Do You Wonder Why the United States Is Struggling Economically? — Take this “Evaporating Brain Infrastructure” Tidbit

© 2011 Peter Free

 

08 December 2011

 

 

If one understands how science, technology, and engineering evolve over time, one recognizes that the following depressing statistics matter a lot

 

Extracts from Fareed Zakaria’s column yesterday:

 

[T]he big shift in the United States over the past two decades is not a rise in regulations and taxation but a decline in investment — in physical and human capital.

 

In percentage terms, the federal share of research spending — which funds basic science — is half of what it was in the 1950s.

 

The number of engineering degrees conferred annually decreased more than 11 percent between 1989 and 2000.

 

Even with the increase in college attendance over the past two decades, there were fewer engineering and engineering technologies graduates in 2009 (84,636) than in 1989 (85,002).

 

© 2011 Fareed Zakaria, Obama’s economic speech shifts the focus from deficits, Washington Post (07 December 2011) (paragraphs split and reordered)

 

I quote Zakaria because he is generally very careful with his facts.

 

 

Consider this easily demonstrated phenomenon

 

Capabilities based on military and NASA research eventually flowed into the civilian sector.  Many of the techno-gadgets — and indeed the Internet itself — that we use today came from this government-funded research.

 

Yet, we as a politicized culture are apparently too obtuse to see the connections between this (and other phenomena) and our nation’s successes during the Fifties, Sixties, and early Seventies.  Self-destructively, we split the “research goose” in half.

 

And worse, our politicians are talking absolute drivel about “what caused what” in regard to our economic decline.

 

 

People spouting bull-waste, rather than facts

 

I get so tired of hearing the nonsense our political class spews in its ridiculously generalized and factually unsupported ways.

 

It is as if most of us have completely forgotten that one of the bases of rational behavior is a willingness to marshal provable evidence that supports one’s ideas.

 

Evidence-gathering and analysis are not hard to do.  For example, Mr. Zakaria pointed to (readily accessible) facts that disprove Republican Party hot air that excessive regulation and inordinately high taxes are the primary causes of America’s woes.

 

And I have been regularly attacking the shared Democratic and Republican, plutocrat-toadying idea that off-shoring is a good, necessary, or socially and militarily-defensible idea.  (See here, here, here, and here.)

 

 

What happens when you combine (a) ideologically-motivated blindness to facts with (b) cuts in exactly what made this nation great?

 

Failure.

 

(I support that conclusion, here.)