The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration
I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.
This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.
> In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.
Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.
White people in the U.S. are equivalent to Koreans in Korea. They reflect a complete spectrum of the population, from poor to rich. Non-whites generally are different sociologically. For example, 71% of hispanics speak spanish at home, in a country where the educational system is in English: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/22/key-facts.... Korea or Japan don’t have an equivalent group to that.
You are wrong at so many levels. Your argument is factually incorrect and logically flawed. And you know it.
The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
Maybe you should actually prove him wrong. Making a claim without evidence doesn’t help anyone.
They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic.
Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.
> No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings
The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...
If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi....
White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).
You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
Over half of the adults in the US can't read at a 6th-grade level. They aren't all immigrants. Clearly American education is not actually good.
Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries.
That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
TLDR: Western Europeans are dumber than an American 6th grader.
I read my first Stephen King novel in grade 6. That seems to me more than sufficient aptitude for reading the things an average person needs to read to get through life.
Was it assigned to you in school? Just because you read something in the sixth grade doesn't mean it was written at a 6th grade level.
They should have gone the voucher route many years ago - competition for the best schools.
You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.
I do think it'd be smart to support programs for gifted students and to screen for them. Those programs should be available to anyone in the US who qualifies regardless of where they live or what kind of money they have. Every student should be allowed and encouraged to reach their potential.
Your first point is in tension with your last point. A large fraction of the student population has a low ceiling of potential, and it’s very expensive to try and push them past that ceiling. The focus on doing so sucks up vast amounts of money and teacher attention that then gets pulled away from gifted kids.
That’s why sober and clear-eyed countries like Germany conventionally sort students into tracks starting around age 10.
> Your first point is in tension with your last point.
It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.
Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.
When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.
Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.
That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.
No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
I saw this play out when I was in school: profoundly intellectually disabled students getting 1:1 or even 2:1 teaching, trying to get an 18 year old to be able to read 3 letter words, while AP classes were bloated to 30+ students.
> No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
The US is the richest nation on Earth. It can easily afford to educate its people. If you really think we'd need to find new sources of tax dollars to fund that, I have a whole lot of suggestions for where to start and I'd bet that you can easily think of a few low hanging fruit yourself.
> There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
The ROI is massive. As I've said elsewhere, uneducated children become uneducated adults. Adults who vote. Adults who, if they lack the education needed to live successful lives, end up costing society in many ways over far more years than they spend in school.
I don't know about you, but I want to live and work with people who are educated and literate. If I were looking to move to another country for work, I'd want to move somewhere where the people were educated and literate. Especially if those people were going to be my boss, or my neighbor, or handling my food, or in charge of my visa application. Having a well educated population is pure win. The cost of ignorance and a lack of the kinds of skills a good school teaches is staggering.
The US already spends significantly more (both in absolute terms, and as a percent of GDP) than other developed countries, but with worse outcomes (particularly for non-white, non-Asian students).
The question is whether anyone actually expects the outcomes to change if we throw even more money at the problem, or if it'll just get gobbled up by teacher's unions, administration, and silly things like non-phonic instruction or DEI programs.
Or train (and appropriately credential) more teachers and pay them like the critical specialists they are.
If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.
Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.
Washington state has the highest public school teacher pay in the country (over 100k/yr). It also has educational outcomes which are middle of the pack. That correlation doesn't hold in many cases. Oh, and the fact that half of the funding for the district goes to administration doesn't help either.
Not everything is about money. The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Just to add one more point that makes the US attractive to global talent: citizenship. In particular: 1) citizenship at birth and 2) viable path to citizenship via green card.
Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.
It's much easier to get citizenship almost anywhere else in the world than to get it in the USA by green card.
Uh not really? As a comparison, it is almost impossible to naturalize if you decide to work in the two cited examples (China and KSA).
Also, the green card process very much depends on your nationality.
Name 5 wealthy countries (let's say top 30 HDI) where this holds outside of the EU.
Plenty of developed countries limit the easy way to their citizenship to ius sanguinus, and if you aren't a descendant of a previous national, you have to pass stringent language and culture tests.
I don't think you would find a Lithuanian or Finnish language test quite so easy.
Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”?
There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
(Looking at Elon boat photos) Oh, that's what the founders meant by huddled masses!
America had a place for you.
Does it apply just to billionaires?
The comment used the past tense in every sentence
Born here.
And yeah, used to. Past tense.
Not any more with der fuhrer.
> used to be
> There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
I see negative opinions of government officials constantly.
It's basically all I see whenever I have the misfortune of turning on the TV.
Have you tried OAN or Fox News?
Many many such negative opinions.
The only difference between channels is which government official is criticized.
> The US was quite unique
Well, based on the current admin and supporters, only part of the US was unique
That has always been true, and for everywhere. However very few countries are anywhere near as accepting for foreigners as the US as a whole despite the many who are not. Canada is just as accepting from what I can tell - I don't know enough about Australia to know. Most other countries are far worse - though many will not admit it just how bad their country is.
Sadly Australia is very welcoming to foreigners until you get about 50km out of the major cities. Our xenophobe political party (One Nation) has had a significant rally in the last few years, to the point where by some measures it is the second largest party.
It's the same thing in every country.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
To be fair, they're still welcoming to foreigners in the bush, just as long as they're white. Rural Australia has many towns that have a strong Italian or Greek heritage (for example).
One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.
And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
> A CEO, a blue-collar worker, and an immigrant sit down together at a table upon which there is a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, then whispers in the ear of the blue-collar worker "Hey, I think he wants your cookie."
The problem with billionaires is that they truly have more money than they need. The only thing left for them to pursue is power. Cheap labor only helps them get more money. Racism on the other hand can be used to justify the destruction of democratic institutions which are a billionaires only competition.
It’s the same in the US. Proximity to a city correlates strongly with all forms of openness. It holds nationwide. There aren’t really blue or red states, just predominantly urban or rural ones.
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
There's more pressure in rural areas to conform in the sense that people know people that can make your time more difficult if you don't. If you get blacklisted in the bush gl finding any work and that's a survival issue. In the city you can walk around anon most of the time and people are more used to others being different. Dump a new high rise of foreigners that don't speak the local language in a metro area and no-one will notice. Do that in the bush and LOL.
The dilution factor is something I hadn’t thought about.
Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.
The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
To expand on this, consider the historic importance of culture for improving survival odds and thus conformism as a natural consequence. So it makes sense that people in smaller groups would exhibit associated tendencies, and also that people who exhibit those tendencies would tend to gravitate towards smaller groups.
Somewhat related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989124
That's probably all that matters TBH. If you can attract top talent to major cities where top schools, research firms, and companies in general, what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
> what does the opinions and attitudes of people 50km away matter?
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
That is a trivial observation. A nation of such size can hardly be a hive mind with totally homogeneous politics.
You’re right best reserve such observations for small nations like China
Yet China is 3 times as big and you are quite comfortable treating it this way
Yeah. And? So?
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
> The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.
Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.
We used to teach a nuanced, honest version of history too. Apparently that doesn't happen anymore.
> The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Very select parts of the US. Would've thought that the last 9 years taught you that for huge swathes of it, this was never true.
US State Department already asked for social media accounts. Chinese visa applications dont.
Well, perhaps it is time for large, ethnically-homogenous countries that are on the ascent to adopt diversity policies of the sort that the US was approaching before the "vibe shift"
I don’t think diversity policies are what made America diverse.
How could they not be? If people cannot emigrate to the US then they won’t settle there. A relatively open immigration policy absolutely helped make America diverse. I’m pretty sure that’s what OP is referring to, not DEI or whatever the latest boogeyman is.
I don't think open immigration in America's earlier years stemmed from a desire for diversity. It was more like "holy shit we need workers, I guess we can tolerate some Irish and Chinese people if we have to". It seems like a reach to call that a "diversity policy".
Canada is largely still homogeneous but still welcoming to immigrants and very close to the US. Rather than China totally changing cultures, I think it’s more likely that US-based companies will have large satellite offices in middle powers.
I'm Canadian and unless you're talking about the middle of Saskatchewan I don't know what you mean - no city over a hundred thousand here is homogenous.
I have been in small towns in the Maritimes where people looked shocked to see an Indian immigrant with me, probably for the first time ever. I meant more in relation to the US, though, which is a much more diverse country.
Canada is not ethnically or culturally homogeneous at all.
Canada is 70% white where the US is close to 50%. That 20% puts them far above the majority line though. Not at all homogeneous, just much more so than the US.
White is a color, not a culture. Quebec and Newfoundland are very different than Alberta and Saskatchewan.
I will say that perogies are amazing and were much cheaper in Alberta than Newfoundland so you get an upvote. But don’t discount that this is also true of the white population in the US.
"White" is not one ethnicity or culture -- a lot of that 70% are French-speaking Quebeckers who surely cannot be considered part of a homogeneous mass with Anglo-Canadians.
I’m upvoting you because you’re 110% right but don’t discount how diverse the US is too, without an obvious divider like that. The New Orleans Cajun are also French immigrants, for example.
No, they're not: they're the ancestors of Canadian refugees who were forcibly expelled from what used to be called "Arcadia".
Incase anyone else is a wikipedia searcher like me, want to point out there's no 'R' in the historic colony.
Acadia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia
Wanted to save other people time searching it up too
> China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
Don't get it twisted. While what is happening is not right, explain to me what happens when there is criticism of China from within China on their treatment of Uyghurs.
The existence of concentration camps in China does not disprove their existence in the United States.
America is hostile to science and technology. I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
> I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
Lots of folks vote against better healthcare. Perhaps they “deserve” better healthcare regardless as they’re human, but perhaps they deserve the outcomes they specifically voted for. Otherwise it feels a little paternalistic.
> Not everything is about money.
It is when researchers can't make enough money to eat and live, which is an actual reality in the US right now.
Researchers at top institutions often make less than Uber drivers.
There are other countries where you can live on less and the government isn't dipping their hands into your pockets every 5 seconds.
Some people will switch careers, but I do doubt that in an economy with very low unemployment amongst qualified people, any actual scientist will literally starve and become homeless.
maybe not starve, but should scientists live in poverty?
Well yea, but I suppose that exceptional molecular biologist can use his potential somewhere else better than as a lower manager in a corporate.
They sound like very loyal people who I would love to have as my compatriots.
Many of the world's most intelligent and caring people are loyal to values over tribe.
they can't be your compatriots if you imprison them, nor if they've to death due to working without any funding, also know as "pay"
Loyalty is earned. They don't owe me or you any loyalty if we mistreat them.
> Scientists go where science is funded.
DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic pay quite well for research and have better "labs" than most places on Earth. I don't believe they're struggling to hire either.
This article is using a relatively outdated definition, functionally speaking, of "research institute".
Traditional research institutions, especially academia, have been declining for decades and current funding problems are just another one of many problems thrown into the mix.
I remember well a world where most serious research happened in universities and was publicly funded. I personally think that was a better world, but that is not the world we live in today and I don't see us going back. Even China's most impressive research is not coming from publicly controlled research institutes or universities but from VCs and large corporations.
To be fair, the time of open public science was a relatively brief in it's long history.
For every scientific discipline that is well represented across modern corporate labs there are a dozen that are not. Most "serious" research is not directly connected to making money.
USA is still one of the top countries for scientists. Just as an example Europe had a few years of exporting the best GLP-1 drugs (finally something in which Europe was leader in science), Eli Lily quickly took it over.
In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research: even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA.
Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
USA politics is looked at so closely, because it matters and changes and still more democratic than most countries in the world even though democracy is a mess (as it's supposed to be).
> Just as an example Europe had a few years of exporting the best GLP-1 drugs (finally something in which Europe was leader in science), Eli Lily quickly took it over
You make it sound like Europe was not a leader in any area of science until this one thing which they led in for a few years.
> Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company
No, he's an example of what can happen when a Fields medalist gets funding cut. 99% of exceptionally smart university mathematicians and scientists will not be able to get VC money.
With the US both cutting research funding and becoming unfriendly to foreign students many future Tao's that would have chosen a US school for grad school will likely look elsewhere.
Terrence Tao expressed sentiments are at odds with you and which align with the article:
> The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no brainer, option. If you got an offer from a top U.S. university, this was like almost the best thing that could happen to you as an academic ... If it's just a less welcoming, atmosphere for science in general here, the best and brightest may not automatically come to the US as they have for decades.
A more lengthy article about his resentment against the government: https://newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-award-winning-math...
Not really, one is complaining, the other (which the article's title says) is voting with their feet. He could have gone to literally any country/university in the world and he chose not to.
Also in the USA you just wait 4 (or 8) years and you have a new president. In many other countries you don't have that luxury.
That is also the curse of the US now. If your funding will only last a single presidential term, you can't ensure a livelihood. The instability of US budgeting and the wildly different priorities of incoming presidents is a huge source of uncertainty and cost.
He has a point, but there are no obvious alternatives. It's still a long way towards fascism for USA to actually lose its attractiveness, and it's not that other countries are getting more democratic either
Canada and EU are currently far more attractive if not getting kidnapped by the government and sent to an El Salvadorian torture camp is a priority for you.
How many PhDs have been sent to El Salvador? EU doesn't nearly have the career opportunities as the US, even less so for foreigners. Canada might be slightly better, for its proximity to the US and being an English-speaking country
None, because if you have a PhD, you're smart enough not to try it.
It's definitely >0 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Canada can't even keep their own citizen anyone trying for much of anything comes to the USA same with the EU.
For mathematics Europe is an obvious alternative. The US and Europe produce about the same level of high level mathematics research per year.
> I's still a long way towards fascism for USA to actually lose its attractiveness
Hard disagree. They are on a road to totalitarianism. Unless there's a quite violent change of course, it's just going to get much worse.
Have you not seen the president and his people go after: Political opponents, Attorneys, Leaders and workers in the government who dare to disagree, Immigrants and tourists with the wrong opinions, Journalists (because they power and can expose some of the lies and corruption).
Have you not seen the Trump family and friends becoming very rich, and giving out contracts to their friends?
Have you not seen the government being weaponist against the maga "enemies" ?
This is what fascism looks like.
This is all bad, but the real test will be the next presidential elections and, to a lesser extent, midterms. If you can vote a dictator out, it's not a real dictatorship.
And again, I'm not really seeing Europe staying democratic for long after the fall of the USA
> but the real test will be the next presidential elections and, to a lesser extent, midterm
Sorry, but that is just extremely naive. Just look at how this usually works. Or look at what the orange fuckhead tried the last time. Now, repeat, but with much more power and influence in all the right places, from government to big tech.
Sorry, I am not from the USA, but like many people know a lot more about it than I would like - still might be missing some context because of that. I am not sure how it really works - all these people who now support Trump in achieving their goals - why would they want to support him in staying in power indefinitely? Isn't it clear that when there is no democracy, their opinion doesn't matter anymore? It's still very non-obvious to me that US as a whole will let that happen.
Me neither, and same!
I have no idea, but many keep supporting him through all of the above. So what would make them stop?
I hope you're right, but it's not looking good so far :/
Let me put your mind at ease, the version of US politics you think is happening is just a mirage. As in it doesn't exist. Real US politics doesn't take place in the media anymore. Its all just propaganda now. Trump is a terrible statesman, but he is nothing like what is described by the media nor anything you mentioned in any real way nor are current events in any way unique or different from how the US functions normally. Its just that now it seems to be OK to call an ICE facility holding people to be deported (something that exists in almost every country) is now called a concentration camp in the media (and even in this thread). But Obama, Clinton and Bush deported about the same number of people as Trump. So please believe me, as someone who actually lives in the US, you are just watching a scripted reality show from another universe, not actual life in the US.
I fled SF and I know a bunch of similar people. Startups are still founded there for the address, not the local talent pool. The address is there because of inertia, not because of inherent advantage. If I were to create a startup I wouldn't even consider doing it in SF now. It is a waste of money that could be put towards the idea. The US is clearly on an ant-intellectual path. People default to here because of inertia but every attack on immigrants, every high level decision based on quack science and personal gain and every attack on our institutions supporting the development of the next generation is putting inertia elsewhere. It is clear as day that the US is only keeping any kind of advantage right now due to inertia and threat and not innovation and effort.
>In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research
What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
The US is in the position it was for semiconductor manufacturing, first it was labs and open science. Then by the 80s fabs started costing millions and universities stopped being able to contribute and nothing got published.
Now it's getting to trillions and if Intel goes under there is no one in the US who knows how to make any semiconductor generation newer than 2010.
>What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
>Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
Google published the transformer architecture. Facebook published llama.
>Google published the transformer architecture.
In 2017. Then sat on it for five years.
llama hasn’t had a new version in over a year. off the top of my head there are at least 4 entire new series of Chinese based llms that have been open sourced
I'm not sure how making a copycat "me-too" drug, after one was successfully developed shows how innovative a country or company is?
You realize semaglutide wasn’t the first GLP-1 right?
The first GLP-1 was exenatide, invented in America and released in collaboration with Eli Lilly.
In addition tirzepatide and retatrutide are not “just” GLP-1s. You frankly do not know what you are talking about.
> Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
What company did Tao fund with VC money?
This is a lagging indicator, it is still one of the top no question, but the point is that is shifting materially.
I have visited USA but I never liked it enough to want to live there due to the culture being too extroverted for me. I moved to Singapore and like it a lot.
I don't think USA is a bad place, probably the best for your career but I don't see myself enjoying living there too much, although maybe I am generalizing because I only visited New York and SF.
I find the Peter mention funny because some of the other reasons he said it made sense to move to SF were that labor laws in Europe wouldn’t allow him to work 6-7 days a week, and he’d have to focus more on safety/responsibility in mind in Europe.
He’s moving from London after all, arguably the global AI research hub.
(Also likely SA told him the offer was contingent on him relocating)
I have never had problem working (and seeing other people work) 6-7 days a week in reality in Europe (even if it was unofficial).
But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.
It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.
Nobody would stop him from working 6-7 days a week. Only for forcing his employees to do this involuntarily for him.
Kinda tells you all you need to know about US startup culture.
Pretty sure the US doesn’t allow involuntary servitude.
The Thirteenth Amendment makes it clear that it is permitted only by exception.
There are no work police in Europe who go round every workplace to make you log your hours working and arrest you if it's over 40.
> Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
That is the intent of these government policies: Shift power and resources to powerful, wealthy private individuals (and their companies). Is Tao doing research?
I'm sorry, but LLM startups isn't science, it's the current gold rush. As impactful LLM stuff might or might not be in the future, it's just the current startup cash chase cycle.
Dodging work regulations is also not really "attracting talent". SF is an insane bubble and views itself as a much more intelletually important than it actually is.
> even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA
We don't know how much OpenAI offered him, but I would bet big that it was enough to get most people to relocate across country lines. [To level-set: we know Meta was offering $100m pay packages to researchers who had not already released something like OpenClaw.]
This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.
There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.
The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.
We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
This kind of analysis isn't much better. First, many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).
Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.
Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.
My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
While I echo some of your points, [1] is bad example (as a Canadian).
Research money in Canada is harder to come by; a basic research grant is roughly ~5x-10x lower than a comparable American grant (students are cheaper here, so its not completely proportional, but equipment, travel, etc doesn't scale).
The example for money for poaching international researchers also comes with the asterisk that while they found ~$2B for this, they also are cutting the base funding of the federal granting agencies by a few percent at the same time, atop of that funding being anemic for decades at this point. A big "fuck you" to the Canadian research community in my opinion.
> scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal
What is the alternative? Canada and Europe don't even have free speech.
This is, de facto, not really a differentiator any more. Only one of the countries in question asks to see my social media profiles at the border to make sure I'm ideologically appropriate.
> don't even have free speech
Only in ways that don't matter to scientists. Not many of them denying the holocaust.
...not sure if you're being sarcastic.
> many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).
This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!
> The US is also no longer safe
I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.
Horizon Europe is a €93.5 billion budget over seven years for scientific research. The EU allocated an additional €500 million from 2025-2027 to attract foreign researchers specifically.
Horizon Europe funds everything — physics, engineering, social sciences, climate, agriculture, digital technology, space, and health. And its budget is still less than 1/3rd of the US NIH budget focused solely on health.
Maybe, but money goes much farther in Europe than in the US. The cost of living is much lower, so you don't need to pay people so much.
it's all about funding. for every 1 person nervous about intellectual safety in the US, there are 50–100 waiting to fill that spot, if not 1,000–10,000. Funding has been cut in academia, and less positions are available as a result. No country is remarkably filling this gap, aside from a hilariously few more availabilities and some more graduate student positions (who operate as the scientific labor in Europe and other countries, before graduating and having to come to the US for job opportunity).
As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.
Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.
I've heard more than 0 people complaining that it's not safe, but not a whole lot. And not the productive people either. Also, unfortunately the same opinions that get you in trouble in the US will get you in trouble in western Europe. I'm not saying it's right, just that it doesn't seem to be actually draining brains.
>scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal
two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.
My neighbours may be turds, but I can get over it... Up until the point when they start pissing in my punch bowl.
What do you recommend
While I agree, US is still the top destination for research, I don’t agree with “Brain Drain is not a concern” nor do I agree with “We need fewer PhDs”. The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return. Pretty much all AI startups at the moment are coming from and being built by PhDs. The pace of innovation slows down and it can have huge long term economic impact. Having fewer PHDs also exacerbates that problem. If fewer people are looking for funding in the first place, you’d have even fewer ideas that could end up contributing meaningfully to society. The only solution to funding problems is more funding.
>The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return.
That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.
It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.
Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them? At least from what the article mentions, figuring out new and better ways to fight diseases seems like one of the most important problems a human could be working on. In my mind the solution is to provide funding and fix the funding process, not produce fewer scientists.
Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.
<< Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them?
In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?
The need for things exists independent of the standalone economic viability of those things. That is the entire point of public funding of various resources, including scientific funding. The “available” resources is a political decision.
Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy. For the research discussed in the article it is quite clearly a political decision, not directly grounded in a need for less medical research.
<< The “available” resources is a political decision.
It invariably always is.
<< The need for things exists independent of the standalone economic viability of those things.
Sure, but there is only so long that can go on funding studying of rather pointless stuff[1] ( added UK example to not be accused of hating on anything in particular US-wise ).
[1]https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/5272/1/g...
<< Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy.
I am not suggesting that. I am literally saying: there is only so much money. That is it. And if push comes to shove, studies of whether chicken finds humans pretty take a back seat to more pressing matters.
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story of Michael Faraday showing his new invention of an electric motor to a politician in 1821. He had invented it after investigating strange twitching of a magnetic compass needle.
After seeing the motor, the politician asked “what good is it?” and based on what I can find Faraday either said “what use is a newborn baby” or “one day you’ll be able to tax it”.
So two points: One, you don’t always know things will have a high ROI from the start. Sometimes you just have to be curious. And two, politicians care about the next election in two/four years, not planting trees that won’t bear fruit for 30 years.
We have vast amounts of resources. More than enough to supply the basic needs of everyone in the country.
The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.
There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
<< There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
Eh, I mean if you put it that way, I suppose all those budgets are just a show and not at all an indication of how utterly fucked we are as a country unless we both:
a) massively reduce spending b) massively raise taxes
In very real terms, there is only so much money. Some additional money can be borrowed, but we a slowly ( but surely ) reaching a breaking point on that as well.
The issue is: no one is willing to sacrifice anything. And I am sympathetic, but if hard choices are not made now, they will be kinda made for us anyway.
Yes we have to massively raise taxes.
We need to claw back billions and billions and billions of dollars from people for whom it will make zero difference in their daily lives, so that we can spend it on people for whom $100 can change their month, and $10000 can change their life.
Lol. No. We have to massively raise taxes JUST to keep this country afloat financially. The poor people are still fucked. I know it is exactly massively popular to say, which is why you don't see major proponents sans rando online like me.
You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.
You would forget that this would cause exponential growth: in a couple decades, a single lab could produce more people seeking tenure track than an entire country's worth of positions; there need to be smarter ways to provide the requisite labor for science, since this is clearly unsustainable praxis. Running a pyramid scheme of this magnitude is only going to cause an implosion—which we may already be witnessing.
That's a result of the funding model focused on small competitive grants. You could probably get at least as good research with a funding model that replaces every three PhD students with a student and a staff scientist. But then the society would have fewer PhDs overall, which would have unpredictable consequences.
Pretty good for the professor, not so good for the students.
Purely anecdotal, but my friend's dad was a professor at well respected university in California doing Cancer research and recently moved to China even though he didn't want to because the money was too much for him to pass up.
> We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
You'll have gluts of Masters then and so on.
Set aside the question of how we might implement this (which I grant is complex and path-dependent)... but imagine if 5% of the wealth of every US billionaire were instead allocated to research and development.
Ultimately I don't think even the billionaires would be unhappy.
One can dream. Capitalist society would never reduce their PhD slaves. Saying this as someone who's closer to finishing PhD.
> In the normal trajectory of a life in science, Morgan would be planning to set up his own laboratory conducting groundbreaking research designed to win the war on superbugs. But with an ongoing hiring freeze at NIH, his options are limited.
That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
True. Morgan could also end up running pipettes and 96-well plates in Foster City for $45000/yr.
Morgan (or someone else)
The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.
Well, he might be planning to set up a lab. Probably wouldn't, though, statistically.
> That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
I think you misunderstood, since that's not about optimism. Years ago, smart students from all over the world could hope for a successful career in American research. Now, in the USA many doors are closing in most academic domains, and few (potential) researchers dare plan any success story.
I’ve heard that, at companies developing AI right now, the core R&D staff are mostly ethnic Chinese. I’m not sure whether that’s accurate.
I’ve also heard that meetings are conducted in English, but that all private discussions happen in Chinese, so managers have no idea what they’re talking about.
That said, Chinese really is hard… In contrast, English is simple enough, so it’s more efficient to learn, and it’s easier to attract talent.
As for whether this “stifles” anything, I think China mainly relies on its own people. Most of the talent who go to China still speak English anyway.
On top of that, China’s speech control is genuinely annoying. Though I also find it annoying that Threads arbitrarily suppresses speech, too.
In areas like energy, semiconductors (Taiwan—although some production/deployment is currently in China, but it’s hard to say what might happen and when), and AI, China does feel unsettlingly powerful right now.
In democratic countries, just getting approval for a new energy facility can turn into years of arguing; in China, they can build several in the same time.
By the way, I’m Taiwanese.
If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.
All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.
This is the most interesting part of the way the US government is structured. Where the federal government has very little power compared to the states, each state is competing for talent. Like how Texas is more conservative and California is more liberal. May the best policies win. People will move to whichever set of laws better produces success. I don’t think that as true as it once was though.
I don't think it works out in practice; people voted based on identity but move based on economics.
And identity is mostly upbringing... You don't get mostly neutral people moving around to the best system, you get opinionated people trying to bring their preferred system to the better opportunity.
I keep meeting Stanford grads that interview for jobs in Germany, most are women or non-Caucasian.
Germany is not even an attractive country to work in at the moment, so I assume it’s even more pronounced elsewhere.
Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America.
It's also repelling their own citizen. Lots of videos of people being fed up with the ambient angst in the US any time they come back from another country.
This is a thing that you don’t notice until you experience it. No more compelling argument that we’re doing something wrong as a nation than that first time stepping onto an American street after visiting a civilized country.
True, after you visit a country where the cities are entirely safe and there aren't really any bad parts, it's disheartening to return to American cities where people say: "It's really safe! Just ignore these areas, don't go out late out night, keep an eye out when you walk around, and just ignore the crazy people yelling threats at you, they probably won't do anything."
Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.
I think it’s more than that. Surveys show the whole US is gradually becoming more and more unhappy. https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
It’s mainly because income isn’t keeping up with rent/mortgages/healthcare/inflation etc. But there’s no collective will to solve it, the solutions are all individual, like “work harder”. But lots of people are already working 2 jobs.
It sucks to live in a society that doesn’t care about you, and many are angry, but they don’t know what to do because they were trained to hate socialism. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save your life, nevermind pay Europe-style taxes.
I live in a civilized European country and gravely miss the freedom of speech I had in the USA that I don't here. I'm terrified one tweet will get me jailed for 30 months.
Yeah, we have so much free speech lately, it's starting to overflow into the negative https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-department-homeland-s...
I mean it sounds like you live in the UK, which seems to be doing everything it can to depart civilized Europe
Considering the degree of "hate speech" a Tweet would have to contain to land someone in jail includes direct incitements of violence, I'm scared to ask what sort of opinion you'd like to share that you feel you legally cannot.
The claim that you get thrown in jail in London "just for sharing your opinion" is a myth, unless your opinion is, "round up everyone of race X, put them in a hotel, and burn the hotel down."
the amount of people arrested for online activity in England is not the best example to use if you're arguing that such events are rare.
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
Your comment carries some major "Oh you know the ones" vibes.
https://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1050391663552671744?lang...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
The "real thing people are experiencing" is posting unambiguous hate speech or calls for violence, and then getting in legal trouble for it. Calling it "online activity" or "just sharing their opinion online" is the actual blatant misrepresentation of what's happening on the ground, akin to saying someone robbing a store was "jailed merely for getting food for dinner that night."
Weird, I wish I had universal healthcare and socialized housing.
What strikes me about this discussion is how the talent flow has become bidirectional in ways we didn't see 20 years ago.
The US built its scientific edge partly on being the default destination for ambitious researchers worldwide. That asymmetry is eroding - not just because other countries improved their institutions, but because the friction of working in the US increased (visa uncertainty, funding instability, cost of living in research hubs).
The interesting question isn't whether the US can "win" the talent war, but whether the model of concentrating talent geographically still makes sense. Remote collaboration tools, distributed research networks, and global funding mechanisms are creating alternatives to the traditional "move to where the lab is" model.
Countries that figure out how to participate in global talent networks without requiring physical relocation might have an advantage over those still optimizing for immigration.
What country is it attracting then?
Anywhere else is a low-bar... probably shouldn't go searching for it =3
It's hard to tell. The Guardian is UK based, but for some reason the use word 'we'.
But actually China and India may be retracting some of their talents back. Unlikely many go back to EU/UK socialism.
The article provides absolutely no data to support any claims of a brain drain away from America, towards Europe or anywhere else. You’d think they would have found evidence if there was any. So after reading this, my prior on substantial numbers of researchers moving to Europe has gone down.
There is an obvious plausible reason why there might not be much brain drain to Europe: salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.
Academics love to believe they don’t care about money, and Guardian readers love to believe that the US is doomed by its moral failings. I’ll believe both those things when I see evidence for them.
The article provides absolutely no data to support any claims of a brain drain away from America, towards Europe or anywhere else.
There are no actual numbers for emigree PhDs. Government losses across all agencies are some 10900 scientists [0] or ~14%. Whether they retire, emigrate or no longer do science doesn't matter for the outcome.
[0]https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-l...
... It matters for Europe! Also, do we know they aren't still in the US university system doing science?
> You’d think they would have found evidence if there was any.
Maybe somebody closed all public scientific databases, all government science webs, and harassed or fired thousands of scientists. That would explain the lack of public scientific data.
> salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.
Salaries are just a number and should be always taken in the context of coast of living. Europe is diverse, with poor places and rich places. You can live like a king with a worse salary in many places. In the more expensive ones you will pay more taxes, but receive more services in exchange. You will enjoy 30 days of paid holidays a year, and a very diverse continent to roam free on that time. You will enjoy also universal healthcare, affordable groceries, a near to zero expectation of your children being murdered at the school, and much more options to choose a political party that suits your own interests if you don't like the current situation.
Europe has many problems and lots of idiomatic and cultural walls, of course; but at this moment US just looks like a terrible place to live or even visit. The government is purposely doing all that they can to fleece every citizen and burn down the entire place.
It's incredibly inexpensive for countries to import that top talent into their own universities. But governments just don't see the value, for the most part.
I think it's not that simple. If science comes to the conclusion that there are 36 human genders the top talent might also look for s.th. more sane.
I understand that the government is now too coarse to use soft power, and maybe it wasn't even working as well as it used to, but it is bizarre to undercut the sciences when their military capability is derived almost entirely from high technology since they can't field or lose lots of soldiers. I get they want to be Rome 3.0 or some bullshit, but Rome was famous for investing in engineering.
A bunch of dunces.
Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.
Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.
They're happy to fund the military, they have a list of words [1][2] that they use to flag grant applications, including "female", "bias", "political" and others. Cuts seem to be directed at biomedicine, health and social studies.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
That's true, I've seen it in action, but at the same time... the number of grants and the rate of grant issuance has been very slow. They aren't using a scalpel to eliminate all the "woke".
They are also attacking Harvard, the number 1 science university in the US. There's a scandal at Harvard last month where the Dean of Science was fired because he was protesting against eliminating graduate students in the sciences (they eventually settled for something like firing him and 50% cuts to my knowledge). I have no love for Harvard by the way, I never thought I would be defending them.
The Harvard budget alone is larger than most other countries.
Some things are more important than grant money, and don't necessarily improve with larger budgets. =3
Meanwhile I’ve been getting Migrate to Canada ads in my IG feed…
Well deserved.
But we’re great now I thought?
It’s less brain drain and more brain blockades. For now smart people still want to come here. We have to end our insane policy of preventing them from doing so.
I think the US draining other countries of their best and brightest is why many countries have been left behind in terms of economic development.
Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.
Yes, Canada has already seen a large uptick in researchers and doctors coming in from the US and other countries have too. It's good for everybody for research to be more decentralized so that it can better withstand shocks in single countries.
I had to find a new doctor recently, and the temporary one that was assigned to me was a guy from Texas... he said he came here because they didn't have room for him and he heard we needed the doctors. Why Canada over any other US state? Hard to say, but I'm not going to complain.
Nationalists are all the same and all hate the country as it is vs how they imagine it to be - see the uk brexiters ignoring science and the creative industries.
Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.
I am pretty sure we are still attracting top talents. We are not, however, attracting good to mediocre talents. Is that a good thing? What’s going to happen to all these mediocre graduate programs spread out all over the country where they simply existed to satiate foreign demand?
It is not a "brain drain" when you declare war on science and fire all of your scientists. There must be some other phrase for that.
Brainwashing? ;)
Brain flush?
It's not surprising. smart, educated people are a direct threat to the current administration and in general the US right has had academia in its sights for awhile. Ultimately it's bad for the country but how the US has been trending. Similarly, US education funding and the content of it has been politicized and it's producing a negative feedback loop.
Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.
Come to Europe, we have cookies ;)
We know, the law requires you tell us of this if they’re for marketing purposes.
It’s actually a cookie experiment
I'd love to, but where to? The Swiss are trying to cap population, the Germans elected the AfD, the UK no longer counts.
> The Swiss are trying to cap population > the UK no longer counts
Well the Swiss are not in EU either, but both are still in Europe
Well, it's hard to freely speak my mind about the Brits w/o getting downvoted, but they created a large problem and let their dogs out on whoever complains about it.
> the Germans elected the AfD
On federal level they are still at about 25% without an option to come into power. It is bad, but it is not hopeless, yet.
Ireland is solid, especially for any sort of biotech/medical. Strong critical skills immigration path, good wages, pretty much every major company has a facility there (many rivaling the US sites in size), friendly and welcoming place. Housing is a bit of struggle, mainly for renters.
I made the leap this year. No regrets.
Irish infra is not great if you compare it to many advanced European countries. I hate they still do not have a train/tram connection from the airport to the city. Taxes also make you weep. Not to mention an immense risk of losing all those corp taxes and industry if US pushes ahead and creates barriers for companies to trade. It is great at many things but also has some downsides.
Tell me more. As someone with dual Canadian/US citizenship (former EU citizen that I gave up 20+ years ago) - how hard is it to get in?
It wasn't terribly difficult, you just have to find a company to hire you. Weirdly the biggest issue I ran into was companies not believing I was willing to relocate and assumed I was just some idiot looking for a remote role. The paragraph about it in my cover letter didn't seem to matter.
Apparently I was initially rejected for that reason, but my boss dug me out of the file for a potential discussion about a US based role. He told me that 6 months later over pints.
Once you've got an offer the critical skills employment permit (CSEP) is quick and painless.
All in all it was basically a lateral move lifestyle-wise. "Federal" income taxes are high-ish, but there isn't another level of state and local taxes eating away more; and property taxes are practically nonexistent (€280/year I think?). There are a handful of schemes which will shield a decent chunk of income from the highest tax rates, and the company benefits are fantastic (medical 100% paid for for my entire family, good bonus, 2:1 "401k" match).
As mentioned, housing is absolutely horrible right now, especially for renters. Luckily home prices are still somewhat reasonable compared to the US - we made enough selling our US home that we could buy an Irish property outright. Can't get a mortgage or any sort of credit until you've been in the country for 6 months. Probably won't stay in this place more than 2 years (when I get permanent residence on the CSEP route) but its a comfortable enough spot to get settled.
I wish it was a bit less car-focused, but there will be a train that drops me off basically at my office door in ~2 years, so they're trying and improving pretty quickly.
And original bottle caps on all plastic bottles!
(Like seriously, it turns out to be pretty useful in practice. :) )
Trump is clearly winning his war on America.
now chinese know kill line in us, chinese will not go to us again.
Frankly, if the places that dominate at healthcare delivery efficiency also dominate at research, that could be good for the world.
The US having a dogshit healthcare delivery system but so much research means that good vertical integration is not possible.
Conversely a more integrated EU — continent scale welfare state — could do really interesting "integrated OpEx and CapEx" medical research in ways that are simply impossible in the US.
Remember the Danes making Ozempic is making something that is fundamentally far more useful for Americans than Danes (of course the money is good for Danes). Most non-American drug research today probably chases the lucrative American market, but ideally that would change.
You're making a lot of assumptions: that providers are healthcare providers, that providers want to provide more healthcare, or that providers are incentivized to pay for better healthcare.
I'm sure the system you want would exist if healthcare providers had one customer to worry about: the US government. I can't think of a single doctor, the ones that actually want to help people and not cash a phat check, that likes the current system of filling out paperwork or begging to do surgeries for patients from insurance companies.
Most actually want to just provide care.
Get rid of the middle man, get rid of the profit motive, and you'll get a system that society can actually shape.
For an American startup/technology forum, this place is remarkably anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-AI, anti-crypto.
There’s a massive difference between being patriotic and being pro-Meta or pro-Google. And given recent bribes from tech leaders to Trump, I’d argue being anti-BigTech is actually patriotic.
Gee, wonder what caused that change over the last decade. Really can't think of a reason.
And just in case you truly believe it's something like "Russian bots" - and I hope you don't - you need to check out the change in the bigger public's opinion on big tech companies, and why it has changed. It's far from just HN.
I would say quite the opposite. Have you considered the position of the general population in your assessment?
I don’t think many educated and working class people are pro- those things at this time
>As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world.
Oh no. We might lose the largest most expensive medical system in the world. I would sure hate to have an affordable lightweight medical system. I mean, aren't we doomed if we can't spend another five trillion dollars on a covid shot. Think of the poor pharma companies.
Does that mean Europe will get a sustainable lead on irreproachable Science?
I think that depends on a lot of factors. E.g. will there be a turn around in the US, and if so how fast? Will Europe and other nations increase science funding to account for all the new talent that wants to come? Will that funding be permanent, not just a one time effort?
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
Europe isn't the one to watch, IMO. It's China. China has already significantly increased it's R&D funding and in some areas, particularly solar and battery tech, it's world leading.
China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
I agree that China is a science superpower and will only improve. That said, I would prefer living under a wester democratic system, so I really do hope that the west picks up what the US drops. I'm totally fine if the west is merely close to equal to China in terms of science.
> Also, if the US restores their democracy
We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?
China also likes to claim it is a democracy because it holds elections.
It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.
I wouldn't say that elections have little to do with democracy, they are necessary. Though I agree that merely having an election isn't sufficient. A lot of modern dictatorships have "elections". And that's not to even begin to get in to how representation works.
No, the US still spends 5x what Europe does on biomedical research, measured as a percent of GDP.
For now. US science is still in decline. Major works by places like Moderna have been denied permission to continue, for example. You can't assume that funding will not continue to decrease at a rapid rate in the US.
Even if it continues, there's been a huge amount of reputational damage done and no political will to do what must be done to reverse that damage.
China is putting up the money, not Europe. Europe only gets a slice if they invest in it.
lol no it's Europe dude for the same reason they are lagging in everything they will lag in this why would you think otherwise.
On a more serious note any of the freedoms people are talking about disappearing in the USA were either already long gone or a decade further down the road of dying in Europe. Hell they are routinely jailing people for speech now.
For all the recent hand-wringing about the U.S. becoming less welcoming to immigrants, the U.S. is still far, far ahead of any European country in terms of immigration opportunities. If you're qualified to come to anywhere in Europe, you were qualified to come to the United States years or decades ago.
No. Europe is in decline. Asia will.
There's a version of this that doesn't get talked about enough -- what happens to the compounds already in study when the researcher who designed the safety protocol leaves. Institutional knowledge about why certain interactions were flagged or screened against isn't usually documented well enough to hand off. It just lives in the PI's head.
We've been building Bio-Twin (biotwin.io) partly for exactly this reason -- AI pre-screening that externalizes the safety logic so it's not dependent on which scientist is still employed. Not pitching, just -- this is a real downstream consequence of the brain drain that seems underdiscussed here.