MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science

MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science(paulkrugman.substack.com)

101 points by devonnull 29 days ago | 43 comments

MrGilbert 29 days ago |

I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.

burnt-resistor 28 days ago | |

Much of the damage is irreparable. Organizations that no longer exist have lost workers, other stakeholders, resources, and trust permanently.. and in cases like USAID and healthcare, people have suffered permanent injuries or died.

These clueless assholes don't care about or understand the implications of the damage they've caused... they're gangs of criminals rapists and pillagers scorching the earth and leaving chaos and destruction in their wake.

PigeonHolePncpl 29 days ago | |

Economically? No idea.

Global trust? I'd give it 20-40 years.

surgical_fire 28 days ago | | |

That presumes a sharp correction in the direction the US is heading, whatever it is.

Is that a given?

tim333 28 days ago | | |

Maybe they could elect someone normal next time around?

bestouff 29 days ago | |

I'm not even sure the Nazi regime was that much anti-science.

jfengel 26 days ago | | |

They kinda were. Both relativity and quantum mechanics were dubbed "Jewish science", which made it a lot harder for them to progress in those fields.

karmakurtisaani 28 days ago | | |

A lot of great scientists left Europe because of them tho.

rexpop 28 days ago | | |

The fascist "suicidal state" fundamentally rejects reason, rationality, and civil progress.

bryanlarsen 28 days ago | |

The US got to its preeminent position because the rest of the world screwed things up badly, and the US played a key role in rescuing it. Hopefully we never again see a global conflict on the scale of WW2, so hopefully the US never again is in a position to gain the rewards from rescuing the world.

red-iron-pine 28 days ago | | |

the US got it it's preeminent position because it was a resource and manufacturing powerhouse that was unrivaled in the world at the time. it was already overtaking the aging British and French empires when the WW's happened, and both of those wars gutted everything.

it'd be like if WW3 happened now and every other major country got nuked except China.

jaybrendansmith 28 days ago |

Again, I don't understand why this post is flagged. Don't hackers care about science? Isn't this newsworthy?

apothegm 28 days ago | |

I have some theories about that,but they sound a bit paranoid if not tinfoil hattish.

eudamoniac 28 days ago | |

I didn't flag it, but I almost did. I am typically not in the habit of reading any articles that start with this kind of eye rolling invective, with every verb tortured through a sentiment thesaurus:

MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science - When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength

With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science...Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved...Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt...This new assault on U.S. science...

"War" "ignorance" "terrible news" "killing" "strangling" "screeching" "assault". I just don't read shit like this. Report the facts and stop trying so clumsily to tell me how to feel about them.

andretti1977 29 days ago |

… “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto…

jruohonen 29 days ago |

From the liked NBER study:

"Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher."

https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50

3eb7988a1663 29 days ago | |

Surely English fluency is somewhat relevant.

surgical_fire 28 days ago | |

Interesting.

I wonder if within my lifetime it is possible that Chinese will become the main language one has to learn to be on top of things, with English becoming more niche.

These shifts happen slowly I presume. There was a point where a lot of people learned French as a lingua franca, and it transitioned to English over decades.

w0de0 28 days ago | | |

Unlikely. Adaptability of the language to new concepts as well as ease of adoption for second language learners matters. English - indeed every other candidate global language (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic) - excel Chinese in these respects. I’d wager that even we’re American hegemony to go the way of the UK, English will persist. It may become more Indian or Singlish, but this demonstrates its strength.

zb3 29 days ago | |

The more Chinese publications, the bigger share of their citation rates, right?

throwworhtthrow 28 days ago |

The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.

xphos 28 days ago | |

I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.

spwa4 28 days ago |

WOW. EU paper authorship is also back to 1980 levels. But still. I mean, I get that this is still better than the US, but wtf.

I wish Krugman had included that total papers has gone up spectacularly, and would not hide the absolute numbers. Plus I don't like that he's not being very clear on the distinction of social vs "hard" (positivist) sciences.

But wtf.

jmclnx 29 days ago |

China is increasing funding, US is cutting funding so this will only help China.

readthenotes1 28 days ago |

How is this affecting the replicability crisis?

xtiansimon 28 days ago | |

All around, black days for Science.

rolph 29 days ago |

not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms.

private interests have greater actual holdings than gov.

"they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.

gverrilla 29 days ago |

Absolutely deleting progress.

wileydragonfly 29 days ago |

NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.

rootusrootus 29 days ago |

As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.

nis0s 29 days ago |

I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.

xphos 28 days ago | |

I disagree any of the bloat you are talking about exists because puffying paper numbers is basically required to justify your work. Its because they were distrusted extensively so they have to ritually say their work is useful. Also I think its very challenging because most extra committees and stuff exist because people complained about how streamlined science use to be. Those committees exist because science got wrongfully accused of wasting money in the 80/90s with the golden fleece awards among other things, where republican's claimed someone's basic science research was a total waste of government money. Ironically many of the things that won a golden fleece ended up saving the country billions if not trillions of dollars overtime.

I think the major struggle with basic research is there is no way to conduct it in which results are guarenteed. If you could do that you wouldn't need basic research. But there are a ton of questions whose outcomes are not really valuable at all but you simply don't know. On net science dispite those many useless questions answered still is extremely net posititve because some of those apparently meaningless questions ended up being the right question to drive research to useful good answers.

insane_dreamer 28 days ago | |

better to have some overfunded labs who are able to receive more PhD candidates, than underfunded labs who have to cut their graduate programs

besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"