No scientist has ever looked at the state of science funding and thought it was great. The pressure is tremendous and the success rate for grants is dismal. But hey, it could get so much worse and probably will. The incoming administration is flagrantly anti-science.
Trump has been getting cozy with the Argentinan president, Javier Milei, and the two have been up to no good.
Last month, Milei pulled Argentina’s delegates out of negotiations at the United Nations COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where world leaders were discussing how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and pay for such efforts around the globe. The move came hours after he spoke with US president-elect Donald Trump, who has signalled that he will remove the United States from such negotiations when he takes office next month. Trump and Milei have expressed mutual admiration.
It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.
“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.
Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.
Milei does not hold scientists in high regard.
Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists. Rather than having their research subsidized by the government, he said during a forum in September, “I invite them to go out into the market. Investigate, publish and see if people are interested or not, instead of hiding like scoundrels behind the coercive force of the state”.
Scientists aren’t going to be friends with Trump, the flamboyant idiot who would appoint RFK jr to run the NIH and Elon Musk to shred the economy and wants to shut down public education, so I think we can expect the situation for science in this country to get progressively worse. Other countries already have saturated populations of scientists, so if there were to be a reverse brain drain, I don’t know where we could go. Does New Zealand have room for a million expatriated American scientists? Canada? Germany? For American science to abruptly collapse would be a catastrophe for the whole world.
With Mittelklasse-Merz projected to be Germany’s next chancellor? Good luck with that.
Canada probably will be seeing some scientists come back if Trump really gets going, so there are likely to be less openings for would be American expats.
Canada is looking like it will soon have a right wing government that, if the last time they were in power is any indication, will be hostile to scientists.
It isn’t only the right wing that censors science. Lysenko? Didn’t Stalin insist that science must obey the laws of Marxist Leninist dialectical materialism.Surely that demanded rigid Laplacian determinism?
I go back and forth on this. Since the US flatly refuses to adequately tax billionaires, the alternative is to keep increasing the debt, but that’s only sustainable for so long. Eventually the credit cards are maxed out, and if China’s economy collapses it may no longer have any money to loan anyway.
So maybe the best thing is for people to get what they voted for: Let the system collapse. Let inflation and unemployment run rampant. Let the social safety net disappear. That’s what Americans just voted for, so let it come. When people are sheltered from the consequences of their own poor choices, there is no incentive for them to make better choices.
Because of America’s vast wealth and power it has spent decades evading the consequences of its choices. Maybe those days should end. Not looking forward to it; I’m about to retire myself. But if we’re marching through hell, as Churchill said, sometimes the only solution is to march as fast as possible.
Sure, there are idiots at both extremes. But it’s the right wing idiots that are now in charge. I’ll worry about the left wing ones if they ever gain some power.
I suppose it is time once again to dust off an old study on how science is the main driver of our society.
.1. US GDP per capital has increased about 9-fold in the last century.
.2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.
Our lead in science Research and Development funding explains our lead in the world in terms of the world’s largest economy and…largest military. The military is well aware of the value of science and has a good incentive for spending money on research and development. Better weapons means fewer soldiers dying in battles.
The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.
If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.
I am sorry to notice the current New Zealand government is doing budget cutbacks on science.
1933-1945 there was a huge flow of scientists from Europe to USA.
If the EU countries are clever enough to recruit the scientists from North and South Idiotistan, they will reverse the flow. And the Chinese will cheerfully recruit the Asian researchers that earlier would have emigrated to Merica.
Many of the payoffs from science lie in preventing harm. But preventing harm is not what billionaires want, because they profit both from causing harm and from repairing it. There should be no billuonaires.
I’ve always thought Argentina should be a rich nation.
A large country, educated European population, temperate climate, lots of natural resources.
At one time they were well on their way, around the turn of the 20th century.
“Yes, Argentina was once considered one of the wealthiest countries in the world, particularly between the late 19th and early 20th centuries,”
Since then, they’ve been a perennial basket case.
It is not clear how they can reverse their decline.
This book takes an empirical approach to why nations succeed or fail.
You need three things to succeed.
.1. A strong central government.
(This is something Loonytarians supposedly reject although when they gain power they always make their central governments into dictatorships. It is pure hypocrisy.)
.2. Taxes must be at least 10% of GDP.
(Loonytarians reject this but just cut taxes and increase spending and run larger deficits.)
.3. Rule of Law.
A level playing field.
This is why much of the Third World is the Third World.
The economy and government both end up in the control of a hereditary oligarchy, which is usually heavily intermarried.
They use force and monopoly powers to keep control of the economy and prevent anyone else from joining them.
(In practice, Loonytarians reject Rule of Law in favor of Rule of Oligarchies).
We will see if Loonytarian Milei has any answers.
I haven’t followed the events in Argentina very closely so don’t have any idea how his rule is going.
Raven, I’m sure this is no longer accurate, but when I was in high school (back in the 1960s) we were taught that Argentina was then one of six countries that grew enough food to feed its own population (the others being the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel).
Ed Seedhouse@6. Indeed, But isn’t there a residual belief in the racial superiority of Han Chinese? Though I suppose that it would be just that; residual from imperial days.
I’m sure some libertarians will be showing real soon up to point out how much better off Argentina will be under a libertarian government. Yup, any day now…
Despite their opposition to US participation in particular conflicts I expect the incoming administration to increase the defence (war) budget if for no other reason than it allows Trump to be a bully. A big chunk of that budget is to fund research and development. A scientist studying spiders, for example, merely needs to show how their research will potentially benefit the military and their grant applications will get support.
Trump can say whatever he wants about scientists, but it is Congress that sets the budget for research, not the president. Trump recommended budget cuts every year for research during his first presidency, but most science agencies had their budgets grow anyway.
Here is where I am compelled to remind everyone, if you live in the US, you can send a message to your Congressional delegation at any time. If strong science funding is important to you, please tell them to support funding to research agencies at the highest possible levels. It is easy and quick to send an email, but it is even better if you can call them or set up a virtual or in-person meeting.
You may or may not make much progress on your own, but Congress does listen to their voters when they are deciding where federal dollars should go. Republicans have historically supported federal science almost as strongly as Democrats, so don’t give up just because you live in a Republican district or state.
There are many resources and toolkits available online to guide you through Congressional advocacy if you have not done it before.
Right now several scientists at my work place are waiting for the formal Notice of Award for grants that are= supposed to have gotten the OK. NIH agencies have been silent for a while, possibly waiting for renewed government funding on the 20th, possibly waiting for the word of the new administration, very unclear. Meanwhile people need their salaries.
“Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists.”
And Stalin was distrustful of scientists and engineers, especially aircraft engineers. Funny how that turned out in 1941.
@13: There are racists among all kinds and colours of humans. What does that have to do with anything? Do you understand what “non sequitur” means?
@ 4
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disappearing-pod/the-seeds-of-starvation/#:~:text=During%20WWII%2C%20nine%20Soviet%20scientists,to%20save%20humankind%20from%20doomsday.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/03/08/nikolai-vavilov/
Sound familiar?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/05/12/soviet-botanists-starved-saving-seeds-for-future/10840121-9058-4c1f-ae7a-22ac16a6f4de/
@17 NIH is probably silent right now because the federal government could shut down this Friday if Congress and Biden don’t sort their elbows from their asses. The continuing resolution that the US federal government has been operating on since 10/1/24 expires midnight Friday 12/20/24 and all federal agencies have to be prepared for both a timely shutdown AND continuing on, despite not knowing under what conditions they will be proceeding. Right now I’m waiting to see if I will still have a paycheck after the 20th.
Embrace the suck.
@ 7, 10, 16, 18 Yeah, be prepared for otherwise preventable childhood diseases to come roaring back.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rfk-jrs-lawyer-top-ally-asked-fda-revoke/story?id=116769906
You know the situation is fucked when Mitch McConnell is the great white hope.
Or the great orange gasbag, who is notoriously mysophobic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/12/13/rfk-polio-vaccine-fda-aaron-siri/
Hello, Argentinian reader here, and I don’t need to be a scientist to tell you that things are really bad for science indeed in my country -as well as for any social issue you can think of. Recently, as a predictable side-effect of Milei’s constant barrage of attacks against the sciences, a group of geology students and teachers that were conducting research in the field were heckled and threatened by a couple of Mileist locals who wanted them to leave. It got so bad that the geologists had to call the police. The hecklers were actually offended when the police took the scientists’ side, and later they released a video justifying their actions:
By the way, “Scoundrels” is pretty tame for Milei, who loves to dehumanize anyone who doesn’t share his far-right views 100%, no exceptions (really, he’s currently been feuding quite publicly with his own equally awful vice-president for trifles that really shouldn’t matter to them). “Rats”, “cockroaches”, “turds” and more are part of the usual repertoire of insults used by him and his army of loyal followers. Just as with Trump, he’s crass and crude and people love him for it -his approval rating is currently over 50%, if recent polls are to be believed. It doesn’t help matters that, again just as with Trump, he’s got most of the corporate media groveling behind him and he has mastered the use of social media to spread propaganda, especially on Tik Tok and Twitter, the latter thanks to a boost from his good friend Elon Musk. The younger generations seem to be particularly enthralled by him, especially the men, which doesn’t bode well for our future as an independent nation. All in all, a pretty grim state of affairs if you value progress.
Turning research off and on. Spoiler alert: you can’t.
I worked at a research center for an oil company early in my career (80’s, 90’s). We had a diverse portfolio generating about 400 patent applications per year in plastics, catalysts, chemical analysis and processes and all kinds of stuff. The Brainiacs in the Executive Suite used a Magic 8 Ball to determine that we had to “get back” to our core business and started slashing programs, laying off researchers and staff. Something like 30% gone, like, poof. About two years later the same Brainiacs or their spawn observed that patent applications had dropped to less than 100 per year. Obviously, we were all slackers and needed to be punished by another round of cuts. So it went.
Finally, there was a feeble, half-hearted attempt to get some new research going but it was too late. The institutional knowledge was gone, as was the infrastructure and support staff. The word on the street was that the company was toxic. Bad Mojo. The last time I was in the area I swung by the old place and it looked abandoned, a haunted house.
Raging Bee@14–
Too late! About 3 weeks ago, Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart gave a speech exorting us to become more like Argentina.
@22–
Mitch McConnell is one of the people most personally responsible for the Republican shift to insanity. This is pretty much the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” joke, only instead of being a mere voter, he was one of the driving forces behind the party.
Ed Seedhouse’19. I do know.but I suspect that it feeds Chinese Exceptionalism which is just another example of an almost universal affliction.