Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.
You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.
For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.
I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary:
* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.
* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.
* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.
* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.
* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.
and more.
My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.
Eh, that's not a unique set of strengths. In any European country I know about (at least a dozen) you can get all-English education from kindergarten to PhD. In some for free, in some that's paid, but probably not as expensive as in the US. Everything is really rather a matter of tradeoffs and bang-for-the buck rather than categorical differences. Some European passports offer more access, but without the downsides of the US one. The only matter in which I don't know how to compare is the racial issues, but I hear the US is not exactly free of those either.
I dunno - I'm in Berlin and my kids go to a private school for English education. I don't think somebody who couldn't afford it and wasn't a native English speaker would be getting English without parental effort before 4th grade.
Also in the area I'm in plenty of people don't speak English - I just went to an eye doctor and they didn't speak English although to be fair that's the first time it's happened to me in 2 years.
Most of these perceived advantages are not unique to the US. I think there are only two things that still make the US more attractive nowadays: higher salaries and more jobs available to immigrants than in other places. If these two things disappear, the whole proposition starts to fall apart.
But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.
That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.
And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.
Most common first name in France is Mohammed. I really don’t understand what he means with immigration, unless he means he wants mostly-Asian immigration because others are a problem.
That factoid is because Muslims are obsessed with the name, and you will find someone named Mohammed in the majority of Muslim families, not immigration. It doesn't take much for the name to enter the top 10 boy names when they become 0.1% of the population.
If you keep posting swipes and flamebait, as in your first sentence here or "shut up forever" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42949095, we're going to have to ban you. We've had to ask you this more than once.
> The USA passport is far from a strong passport. Plenty of better alternatives elsewhere. Also, that implies getting citizenship, a 5 year ordeal.
This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...
> Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation
Which is a great marketing stunt that most countries (Germany included) couldn't afford, but otherwise, how often does it actually happen? I doubt they're spooling up Black Hawks to evacuate tourists every time there's a crisis somewhere.
It's not that the US will respond to every crisis, but that it's much easier to do so when you have resources nearby. Flashy rescue missions help justify the infrastructure and logistics networks that support such a sprawling military footprint. Also, humans are notoriously poor at thinking about low-probability, high-impact events.
I don't have the links on me, but there were other crises where Europeans were quickly evacuated but the Americans dragged their feet, so it's more case by case than you make it seem.
I don't know what to tell you, if you think the cuisine available in the US isn't great it's because you aren't looking. The "tossed salad" nature of the country comes out in full force to create a food scene that holds its own against anywhere in the world. Even if you restrict yourself to classic American cuisine the food is still world class.
One of my absolute favorite things to do any time a friend from overseas who only knows American food from our media portrayal comes to visit is to take them out to eat and watch their eyes light up. The best reaction I got was from a UK friend I met on WoW— "good lord I see why you're all so fat" said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. If there's one thing America can do it's cook.
Am Brit, that stood out to me too. I mean, I've made the same comment, so I know what was intended. (See my next comment for another example of this "skill").
I mean I guess this could have been the case but this guy in particular was originally from South Africa and living in the UK at the time and is in now in the process of immigrating to the US after marrying one of our other guild members. So unless it's also a British thing to commit to an underhanded compliment for years and continue snarfing down American food every time he visits I'm gonna assume he continues to be genuine.
UK is also a place with amazing immigrant/ex-colonies cuisine (as in great places to eat), but if we were talking about the British cuisine itself, getting above it is far from a high standard.
It's still there under the surface, and it's still good. But it's not fashionable (when was the last time you had kedgeree, cullen skink or lardy cake?) Stichelton, about two years ago, was a religious experience but it's £30/kg and is the output of a single herd.
Our day-to-day diet is poor (we're probably the most Americanized European country when it comes to diet), but there are good bones we could build on. Someday. A lot was lost to industrialization and WWII and can't be recovered, but much still survives.
It's possible that the… uh, 4? I think? Times I've spent a month in the USA, covering California, Nevada, Utah, NYC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts (and Connecticut, only on the way through, but had a pizza there) may have not been diverse enough to fully encompass your cuisine, but…
But the food I actually saw in the USA was mediocre.
I didn't have any interest in 20 varieties of Oreo or bars of chocolate with bits of pork in it (for the latter, I'm vegetarian); the stuff that Whole Foods sold had slightly less flavour and variety than European discount stores like Aldi, Trader Joe's might as well have been a corner shop; the fancy restaurants were merely OK, the only positive of the fast food joints was the low cost, the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafes and diners were on par with the random UK town centre breakfast diners you try once to see what they're like and never go back to, all the pubs were somehow even worse than Wetherspoons (UK chain with a bad reputation), the "cheese sauce" on tortilla chips was on par among the absolute worst approximations of cheese I have ever encountered.
And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
The best food I had in the country was at a place covered by an NDA; but even that, the best, was "4 stars out of 5" by European standards.
I had the pleasure of entertaining a colleague from China who was visiting Portland while we worked at a conference some years back. She had offered many similar complaints about American food as you did. But the places I took her to (which were themed, respectively, as Argentine and Russian) seemed to abolish that completely.
America, outside of New York and maybe Orlando, isn't really set up to entertain international visitors. Many restaurants charge a high price because they serve food that kids like and parents can tolerate. Fast food is optimized to eat in the car; delivery pizza is optimized to be delivered, which is something you should never do to a decent pizza. Nachos are a meme. Whole Foods was good ten years ago; a decent host should have pointed you to Wegman's or Market Basket or Publix. Trader Joe's is great when you live here and you want to get a good price on a bag of "wild rice" (manomon) or pecans, but you wouldn't usually live off of it.
If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.
>And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
Because Americans didn't eat yogurt until they started marketing the fat-free stuff as a diet food. Real yogurt is an afterthought for most manufacturers, though Dannon sells the real thing. Now everyone has switched to strained ("Greek") yogurt so the market for the normal kind is even less.
I think when comparing where to live, it's more helpful to look at what's normal. That's what you're going to be eating at mealtimes at work, it's what your kids are going to eat at school or their friend's place, etc. It's what you get when the company moves its office away from New York and you have to follow.
My visits there were between Christmas 2014-15 and the end of summer in 2018, Whole Foods wasn't that good even on the first trip.
> If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.
I did, that's how I got the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafe — can't even remember the name of that cafe now — and Whole Foods, and the Co Op in Davis, CA: https://maps.app.goo.gl/38HdERDX99vxBzF66
Overall your description seems to be broadly agreeing with me, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to "abolish" my low regard for American cuisine?
>My visits there were between Christmas 2014-15 and the end of summer in 2018, Whole Foods wasn't that good even on the first trip.
Shows something about my perception of time. I have some fond memories of the first time I went to Whole Foods in 2003 when I was eleven at math camp in Charlotte. At that point the "organic food" movement was just getting started, so food labeled "organic" was usually from independent farms, and the store had so many free samples you could practically have lunch for free. By the time I was in college I was going to a warehouse market (Your Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta).
I'm not sure why you would go to a grocery store as a tourist?
>Co Op in Davis, CA:
Davis is a very small town that basically just serves the University. Why would you go there? Was it for a symposium? I'm sure it was pretty good for local produce by the standards of a small town when it was the season in California, but it's not exactly the sort of place where you would normally visit. I lived an hour away for five years and never went.
Anyway it just seems like you got some dubious advice, and on behalf of America, I'm sorry.
I'm not proposing anything, let alone that specific thing. And I'm not even writing about health, this is about taste.
If you want to surprise the entire world by having your government do anything like that, entirely your choice.
But it would be a surprise, especially as the people your electorate just voted in appear to be against all regulation and federal agencies.
Americans voting for that would be as much of a surprise as the President demanding transfer of ownership of an ally's territory and refusing to rule out use of military force to get that.
I don't disagree with this assessment at all, the food at a randomly chosen restaurant in Paris was better than randomly choosing in the US. I had the same experience in Prague. Not usually "wow" but far from disappointing. But I've lived my whole life with the mantra that 90% of everything is shit so mediocre food places existing anywhere doesn't affect my read of the scene overall.
It's not usually the "top" restaurants that are the best in the US, I take people to dives, little holes in the wall, and greasy food trucks that just happen to be where some artisan decided to hone their craft. The place that cheap plastic tables and still
has a line every day.
There are amazing craftspeople of any craft in the US. Far more than any other place I've been to. Cooking, or rather restauranteuring, is no exception. But the average restaurant is... not that.
I worked at a village next to Geneve and the local restaurant was really good considering the price and location. (Cafe American in the city for the rack of lamb which is exquisite -- if they are still there; this is circa 2000)
This is such a perfect encapsulation of how badly the US lost the food culture war and why it's so frustrating to talk about it online. Saying that the US has amazing food always gets comments like this. I'm sure Georgetown has amazing food too. I'm excited to try it, it's been on my list for a while. I'm gonna stay with a friend's family in Thailand for a month next year and want to fly there as a weekend trip.
I totally agree with you. Scientist originally from the UK who moved to the Bay Area. Salaries are much much better here
I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US
I should say $100k was a terribly bad choice of salary, for either $USD or "$plausible other economy" -the key point came across I think. Your decision to move on would be made even harder by the IRS: you have a very long tail of consequence for your 401k/roth, property, and even just income: they want to know worldwide income for a long, long time. I almost took a gig in the US from Australia and realized I'd drop out of lifetime rating in the Australian private health insurance model, I'd lose payment to australian superannuation and the US versions I made would not be considered tax friendly income, unless I spent a lot of time and money with an accountant. I decided against the move for other reasons but financial complexity paid it's part.
Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.
> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.
That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
>> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.
> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.
There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.
> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory.
This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.
Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists
This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.
> crime rates beyond most first world countries
Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.
> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions
We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.
> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.
If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
> Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?
Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.
The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.
> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.
If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work (if you still need to work you're not really secure since you could lose that job) then I think you actually would need about $10M. By the time you buy a house, pay for your kids school (elementary through college) and medical insurance for the rest of your life theres not a lot of change left. That to me has always been the goal, I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.
> I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.
That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.
> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work
This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?
If you are trying to say that society forces us to feel insecure in order to drive us to never stop working then yeah I agree and it sucks - doubly so because it may even be true that if we all felt financially secure, society would grind to a halt.
There's certainly some truth in what you say. I see it as a societal problem that the only way to ensure you don't wind up with less than $X to live on per year is to amass some large multiple of $X. What would be better is a more robust social safety net program that ensure if that one layoff happens and you're out of work, your situation isn't that dire. Like maybe you tighten your belt a bit and maybe if you had stretched for a big house you have to move to a smaller one, but you don't wind up on the street. And in exchange for knowing that we will never wind up on the street, everyone accepts that no one will ever get to own a $100 million mansion or a superyacht or a company worth $100 billion. It seems like a fine trade to me.
$10M invested nets you (comfortably) $400K/year forever.
From that:
- 60k for capital gains tax
- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children
- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).
That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.
You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US.
It’s absolutely mind blowing to me that people like you can sit there and go, “no, you shouldn’t be able to retire in NYC for saving a few hundred thousand lives because the thought of you getting $10 million is icky to me.”
You surely want to retire comfortably. You want to do what you want - and spend money along, not some arbitrary amounts but just without thinking too much.
$10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
The 50 years is wildly off. Even taking the average male/female lifespan most people don't enjoy more than 20 years of retirement. And sadly in my family I think the average is much closer to 10 years.
If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.
>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.
Well, for starters I don't think most people's retirement lasts 50 years. Even if you retire fairly early at, say, 50, that's taking you to 100 years old.
Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.
Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.
50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100 - what if the person would live longer?
We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.
$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.
Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.
>>50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100
Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.
>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.
So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.
You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.
It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.
No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?
Why wouldn't you rather want to attract people with much higher odds of a reasonable quality of life regardless of whether they personally hit the jackpot?
In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.
No, it’s not better off. The lottery is paid for by poor idiots. All of the money going into those tickets would have been in circulation.
I also don’t think you understand wealth creation. A lottery is zero sum. A biotech company that makes $1 billion saving a couple hundred thousand people from early deaths allowing them to contribute to society is wealth generating.
$1bn / 200k people is $5k each. For a drug that probably costs $4. When you mark up the cost of saving a life by 1,200% I don't think you get to call that "wealth creation" or "saving lives" or even "preventing death". That's called "extortion."
I tend to agree, but having met some of the people who pursued this dream, they are very very inventive. They're smart. If that energy chasing a dream could be redirected, they'd be doing amazing things. Mostly, they wind up realizing that the goal is illusive, and re-pivot to a saner outcome but by that time they are fully vested in "america" as a plan.
The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.
BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.
That is the thing though: with the increased safety nets of the richer European countries, you would think that taking risks would both be more encouraged and naturally less dangerous than the US. And I am a big proponent of said safety nets. But we don't see this "moderate-risk-taking" mentality in the EU...
...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.
I'm not so sure there even is so much less risk-taking in Europe than in US.
There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.
Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.
Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.
(I imagine Musk
thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)
I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.
Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)
>That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".
Not at all. It’s that we experienced several times, first-hand, that some mentalities and mindsets systematically drive our societies to discord, war and death.
And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
>And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.
gee, no matter how many times Europe has told the Jews that they are not welcome, they've kept coming back, bringing ses penchants for assessing capital risk in middleman trade, and hedging financial risks!
You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).
It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.
The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.
Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.
It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.
There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.
Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.
Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.
I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.
Here, this one uses the simplest metric possible; a poor child is much more likely to remain poor in the US than in the other rich western countries looked at.
Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
No, this is apparently information that clashes strongly with your prior beliefs. The US is packed solid with underprivileged adults who came from underprivileged positions, and highly privileged adults who came from highly privileged positions - regardless of whether it has a dozen counterexamples.
You don't even need to look for the count of billionaires. My grandparents were poor-as-dirt farmers. My dad's education stopped at high school. He even went to a one-room schoolhouse until he was 14.
My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.
It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.
The relevant metric is not “did your grandparents farm” but “where in the socioeconomic continuum were your parents, and where are you”. In the US, these two answers are more likely to match than in other rich Western countries.
There are ~250 $1 million+ lottery winners in the US every year.
There are ~750 billionaires in total.
The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.
They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.
> Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?
Larry Ellison, Oprah, François Pinault, Howard Schultz, Jan Koum, Kenneth Langone, Ralph Lauren, Sheldon Adelson, JK Rowling, George Soros, John Paul DeJoria… to name just a few.
I took a name randomly from your list, Sheldon Adelson:
“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”
I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?
The US has very low average/median social mobility (and it'll only get worse due to insane education policies and less standardized testing), but it has very high variance.
Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.
Most scientists that I know aren't motivated by the prospect of going from $100k-$100m. As long as they have a good wage, they are far more motivated by having decent funding and facilities for their work so they don't have to spend half their time applying for grants.
> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck
But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?
I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.
A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.
There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.
Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.
I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.
I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is two minutes walk and I have a 400m ice skating track twenty minutes bike away. And on the work side I have free compute on an 3000 cpu cluster with also an gpu cluster of h100s and lots of resources for travelling for conferences and other stuff like that. And a lot of my startup friends here are here specifically because they went to San Francisco and got investment offers around 1 millionish and then tried to hire around and all the engineers were expecting 250k+ and then came to Europe and found people just as good who work for 80-100k. That’s a completely different runway for them and they actually have time to develop a product because they don’t have to pay so much and their people are still happy with their lives. Like I do agree there aren’t that many jobs like mine and Europe needs to get their heads out of their asses and poach as many America based scientists and engineers right now as they can. But I think American based people have this idea of Europe that prevents them from seeing their options here. I do think Europe needs more resources and less bureaucracy surrounding big science projects but I’ll make that point when I have my own big science project haha.
Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too.
And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.
It's easier to run a startup in the US, so why do it anywhere else? The financing is easier, the labor laws more business-friendly, and the native market bigger. And that's how it's going to stay for the foreseeable future. EU internal market integration has been paused for decades, weakening labor laws is a non-starter in any European country, and European pension funds are generally not allowed to invest in index funds, let alone something as risky as VC. If you think the EU will ever catch up, think again. The political will to do so is just not there.
From my PoV, the EU doesn't need to catch up. The US will be the one crashing down. There is an ocean in the middle but I can still see Americans digging their hole deeper and deeper.
It is better that we not fight wars and that we endeavour to increase the quality of life for all then we win some made up game of geopolitical competition.
safety and trust are hard to sell. it is widely known. What you say shows that "immediate gains always win" with no context.. It is literally unwise over time.
Yeah I don't get it. I know that Cherry Ventures just raised another 500 million euros but that is really nothing compared to what is in America. I think there is really a missed opportunity both from the government side of things and VC side of things. The government could relax restrictions on small businesses, hand out more tax credits, make it more beneficial to move here (e.g., my understanding is netherlands has a small business visa but it only lasts a year and you have to prove you are making money which is hard for a startup to do after a single year), more government money for research and more money to bring research results to market. Like the european research council (ERC) has a program called something like proof of concept where you get add on funds to an existing ERC grant to produce a proof of concept that could be taken to market but you are required to be the PI on the original grant to apply for the proof of concept. If instead you let anyone apply like the way NSF grants for startup work that would be better. for example postdocs that worked on the original ERC cannot apply for the follow on proof of concept money to try and make a startup that commercializes the research. only the PI of the original ERC grant can apply. That seems silly to me since probably the postdocs are better positioned to be startup leaders than the PI since the PI is more likely to have a permanent academic job and be uninterested in leaving that job to start a company out of one of the research agendas they are pursuing. you probably would get way more results out of the program than it generates now. I think from the VC side of things they could simply try and recruit more of these people who are working on such grants to become founders. In america there is a more clear MIT/Stanford/Caltech pipeline into silly valley and VC offices than there is in europe. VCs are responsible, imo, to create such a pipeline not academics. Anyways, if you are VC reading this feel free to reach out if you think that I am making sense. If I am not making sense feel free to tell me why. I am, of course, just some guy on the internet.
I have a proptech webapp that I built for myself but now gets several signups per week and has active users, yet nobody wants to invest. My last job was for an idiotic startup that had literally three dozen users at its peak yet was able to get over $2 million in VC, perhaps because it was in the US.
I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.
I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut.
Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.
On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.
To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect.
You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.
I lived in both the US for a while (Bay Area), but I am now back in Europa. Quality of life in Europa is really high and you can certainly live quite well in most Western European cities from a typical wage for a researcher. Although many people would indeed not need to own a car (public transport is often very good, in many places you can also get around via bike or even by walking), most do and this easily possible with common salaries. There are places which are expensive, but many cities are quite reasonable. Universal healthcare, a stable society, low crime are among the many advantages.
Having lived in both, how would you equate your personal “purchasing power parity” between Europe and the US? At my firm, I could generally move to Berlin whenever I desired - however this comes with a 50% pay cut. I'm honestly unclear if I'd be ahead or behind where I am in the states if I took that deal.
Not OP and I haven't been in US but I've pondered on this since I've worked in Europe where taxes are among the top3 highest, and also Japan. (And ALSO had the opportunity to work remote, hired in one living in the other)
Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.
So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.
The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.
Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that
“Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that”
Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.
> You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.
Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.
And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.
I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. If I want to, there's 24h train services to the dense city centers of Rotterdam (15 minutes), Den Haag (15 minutes) and Amsterdam (45 minutes).
I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.
That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.
the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.
We get signal wherever we can :) Boston Logan has about a 20-30% premium on normal groceries. SFO is probably closer to 5-10%. I assumed the premium could not be greater than 50% for Amsterdam airport.
Quality of life is highly subjective. Different people prefer different things. Many of us who value open space and privacy would see moving to a dense city as a step down.
It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture wars.
In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.
Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.
I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.
I think very few people proactively decide to become partisan. Most liberal arts academics just want to work in their special field. Sometimes the things they study get politicized, but that’s mostly the doing of talking heads.
If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?
It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline.
The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.
The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.
The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.
Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).
People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.
Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.
It sounds as if the universe revolves around the US. Did you know that one of the biggest HPC cluster in the world is in Saudi Arabia? I know grad students who went there got duplex villas for free lodging.
Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.
This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
The sentiments that you see online are meaningless. Ignore what people say and look at what they actually do. I guarantee you that very few US academics will move to Europe. The US has long had positive net migration from Europe, and some temporary changes to federal government funding policies won't significantly change that trend.
I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.
Something which might shift over the coming decades.
I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.
Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.
Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.
Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).
I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.
Yes, but when you borrow, you have money in your hands.
US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.
This is the obvious conclusion. As the US trashes its own research ability other countries can offer good conditions to the scientists. I've never seen an own-goal so great.
I might move somewhere that gave me a person grant. The U.S. works primarily on project grants, where you are funded to do a thing, but that thing doesn't always work, and most of the time it's a bit contrived in order to appeal to the funding agency. (This is probably so the bureaucrats can exert power over what is studied.) The system would work much better if individual scientists got guaranteed salaries to study whatever seemed appropriate, and if you needed money for equipment you can request it. This would lead to more crazy ideas being explored and less derivative, p-hacked slop carried out by graduate student slave labor.
France is extremely unattractive for research. Lecturers positions suck (high teaching load and you need to speak French). Full-time researcher positions are extremely hard to get, and they pay very little, especially junior position. 2500 euros per month, which isn't enough in Paris and just ok in a smaller city.
China, for example, could set up a very European-style English-speaking institute in Hong Kong or Macau with high salaries to attract scientists. Singapore and South Korea too. One day Americans might well follow the money and the research freedom?
China's drowning in their own PhD's. The competition is fierce, and the pressure is enormous. The best and brightest over there are insanely capable men and women.
In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.
Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.
I see Chinese nationals in US labs thinking a return to China is a more attractive now than it was a few weeks ago. Chinese institutions should absolutely capitalize on this.
It's been happening already for a few years. Many prominent award-winning faculty are leaving US institutions and setting up brand new labs in top Chinese universities.
As a seventh generation American and 17 year Air Force veteran (long separated), I’m suggesting everybody the US who has any skills, talent, sociability or empathy to leave the United States as quickly as possible.
I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.
Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.
Is he really? Where? I'm no Eric Bina but I ate from the same table and would be happy to remind him of the petulant brat reputation he left behind in the halls of NCSA.
I've heard several interviews about the decisions he made at that time and came from a neutral opinion to hating his guts.
It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.
I got to sign an MOU from NCSA about wage ranges about a year after he left because Marc was trying to extort more money out of them to stay there working on Mosaic. He left in a huff is the story, after they paid him a bunch including his tuition.
The plus side was I was already making 10% more than any of my other friends and got another 7% for signing it.
I don’t think that is a fair characterisation of Andreessen.
He’s always been a Democrat, including supporting Obama and Clinton.
His recent support of Trump appears to be a tactical reaction to some of the misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals and encouraging race-based hiring.
He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.
He's pretty explicitly said it's because the Biden administration tried to do the smallest amount of regulation in the tech industry. When Obama and Clinton let the tech barons run wild, he was happy to be a Democrat.
Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is what you're looking for here. The FDIC is accused of violating the APA and some constitutional amendments during the Biden presidency for it.
> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.
Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.
That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.
I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.
Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg was decidedly non-Nazi (and was regularly attacked as a “white jew”), and even though he had ample opportunity to leave, he chose to stay to work on the German nuclear fission program.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
It's funny how the politicization of science in Nazi Germany led to things like "Aryan physics" to counter the "Jewish physics" of Einstein's relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.
as an American I'd be sad to see science move out of my country at the same time I'd be happy and relieved that science continues to flourish and treated with the respect it deserves in other countries (hoping these would be democratic countries with a high regard for human rights such as those of Europe or elsewhere), decentralizing itself away from the US's chronic political issues that show no sign of abating likely for the next few decades at least.
I think that might be an implicit goal here. With antics around H1B, birthright citizenship, general worsening sentiment against "people who dont look white" and "experts bad, podcasters good" its probably worth while for researchers, scientists and professors to start looking elsewhere outside of the US.
First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.
Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.
But does anyone take any science seriously anymore, if the conditions of the US funding would be that don't even mention the topics related to women or climate change?
I would think if you are a European national this situation would have a silver lining in perhaps incentivizing European scientific investment to remain at home and strengthen those nations' scientific research institutions and grant programs. If the U.S. sees fit to rework its institutions, that's its own business. If funding in the U.S. dries up, then doesn't it make sense to go your own way and seek funding in your home country?
So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.
> i think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.
if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.
The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.
Not just that but capital is attracted there as well to the point there is a glut of it which is probably where at least some of the political problems arise. They literally have more money than sense while innovators elsewhere can't get funding.
Please, do take the US "talent" away. Most of real world progress and wealth creation comes from engineering style tinkering and copycatting, and not from pure academic style science research. But the latter gets all the hype, media coverage and the Noble prizes. This system of glorified scientific research is a vestige of anti-communist, anti-Soviet era, which is no longer useful, if it ever were.
The smart thing is to outsource pure science research where it's the cheapest, but commercialize it where it's most profitable - that's what China is doing and doing it very well too.
Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large group as you can imagine.
> Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country
There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.
e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.
'most careers' and Australia is a special snowflake, too, though yes, a valid example. on the other hand you have Eastern Europe, 6h drive to the 'West' from approximately anywhere and salaries in the shitter except for some professions in capitals (cardiologists would probably also qualify).
> the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside.
Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.
Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.
I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.