Something tells me this is only part of the story. Yes, after several wars we took in scientists who subsequently brought new ideas, improved teaching, etc to the country.
But this ignores the biggest factor: US universities have tremendous endowments [1]. Having deployable capital that is larger than the GDP of some nations helps not only with the acquisition of the absolute best, but also the maintenance of programs who may not have an obvious path to profit. Moreover US students pay more for their tuition than any other country in the world, further factoring in to the availability of money that can be used for such purposes. Additionally, the US spends the most capital on R&D by the dollar than any other country [2].
In the end, it comes down to money. It doesn't matter if you grow the talent if you can simply purchase the best from where ever it happens to grow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021715/what-country...
Edited to add: the brain drain from Europe to the US during WWII is also a factor. We ended up with a disproportionate number of foreign scientists during that period as well.
To give you an idea, I can pay $60 for a FaceTime call with an urgent care clinic. That exact same call is billed to my insurance for $200 or 333.3334% more than what I would pay. An inhaler is priced at $70 at my local pharmacy, but can be had for $15 with a co-pay (God knows what they’re billing insurance for the “rest”) or $12 without insurance and just a coupon I picked up from a doctor rendering one of the “benefits” of my insurance moot. I’m pretty sure the inhaler itself can’t be more than a dollar to manufacture, but whatever, the pharmacist has to get paid, right?
The problem with US healthcare is distribution (a similar but less acute problem exists in education) and efficiency (same).
In fact you could argue that US healthcare priorities being so similar to our education priorities (i.e. spend a bunch of resources on the absolute best, particularly infinitely scalable research like pharmaceuticals, but then hope and pray for the underfunded rest) is what causes a lot of the criticism people levy against US healthcare.
But the US seems to have worldclass outliers in just about any field you can think of.
If a single university has a bigger endowment than the entire monetary value of produced goods and services of a country for a whole year, it gives you perspective on what that money can do when poured specifically into a single purpose (education, R&D, attracting academic talent, etc)
The things people will do for science!
The point is simple: if you can impose your standards on others of what it means to excel in any discipline (and that's what I mean by political power), you're much more likely to come out on top in any comparison. And then you can harvest a lot of objective benefits as well from the best people wanting to move to the places that come out on top.
It's unrelated to meritocracy. It's just that a significant portion of the world population lives under conditions that are too poor to be able to develop extraordinarily smart people in significant quantities that are able to compete with other smart people born in rich countries. In other words, if you are poor, have poor access to sanitation and nutritious food, you'll be at a severe disadvantage to develop the skills needed to be a top researcher.
Competency is usually rewarded, and rewards are pretty well correlated with competency.
There's plenty of room in the tails one can cite to justifyany opinion on the matter, but on average I think we're far more meritocratic than not.
I'm personally willing to bite the whole bullet and am an open-borders advocate. But it's a mistake to think that supporters of border restrictions aren't aware that they're explicitly anti-meritocratic.
Anti-immigration lobbies have tended to caricature and scapegoat low skilled, low income, “undesirables;” while touting their support for (limited) immigration of high skilled, well-heeled immigrants as evidence of that they aren’t simply against foreigners.
I'm an immigrant to the US. I support tight border restrictions because the current status quo regarding the Mexican border, visa overstays, and emphasis on family reunification makes it harder for the US to have a truly meritocratic system, which would be something akin to the points-based systems of Canada and Australia.
It sure as hell isn't whatever policy these authors determined was most likely out of the 3 or 4 they considered using regression over a time period containing one observation of the dependent variable.
(Reading the abstract, it seems the above charactization is even generous.)
Hopefully the next great center of research will have higher standards for what is subsidized than we have in the U.S. today.
It's long had outsized musical influence but was only the world leader in music during the classical period, roughly 1750-1820. This does not overlap Austria-Hungary. However, I don't know the economic output of the Habsburg monarchy relative to the rest of Europe, so it may still be an exception.
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/colleges-and-universities/
https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-pounds-us-u...
Highly specialized research on US levels is done at dedicated institutes like the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Fresenius, CERN, and many more in collaborative efforts on the EU level.
You can't have 5 research universities in a country of 5 million people.
The EU seems to be rather obsessed with achieving an end state where a huge proportion of people (like 50 per cent?) have a degree, but this necessary leads to dumbing down of the curriculum and emergence of mediocre colleges.
We already have people with bachelor degree who can barely write gramatically correct Czech, even though they are natives.
In the US, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Alabama are the states with populations in the 5-million range. The University of Wisconsin, Colorado, and Minnesota are all AAU members, and each would comfortably be the finest university in every country on earth smaller than, say, Spain (40 million people). South Carolina and Alabama aren't as prestigious but both do quite credible jobs of serving as the flagship universities of their states.
Really? I'm counting at least 7 research universities (ranked <200 globally) in a country of 8 million people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=switzerland+population
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/sw...
I don't see China taking the lead even as they start to graduate a zillion engineers and improve a lot otherwise. Especially with Xi's new authoritarianism.
European research is also distributed a bit differently which makes it harder to compare.
Social things are culture, friends, etc. and obviously they overlap.
Europe is generally good to immigrants. They have nice laws, egalitarian policies, corporations that try to look beyond just hiring locals. Etc. etc..
But it's much harder for immigrants in Europe to 'fit in', to make friends, to participate in all the 3rd space stuff, to 'get the jokes', which means being invited to the 'thing', maybe it's a business thing, maybe not quite looked at for promotion etc.. And a lot of business is still done through social networks, a 'guy who knows a guy', from 'introductions'. I wouldn't say downright 'nepotism' but the Uncle who works at the Space Agency who puts his nephews name in for an internship etc..
So it's like 'marginalization by being an outsider' as opposed to any kind of negative or oppressive actions by the in group. (I'm not denying racism or whatever, just saying most things are not really overt, and it's more about people 'self selecting' people 'like them' as opposed to specifically disliking others).
The US is decidedly more open, they care a lot less where you come from and have more aggressive policies and actions at least in some places. Partially driven by ideology, partly just be greed (i.e. aggressively want the best talent), partly because there is less of a rooted culture.
France is very French. California doesn't have an established culture. There's no such thing as a 'Californian' by culture, just residence. If you grow up in france for 30 years, you spend the rest of your life saying "I'm French" because culturally, you are. But if you grow up in Cali and move to Florida, you don't go around saying "I'm Californian". Though you might say "From California" but that has a different meaning. Cali is more or less just a 'place'. Obviously it has hints of culture and obvious not everyone is treated 'equally' but it's fairly open.
Academia on the whole is generally more open I'd say but still, all the other things, i.e. grants, awards, tenure, etc. are going to be different.
- Max-Planck-Gesellschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society
- CERN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN
- ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_Organisation_for_A...
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.35.1.185
It seems to be more about the development of the American university system during the 20th century rather than the current status of research in American academics (which is highly corporatized these days, with attendent quality and openness issues).
Also, the average quality of American universities isn't very high, from the paper:
> "The American system is well suited to producing top schools, although at the cost of inequality. To illustrate, del Corral (2020) compares the performance of Spain and the United States in a recent Academic Ranking of World Universities list often known as the “Shanghai ranking”... The United States accounts for 40 of the top 100 universities; Spain for 0. On the other hand, 83 percent of public Spanish universities (delivering in-person instruction) appear somewhere in the ranking that only 23 percent of their American counterparts do."
Does it? What does "best" mean? If you look at any particular field in the sciences I am sure you will find several universities outside the U.S. with renowned/leading researchers from that field. (At least that's been the case in every field I've been in.)
The U.S. as a whole simply tends to have more researchers and participate in more fields than any other single country. But that's largely a matter of allocating resources, of which the U.S. and its universities obviously have plenty (more than any other country) for numerous reasons. But it doesn't say anything about the quality of the individual research being conducted.
Ranking universities by operating revenue will result in a rather good approximation of the Times Higher Education World University Ranking.
2) Once the British empire and later US became economic powerhouses, English became the de facto research language, what gave English-speaking researchers home turf advantage in access the research literature;
3) The budgetary constraints to universities are softened when they are backed by a government able to print the global trade currency.
Today, Asians are fighting for equality in US educational system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
This is most likely going to lead to striking down Affirmative Action. I suggest leaving emotions out of this and read the actual case materials. There is a lot of intellectual discourse, nuance and vigorious debate in those materials as well as amicus briefs. I love reading high profile lawsuits and this is one of them.
You seem to have read the details of the case, yet you say that Asian Americans are fighting for equality by citing a case that has determined at the lower level and appellate court that no systemic discrimination occurred.
Please don’t extend this meme… Asian Americans are doing just fine in admissions across the board at US institutions.
1. The appellate judge has confirmed the lower court ruling that no quota-based discrimination was found.
2. Even if true (it’s not), it is only at a some (10-20?) elite universities. It is definitely not systemic.
3. Harvard undergrad population is ~26% Asian American. US population is ~6%. This is not a perfect comparison for discrimination, but it hardly reeks of xenophobia (not really relevant for Asian Americans in the US) or racism.
4. The only reason this argument has any potential merit is because Asian Americans have higher average grades and SAT scores than the rest of the admitted population. This would indicate discrimination if those were the only admissions factors, but they are not (at Harvard, I believe SAT and grades would be part of one factor out of five that includes things like sports, and this is similar at several other elite schools).
5. Note that the “students for fair admissions” are hoping that the Supreme Court overturns the appellate court decision and thereby possibly ending affirmative action. Basically, their case is encouraging less overall diversity at elite schools for theoretical benefits to Asian Americans (note that imho it will backfire in a number of ways… look at what has happened to Stuyvesant and Berkeley for examples).
Grades and SAT scores are easy to understand for everyone. Furthermore, for kids whose parents came from East Asia, where entrance to elite universities is (for most entrants) exclusively exam-based, this is a very unintuitive system. The logic that some folks hold (both Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans) is that perfect grades and perfect SATs should get you into the best school, but that’s just not how the admissions systems at these elite schools work.
All of these schools talk about how they want a well-rounded student body, and the admissions materials make it clear that they are looking for a wider range of students beyond bookish brainiacs. I will add that if an applicant wants to get into an elite school based on academics, then grades and SATs are not enough to catch the attention of the admission committee — great grades and SATs alone only make an applicant look similar to thousands of other applicants.
Anyway, I wish the best of luck to anyone applying to an elite school. But if they do, I hope that they focus their application on something other than grades and SATs — they will have a tough time getting in otherwise.
Simply put the fact that you can slip to a pretty low bottom in the US (as opposed to the guaranteed safety net in some other countries) motivates those individuals capable of high achievement to produce the best research. This is why the US has basically the biggest companies, the best researchers, the most dominant pop-culture, etc. Basically, everyone knows that if you don't continue to pursue whatever it is, you can sink to the bottom, and there's not as strong a safety net.
It's also the source of America's constant 'self-improvement' and 'self-help' culture [2].
When people have a guarantee of a good life no matter what, they get complacent.
My explanation also explains why some of the most successful people come from such low backgrounds. For example, successful businessmen like Larry Ellison had some pretty tough childhoods. This makes sense, since those who've experienced such lows will naturally be more afraid of going back than for those for whom it's a more abstract concept.
As another example, this is why Arab countries have much higher rates of females in STEM, than more progressive countries. Simply put, the women know that a STEM degree is a ticket to a better life somewhere else, rather than staying in their own country.
[1] The US also has some of the worst outcomes. The distributions are much wider in the US than other countries in many aspects of life -- income, access to healthcare, education, etc.
[2] and yes these two things feed off each other
EDIT: Why downvote when you can engage? It's really quite strange in the modern day when you can have a musing, and instead of supposedly intellectually curious people engaging, you're just downvoted.
Philosophically this is a tough one: take away the welfare state and you remove the floor of human suffering. Add the welfare state and you remove the drive to succeed (from most individuals, there will always be some who disregard all contrary incentives).
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-to-announce-student-loan-...
It's a common problem on HN; very used to it at this point.
I do agree that immigration plays a part as well, but immigration is also driven by pre-existing differences. The US must have done something that made so many migrants want to study here over other countries, and I think this is because American universities have been good for a very long time.
EDIT: Sorry you're being downvoted too. What a strange world.
Subversive society streaks exist. Problems often can not be brute forced economically or within a given reference framework, so its interesting having people who "go around the problem" without gaming the system in total. So you want a punk mentality, but not a wallstreet trader to produce real value.
I'm still using essentially the same internal combustion vehicle, phone, and literally everything that I was using decades ago and more or less that my parents were using. My phone is a little better, that's about it.
What is this 150 billion of our tax dollars a year getting us?
A telescopic photograph of chorizo?
Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.
We just take for granted that giving money to science is a good investment. I've worked in university science labs and they're extremely inefficient, incompetent, and low labor. One view is that this money is scientific welfare.
Looking at Lithium Ion batteries it looks like the tech was developed at NASA and Exxon.
I'm pretty sure I don't agree with the above ^, it probably discounts the value of grad-school research as an apprenticeship model amongst other drawbacks. But it does have some merit to bear consideration. Surely the current model isn't perfect - where could we improve?
https://electrek.co/2016/05/12/tesla-motors-stanford-solar-c...
> eradicating polio -> almost a century ago 1950s?
> discovering the structure of dna -> almost a century ago 1950s
> developing vaccines that prevent common cancers -> cancer is the second leading cause of death, this hasn't impacted the world significantly and isn't even a treatment except in extremely specific cases.
> creating the whole concept of open source software -> almost half century ago, not even academia, a consortium
> editing genes -> been around 15 years and would love some examples of how it impacted the world significantly pretty much at all
Well certainly most of his engineers he employees were educated, and this is shocking, at Universities.
Where do you think all the fundamental research into Aerodynamics, Materials Science, etc. happened that has made his company even feasible?
This is incredibly narrow-sighted. How many of “Elon Musk’s” (really, the people he employs) achievements have been made possible by foundational scientific research funded by public grants and made available to the broader community? I would argue a nontrivial amount. Much of tech entrepreneurship is technology transfer, not foundational. These are all parts of a complex ecosystem and no one piece is solely responsible for moving the needle.
