Gotta wonder the point behind all of these “China does a thing better than the U.S.” stories is.
Are we in some sort of competition with China? I mean more so than usual.
Yeah, on the last one of these I basically just said good for them. Even now, I’m more concerned with the US actively reducing science spending than with what’s going on in China. Frankly, China doesn’t matter to me one way or another since I can’t speak their language. I’m more interested in Europe since they might to put money into “defense” that actually funds research, and that might make for a good place to relocate to that speaks more English.
Yeah, speedrunning totalitarianism
Spamoflage / dragon bridge is where you’d start your search for the answer.
Basically, it’s deliberately done
It shows how much our own investment has cratered. Costs for research are higher here for materials and wages, yet they’re still outspending the US now.
It shows that China is challenging the American hegemony and America’s cultural clout is decreasing. Whether it’s a competition is in the eye of the beholder. Articles saying “China is outpacing the US in whatever” are making the observation that America, a nation that’s used to banking on its reputation for being a top tier innovator in everything from tech to entertainment, is losing that ability if not straight up giving it away.
You know, when all this started I was telling people that it’s not as simple as out spending the US in science because most countries don’t have the infrastructure, but here we are in the second year of Trump’s second term with NIH research being strangled, and now I’m having to expand my post-doc search internationally because no one seems to have the money to hire me in the US. I don’t know what will happen the US science infrastructure if there’s no money to hire people to use it, but we’re quickly reaching a point where US researchers don’t have an option but to move overseas to anywhere with the infrastructure capacity to take us. That infrastructure doesn’t appear over night, so some of us may be out of luck, but we can share a lot of existing infrastructure and work in sub-par labs if other countries are willing to hire – and if they continue to expand their infrastructure in the long term I suspect many won’t return to the US even if it does restart science funding.
Also, have any other Americans stopped saying “we” in reference to America? Like it’s the place I started, but…
we will see when we see results like actual verifiable peer-reviewed data from legitimate sources.
