I mean…STEM workers are watching while like half the country attacks science (and learning in general) on a daily basis. Can’t blame them for being pessimistic.
roughly 40% of respondents said the federal government is primarily responsible for the strength of science and tech in the U.S., followed by private companies (23%), academic institutions (22%) and nonprofit organizations (4%).
Why would you divide the federal government and academic institutions? The feds fund the majority of research at academic institutions, for both hard sciences and social sciences.
We’re still dealing with the post-Reagan legacy of “government bad, industry good,” and on top of that we have a determined and deliberate anti-intellectualism and anti-science movement in the Republican Party. That’s going to have an ongoing impact and it will take us decades to undo. That’s going to play a major role in both the perception and the reality of national scientific progress.
As much as all of us see science as a global endeavor, national institutions like the NIH are oriented towards advancing science developed in the US. Educational standards, scholarships (or free university education), and funding for basic and applied research all need to be increased.
Yes but for the explicit application for millitary or intelligence usage.
Civilian benefits of millitary research usually come after it’s been used well and good within millitary application, for example, GPS and the Internet.
Yes and no. Both DARPA and IARPA fund research with significant academic applications, even if their ultimate goal is national security. I stopped working for those funding sources because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the potential applications of the work, but my work itself didn’t significantly change when NIH and FDA started funding it. They’ve funded a significant amount of work in chaos and complexity theory, for example, as well as linguistics, and obviously medicine and psychology. A lot of the work they fund is applied sciences, it’s true, but a surprising amount is theoretical. I can’t remember all of the resources off the top of my head at the moment, but if you look at the requests for proposals for DARPA and IARPA, as well as from the DoD, DoE, and service branches, you can get a feel for what they’re prioritizing over the next couple of decades.