<< How come Americans get all those patents and Nobels? >>
Patents: Because the US has always been on the forefront of tying Enlightenment to commodity production. And the few times I've actually seen a random sampling of issued patents, I've been struck by how many are trivial "improvements" on an existing idea or just goofy junk.
Nobels: To some extent, the US has been feeding off the fruits of a truly great system of higher education, which has been systematically attacked and de-funded for at least a generation now. Didn't a recent post here note that US contribution to refereed physical sciences journals has fallen something like 60% in a decade? Those Nobels will be right behind.
(Elite propaganda aside, the true base of this once-great system resided not in eastern private schools+Stanford+CalTech+UChicago but in the state university systems of the Midwest and the West Coast, plus some eastern outposts such as NYC's city-funded colleges. Sure, the Nobel-eligible cream tended to rise to the elite schools, but an amazing number of those Nobelists came from non-promising beginnings in Minnesota, Iowa, the Bronx, etc. And I think public UCal-Berkeley still leads in physical science Nobels. The Morrill Act has done incomparably more for US higher ed than any amount of tax-deductible largesse from dead Wideners. And, yes, I know, there's been the Pentagon, too.)
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:35:11 -0400
>Carl Remick wrote:
>
>>Americans are exposed to education the way they're exposed to
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