I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the scientific brain drain that’s overtaking America.
There’s an exodus of educated people currently taking place in the United States. Policy advisors and researchers with STEM degrees are leaving federal government jobs en masse, whether because of layoffs, budget cuts, or voluntarily quitting in protest of anti-scientific policies. Research scientists and professors are leaving the country entirely, heading for safer harbors like the EU, Canada or even China where they perceive they’ll find more stability and greater freedom for their work.
The consequences of this self-destructive politics will linger for a long time to come. Our policymaking will suffer for it, as the government loses its most qualified advisors. Scientific and technological progress won’t grind to a halt, but the U.S. will no longer be the place where it happens. Increasingly, we’ll be in the position of paying for discoveries made elsewhere, rather than being the ones to originate and profit from them.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
Whatever may happen in the future, the second Trump administration has done massive, long-lasting damage to the cause of science and technology in America. The federal government was once an ally to scientific research, but Trump and his cronies have turned it into an enemy.
They’ve turned anti-science wreckers loose at once-respectable institutions like the CDC, demolishing decades of evidence-based policy and rewriting scientific guidelines on a whim. They put a drug-addled sociopathic billionaire in charge of the federal workforce, firing thousands of workers according to his erratic whims. They’ve decimated budgets for basic research to give tax cuts to the rich and withheld federal grants to punish universities that don’t toe the line.
Last but certainly not least, Trump and his thuggish ICE stormtroopers are harassing and persecuting immigrants, and that includes immigrant scientists. Faced with the prospect of brutal arrests, violence and arbitrary detention, legal residents are making the rational choice to depart the country for safer harbors elsewhere.
Ironic to illustrate it with Ladybower Reservoir drain, a safety system. (I’ve flown over that more than once…)
While I agree that nuclear war could plausibly have ended human life on earth, I disagree that the same is true of climate change. That has the population to massively choke civlisation, but it’s not going to extinct us simply because we’re too numerous, too resilient, and too clever. It’ll be ugly and horrible, but it won’t be world ending.
I’ll stick my neck out and say only an American would pose that setup. Anyone else would appreciate what we have. (Apart from the usual “we can land a man on the moon but shit still sticks to my toilet” reactionary idiots)
“Very soon” is doing a LOT of heavy lifting there. “Very soon” in 2015 was 2020. And it’s just emerged that the flagbearer of actually reasonably safe and successful “AI autonomous vehicles”, Waymo, isn’t using AI, it’s using a sweatshop in the Phillipines. I’ve revised my estimate of when I can go somewhere in my car without needing to bother to drive it – at the age of 56, I’m speculating “never”.
On the central thesis – the brain drain is one thing. But there’s a flipside to it, as well. Smart people who are there are leaving, for sure – it’s the rational thing to do and frankly I’m baffled why anyone who can afford to leave stays there, and even why anyone with ANY alternative even visits.
But there’s at least as much impact going to come from the fact that smart people who aren’t already there aren’t going to want to go there. There are simply nicer, safer places for bright people to spend their time, places that will give them maybe not quite as much money, but where what money they do make will give them an objectively better, happier life.
This is how an empire falls… and you brought it on yourselves.
Trump got 63 million votes in 2016, 71 million in 2020, and 77 million in 2024. Goodness knows how many he’ll get in 2028, if it matters at all. You, as a nation, voted for this, over and over again, in increasing numbers. Ain’t democracy brilliant?
Alexis de Tocqueville, French duke and also politician and social scientist, visited the fledgling USA in 1835. Among other things, he observed and commented on the American pride in complete and utter ignorance (I’m paraphrasing). There’s a streak of that pride that’s survived through today, and countless “jokes” featuring educated people (often professors or scientists) being humiliated by salt-of-the-earth ignoramuses who outwit them.
There was a brief moment in the 20th century when scientists were valued for their knowledge (mostly in the field of making weapons of war), but there was also a lot of backlash by the salt-of-the-earth types who felt threatened by having more smart people around.
IMO, this is what drove George W. Bush’s popularity (“I’d have a beer with him!”) and part of what drove Sarah Palin’s. Blind stupidity also convinces the MAGA that an eeeeleeeeete New York City college-educated Trump is “just like them!” despite being all the things they claim to hate most.
It’s funny–in the 2006 movie Idiocracy, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho is a product of his time and place–ignorant, uneducated, vulgar. Yet he realizes his country is facing a problem he can’t solve, and goes looking for someone who can. You’d never see that today.
Finally, Canada is busy recruiting American doctors and nurses and well as scientists because they recognize talent, ability, and education.
Katydid @2, I so agree about de Tocqueville correctly noting Americans’ pride in utter ignorance! (which we mostly still retain. Parenthetically, he was right about another thing, too, here’s a quote: “Religious insanity is very common in America.”) America has always been fairly hostile to science (really, to any kind of knowledge or expertise.)
I’m more pessimistic (as I said once, I’m rather prone to doom spirals.) But, I think that science in American is gone, and that it won’t come back. It was a long and carefully-built-up edifice, and it’s not something that can be recovered. Perhaps (probably?) ever. Sonof. @1 is quite correct that, not only is the current brain drain devastating, it’s also the generations of future scientists that are lost.
I can’t recall what finally happened with the overhead mess, but, university and medical and other institutional research can’t exist without the former overhead rates. If those cuts remained, or remain, at what Musk set overhead to, that is the end of all research, and training of new scientists, in America.
Well, Canada and the EU and good old China are stepping up, and are taking advantage of this suicide to keep and build their scientific structures. I am hopeful there, as it was the flood of European, and other, scientists, arriving after WWII, along with the booming US economy, that made America an intellectually respectable place for the first time in history. So, a flood of US brains may really help them progress.
It’s still going to cost though. Just in chemistry alone, chemical giants like DuPont and Dow, and all the oil companies, can’t operate without Ph.D. chemists. Oil companies are one of the largest employers of chemists there are. Boy are they going to have to offer enormous salaries to hire anyone, if, indeed, as sonof. says, anyone should want to live and work in America at all, no matter how sweet the deal. So, the companies will raise their prices or outsource all their work, which will make the American middle class (should it still exist) even more poor.
Science in America is gone, I think for good.
Well, perhaps the democrats can win some sweeping total victory that washes away all the damage, and could reverse current policies in time, before the hemorrhage has killed science. And, perhaps the moon will fall out of the sky.
sonof @1, you are correct that America brought its own destruction on itself. But you see, as de Tocqueville did, that the seeds of destruction were there at the start, and so the end was implicit in the beginning (not to mention that massive scythe of destruction, constitutional institutionalized slavery.)
The definitive nosedive began in 1980, with the election of Reagan. That’s when it was decided that America exists for Big Corporations and Big Money, and not for the people. (I believe that was then commonly expressed as “Greed is good.”) It’s been accelerating ever since, we’re now a failed state.
This. So much this. See also the UK on May 3rd 1979, voting in Thatcher.
I really believe that in the future historians will point to the end of the 1970s as a pivot point in history as great as 1945 or 1776.
Agree with both other posters, but want to add something else about Reagan: he was a washed-up, unemployable former actor when he first ran for governor of California (1967 – 1975) and then ran for president (1980 – 1989). Which brings up another conservative trait: they get in line and vote for what they imagine they see, and they repeatedly idolize some really reprehensible people.
But, back to brain drain: I agree that scientific talent has no future in the anti-science sentiment currently infesting the USA, and that other countries are smart to offer a home to well-trained, qualified, and motivated scientists.
Current news just today that’s making me despair: the ivermectin-loving conspiracy theorists are now claiming ivermectin cures cancer and are trying to influence Americans to take horse paste instead of seeking qualified medical care to diagnose and treat cancer. Additionally, the FDA has denied Merck’s application of an mRNA flu vaccine because of the CT surrounding mRNA. And Trump’s EPA has revoked scientific findings regarding climate change. Thinking is hard, y’all! Let’s watch foooootbaw!
Scott Adams – the Dilbert guy – tried taking ivermectin for his cancer.
He died last month, of cancer
On various bits here:
Self-driving cars are a difficult problem, at least in part for the same reason it’s difficult for humans, in that they have to deal with every other idiot driving on the road, children chasing balls out onto the street, animals… it’s inherently a task that’s fairly easy 99% of the time and could become dangerous and critical at a moment’s notice in any one of a thousand different ways that all have to be handled differently in that last 1%. Honestly, I think getting rid of the need for individual cars for most everyday tasks would be far preferable, but sadly that’s a generational problem.
With regards to de Tocqueville, he was right on a number of things like that. In some ways part of the problem is the whole issue of ‘free speech absolutism’. While that was certainly an understandable take at the time the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, due to the way people were actively punished for saying the wrong things, one of the results of having no effective control on speech at all is that the bullies are given as much time as the bullied, and will quite happily shout down anybody who disagrees. Even though that shouldn’t be an issue because only the government is actually bound by the First Amendment, the cultural force built around that can be every bit as toxic as the Second Amendment absolutists. But yeah, “My ignorance is just as valid as your expertise, and I won’t hear otherwise” has been a thing for a while. Not purely a U.S. thing, but rarely has it metastasized so badly.
Not to mention that, frankly, freedom of religion in the U.S. is part of the reason for the comparatively high levels of religiosity: if any charismatic preacher can start his own church and whip people up into a cult-like fervour, many of them will, and did. And then you get the interactions with other aspects such as the Southern Baptist Church pretty much literally existing just to find and push Biblical justifications for racism and slavery.
Really the whole American governance system was an interesting prototype that was already showing its cracks by de Tocqueville’s time.
Adding in another comment on Reagan: part of the reason he was unemployable was that he was actively working along with HUAC, to the point where he was practically considered McCarthy’s hatchetman in Hollywood. From what I recall, that’s even how he met his wife: she’d mistakenly ended up the target of a HUAC investigation and Reagan stepped in to point out that they had the wrong Nancy out of two fairly similar names. So, yeah, a lot of other actors of the time hated his guts. And so when the McCarthyist purges lost their momentum, nobody wanted to work with him.
(Granted, that’s also part of how Reagan managed to get away with negotiating nuclear arms limitation treaties with the Soviets: nobody was going to accuse Reagan of being ‘soft on the commies’, given how much of his career had been openly anti-communist even before he got into politics.)
You could easily trace the current decline back to Nixon: remember that Ailes, the first CEO of Fox News, was a Nixon staffer, and believed that the main cause of Nixon’s fall wasn’t Nixon’s actions but the fact that the media reporting on them made him look bad. The whole build-up of ‘conservative talk radio’ and the isolated media ecosystem to prevent voters from hearing bad things about Republicans if they don’t want to hear them really dates back to the aftermath of Nixon’s time. But yeah, by the time Reagan was working with the ‘Moral Majority’ on an explicit attempt to stack the Supreme Court with the stated goal of overturning abortion and the unstated goal of gutting the Voting Rights Act and the rest of the Civil Rights movement, that was when it became near irreversible.
As for brain drain in general… I certainly hope that Canada can step up on this. We’ve been sadly lax in allowing the big research in the U.S. to do most of the leading work and set a lot of the standards, but we can’t forget that (for example) Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was developed up here at the University of Toronto just over a hundred years ago, or the development of things like the CanadArm. We’ve got a long history of collaborative work on things that we don’t have the money to work on ourselves, and if our most common collaboration partner isn’t willing to help anymore, then we’ll have to find someone else.
De Tocqueville certainly wasn’t the last to make similar commentaries. But up until the late 20th century, there wasn’t any sort of unity among belligerent anti-intellectual types. There was some degree of unity among the Evangelicals after WWII, but they were just one group among many. As a result, the wide variety of stupidity kind of canceled each other out in a lot of ways, and everyone else just got used to working around the ways they didn’t. Though it did have the effect of slowing down social progress, since a lot of “liberal” politicians were willing to throw various social movements under the bus to insure that the damages of anti-intellectualism were largely confined there and the US retained economic, military, and scientific superiority.
Things are different now. The belligerent anti-intellectuals are largely unified and concentrated in the MAGA movement, even more so than the Tea Party movement before it. Their various ideologies are gradually converging thanks to a combination of internet-driven conspiracy theorism and propaganda put out by right-wing think tanks. Social movements are no longer an acceptable sacrifice, and have made faster progress in the 21st century so far than the 20th (aside from maybe feminism, which doesn’t seem to have made a whole lot more progress in the US in the past couple decades).
I have no clue where this is all heading. I’ve said elsewhere that, if left entirely unchecked, it’s hard to imagine how the present-day far-right agenda leads to anything other than White slavery. All of the people who don’t look sufficiently pale are dead or gone. A small “owner” class which has near-absolute economic and social power over everyone else. A wide swath of jobs being done by AIs and robots (or, if they’re still not ready for prime time any time soon, they’ll still find ways to replace a dozen people with good-paying jobs with one person and one AI, and not create any new jobs to replace those). No real rights or safety net. Possibly some degree of forced breeding, depending on whether they’re still serious about there being too few Whites after the non-Whites are purged. At minimum that’s likely going to lead to wide-scale peonage, which is barely above slavery. Fortunately, this is nowhere near unchecked, but the fact that there are an awful lot of people fighting for something like this without really understanding what it might mean for them is rather alarming.
jenor. and katy., this was after de Tocqueville’s time, but there actually was an Amerian political party called the Know-Nothing party. So are you shrieking?
Katyd., the news re the vaccine has me despairing too. Not only will Americans not be able to afford medical care, there won’t even be any. I think that Moderna could, though, in this instance, take the FDA to court.
jenor, your points are apt. It’s difficult for me, of course, my brain mired in The Way Things Are, to think of other ways to have handled freedom of speech and religion. But, their downsides are indeed what you point out.
I so hope that Canada becomes the next economic and scientific powerhouse! Perhaps the weather of the US Midwest crop-growing region will move up into central Canada, and so Canada will become the breadbasket of the world. If I could move there, I’d be there in a second, but it is very difficult for most Americans to immigrate to Canada (believe me, I have checked.) And, of course it is, because, you have to protect yourselves! Perhaps I could get asylum.
Do you remember Michael Moore’s suggestion for a bumper sticker to encourage immigrants to go to Canada instead of the US? “Canada: all the amenities of America without the stupidity and the violence!” Now, you could add “And no fascism either!”
@jenorafeuer:
You can always trace things back further.
I think, though, that the thing that sets Reagan apart is this: whatever Nixon did was inherently fixable, by the right guy. He didn’t break the system.
Reagan broke it in a way it couldn’t recover from.
Another thing to consider about religious liberty: not only are people free to start their own church, but there are financial benefits to doing so because churches don’t pay taxes on their holdings or their parishioners’ donations. We’ve seen time after time how successful grifters amass great wealth by claiming it belongs to their successful made-up denomination (or non-denomination) church. Also, because of the freedom of speech, churches can get away with brainwashing their parishioners. In theory, churches are not supposed to speak or act politically lest they lose their tax-exempt status, but we all know that many do and I couldn’t find a single case of a church being disbanded for it.
@garnetstar; was aware of the Know-Nothing Party (1850s) and assumed the much-later Tea Party (who hilariously called themselves Teabaggers before someone ruined it by explaining to them what that meant) modeled themselves off the Know-Nothing Party.
Agree with @11; the system (and good journalists) worked to hold Nixon accountable whereas Reagan broke the system. And then Trump pushed it into a ditch and set it on fire.
Anyone remember the early-2000s demand to re-write the Constitution so that Arnold Schwarzenegger (a man inarguably NOT born in the USA as is required by the Constitution) could run for president? IIRC, that was a Tea Party demand.
I remember many stupid arguments that Barack Obama (born in the USA to an American mother, with American grandparents and great-grandparents and so forth and so on, and raised by his mother and her family) was not eligible to run for president because of (insert insane reasons here), whereas Arnold Schwarzenegger should totally be able to run because of (insert more insane reasons here). I couldn’t white (sic) understand the insistence.
One note about self-driving cars: my completely-average 2020 model car is equipped with a camera, which it uses to screech nonsensically at me. One recent example: like most of the USA, my area has gotten considerable snowfall and record cold, and there are still mountains of packed snow that partially block lanes on secondary roads. There are also massive potholes all over the place. The car doesn’t acknowledge either of these threats, but if I must veer from my lane to avoid the potholes or driving into 5 feet of compressed ice and snow, my car shrieks at me. My concern about self-driving cars is that I don’t believe the technology is there yet to avoid breaking an axel in a massive pothole or keeping the car in lane even if it means crumpling and accordioning the passenger side on a Matterhorn of plowed leftovers. Or, as @8, jenorafeuer, points out, a child or pet darting out into traffic or another driver doing something idiotic.
Finally, I’m on the go-Canada team. I understand the University of Guelph is a powerhouse of biomed research and if the USA is too stupid to collaborate, I wish them many positive collaborators. I, too, wonder if the climate change will make them the breadbasket of the Americas.
(Apologies for the multiple postings–I’m in a veterinary waiting room while a beloved pet undergoes a fairly major surgery.)
I’ll grant that after Nixon things could have been fixed if there was a will to. I was mostly going back to him as ‘the time the current trajectory was set’ because not only was he an early case of ‘who cares about the law, this is what I want’, but also the whole setup of an insulated right-wing media for the purposes of radicalization was started by people trying to make sure no other Republican president would be held to account like he was. Reagan did indeed formalize most of the proto-fascist ‘big tent’, what with things like giving speeches about being ‘American’ at evangelical colleges and giving airtime to the ‘Moral Majority’, and the active packing of the Supreme Court started under him.
Unfortunately that ‘if there was a will to’ has been a big part of the problem. The Democrats spent the last couple of generations acting at best like the ‘white moderates’ that MLK complained about, prioritizing immediate ‘peace’ and quiet over actually fixing any of the problems before they could get worse.
Also, part of the problem with freedom of speech is that it is not a bumper-sticker topic. There are good reasons to be wary of any attempts to ban certain forms of speech, even ones as narrow as Germany’s laws regarding speaking positively about Nazis. (And yet things like the Hayes Code and the Comics Code in the U.S. were a lot stricter but were not only legal because it wasn’t government enforcement, but were fine with many Americans.) And there are good reasons to say that banning speech can’t actually work long-term. (Those of us in Canada of a certain age will remember the extreme secrecy surrounding the trial of Karla Holmolka, mostly because a lot of what was being said there was later going to be used as evidence against her boyfriend Paul Bernardo.)
But at the same time, anybody who’s run an internet forum knows that if you want any sort of intelligent discussion, you need to moderate things. It’s the whole ‘Nazi Bar’ analogy: any bar that gets a reputation for allowing Nazis to sound off will soon find itself attracting more Nazis and losing everybody else. At some point the Paradox of Tolerance kicks in, and you have to put limits on toxic ideas before they become cancerous and kill the body politic.
@Katydid:
You want churches used as a veneer of protection over an obvious grift, look up the ‘Genesis II Church of Health and Healing’, which exists solely to promote the Miracle Mineral Supplement. That’s basically industrial grade bleach being used as a cure-all. The church was literally created to give the people selling this crap another line of defence against any attempts to hold them accountable, as well as for the tax reasons you mentioned.
@15:
Me, #11:
Implicit was that Carter was not the right guy.
This. So much.
Looking in from the outside, the so-called “two party system” in the USA is nothing of the sort. Even if it worked, by the standards of most civilised countries the system seems to offer a choice between swivel-eyed far right wing nutbars, and EVEN WORSE swivel-eyed FURTHER right wing nutbars. I say “seems” – I don’t know enough to judge Johnson, but certainly since 1970, US presidents can be divided into two types:
(1) the ones who make things worse for everyone who isn’t a millionaire
(2) the ones who mark time until power can be handed back to (1)
There’s no actual opposition, not in practice. Both “sides” have been bought and paid for by the same sorts of people. The very idea that they’re even separate sides is a fiction everyone seems too polite to bring up – and you have the gall to stereotype Brits as being uptight and repressed and too embarrassed to talk about difficult subjects. What’s particularly weird is that this fact is blindingly obvious to anyone who didn’t have to pledge allegiance to a flag every morning at school since they were five, anyone who doesn’t take for granted that going to school carries a quantifiable risk of being killed by someone carrying multiple legally-owned military-grade assault weapons.
Well, looking at it from a purely economic perspective, post-Nixon, the Republican Party temporarily “breaks” the system in ways where the rich can have big short-term profits at the expense of everyone else, and then Democratic Party doesn’t really “bide their time” but more like “patches” the system so that things can recover. Short-term hits on the “number go up” crack pipe just aren’t sustainable and will hurt everyone, even the rich, in the long run. Though even with the patches, there was still a very gradual economic erosion of the middle class. And yet the Republicans were the ones who successfully branded themselves as the “Party of fiscal responsibility” despite that they were anything but that.
Post-2008, this has been broken. After the bipartisan bailouts which rewarded bad actors and failed to fix anything for the middle class or poor, the Democrats have been no longer allowed to patch things in an effective manner and are reduced to putting band-aids on gaping wounds. Biden did manage to temporarily reverse a sharp downward trend near the end of his term (due to the global recession at the time) but Trump undid that immediately. At this point they’re still not so much “biding their time” as “trying to keep things from getting any worse and sometimes failing, because that’s all they can do”.
I hypothesize that a large part of the problem is that quite a lot of the current crop of “corporate masters” are deeply ignorant people whose elite degrees are paid for (either they paid someone else to take their classes, or their parents donated massive amounts of money to bribe the schools into adjusting their grades to a “Gentleman’s C” because they just couldn’t be bothered to learn) and genuinely think that if there weren’t anything holding it back, the numbers will rapidly go up forever. While it’s true that, both sides have long been bought and paid for by the corporate elite, their roles were supposed to be rather different.
All that being said, if one cares about social issues, there’s still a world of difference between them: a significant chunk of the Democratic party is socially progressive, and even the non-progressive ones are more hesitant to throw social issues under the bus than they would have been in the 20th century; while the MAGA wing of the Republican party is revanchist, seeking retaliation for the loss of status of the cishet/Christian/White middle class (while ironically continuing to be responsible for the economic aspects of that) and the non-MAGA ones mostly just go along with it.
I don’t know enough to judge Johnson…
And your “judgment” of everyone else is so lazy and simpleminded that it’s wrong even where it’s right. Seriously, try harder and stop recycling old worn-out talking-points.
Well said.