There’s more to say about a story in this week’s issue, and I suspect readers will want to comment on it, so here’s the place to do it.
Opportunity, Knocking
The Trump Administration is waging an “assault on science,” says the British science journal, Nature, dumping top scientists in government-funded jobs from NASA to NOAA to the CDC. And that’s an opportunity for Europe. “We can suddenly recruit talent that we would not have been able to attract under normal circumstances,” says Patrick Cramer, President of Germany’s Max Planck Society. The scientific “brain drain” is, he says, “a great opportunity for Europe as a research location,” even though “for research as a whole, it is a clear step backwards.” The E.U. is working to create “a special passport” for scientists, and France’s Aix-Marseille University is actively recruiting American researchers after Philippe Baptiste, France’s Minister for Higher Education and Research, wrote to institutions urging them to recruit the fired American scientists, saying the government is “committed, and will rise to the occasion.” China, too, is hoping to attract talent to better compete against the U.S., and South Korea is easing visa restrictions to attract American scientists. (RC/Deutsche Welle, AFP) …MEGA: Making Europe Great Again.
Incomplete
When I sent the stories to the editors last night, I didn’t have a tagline for that story. It was late, I was tired, so I sent it and headed to bed around 10:30 — a little earlier than most Sunday nights.
Relaxing helps: as I settled into bed, a tag idea came to mind, so I grabbed my phone and sent it to myself: “…When the brains are drained, the most evident remainder is the bathtub ring of obliviots.”
When I woke up in the morning, I found my brain had still been pondering it, since the one I used (above, “…MEGA: Making Europe Great Again.”) came to mind.
That’s just one of the reasons I write on Sunday: I want there to be time for my subconscious to work on things. Yeah, sometimes the published tagline just doesn’t work, and other times the editors are probably surprised when they see the issue come out, and a story has a completely different tag than what was included when they did their reviews. Maybe some of you even like the first tag for the story better.
Brain Drain
Bottom line, I found the whole exercise thought-provoking, because I hadn’t yet thought about the obvious-in-hindsight unanticipated consequence of a brain drain. I should have: Putin invading Ukraine resulted in a big exodus of talented people who figured they would be sent into the meat grinder.
Back in 2006 I read and recommended Thomas L. Friedman’s book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century [*]. It discusses how globalization and technological advancements have leveled the economic playing field, enabling people worldwide to collaborate and compete in the market, earning higher wages by (say) doing work for American companies. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the details, but Friedman probably pointed out that it goes both ways.
If job prospects are bad for experts in the U.S., then certainly “flattening” makes it easier for those American experts to find work elsewhere, and of course savvy foreign countries will work to attract them. Their gain is our loss, and it will take generations to recover. Thus, not MAGA, but MEGA.
Exaggeration? I wrote that before an Associated Press story popped up in my feed. “At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year,” warned Emilya Ventriglia, president of the union representing around 5,000 researchers at NIH.
“We’re expecting this to play out for generations,” agrees Levin Kim, the president of the union for academics at the University of Washington. And, of course, to complete the tie-in: “Some American students are looking to institutions overseas,” AP says, giving some examples.
The story ends with Marleigh Hutchinson, who is about to graduate with a degree in environmental engineering. “I want to work on food security and water security issues,” she said, “and if that’s something that the United States is no longer going to value, then I would like to go somewhere else.”
I never thought I’d see something like this in my lifetime. Yes, we’ve needed some reform — intelligent reform, not chainsawing by an unrestrained mad billionaire’s henchmen.
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