On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:45:53 -0400 Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
writes:
> Doug:
> > Of course they don't perfectly reflect technical output. Companies
> > game the system all the time - but not just American ones. Still,
> > there's little doubt that U.S. science and technology are extremely
> > sophisticated. We also make some very fine cultural products,
> popular
> > and high - and much of the rest of the world agrees. People come
> from
> > around the world to our universities. We're not a bunch of
> > knuckle-dragging dolts, fer chrissake. A lot of this is misanthropy
> > disguised as politics.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. The research community is very small, not even 1 % of the
> population and
> 2. It is composed of a large number of foreign talents (Indians,
> Russians,
> Asians, Europeans) lured by higher wages they could earn in their
> native
> countries.
One might wish to keep in mind that American physics for instance wasn't all that impressive until the influx of European scientists in the 1930s who were fleeing the Nazis. That generation of physicists of European origin (think Einstein, Fermi, Szilard, Teller etc.) in turn trained the next generation of American-born physicists (i.e. Richard Feynman). The same was true for other fields. American medicine greatly benefited from the influx of medical researchers of Jewish origin from Germany. And in the humanistic disciplines, where would philosophy and the social sciences in the US have been without all the members of the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School coming to these shores?
>
> Using very select few to draw conclusions about an entire nation is
> really
> bad logic.
>
> Another point - in this entire discussion I tried to point at the
> uniquely
> US institutional factors that promote mediocrity - and nowhere did I
> say
> that Americans are a bunch of knuckle dragging dolts. Au contraire,
> I said
> time and again that there is no difference between the US and other
> countries in the basic behavioral model - transaction cost
> minimization -
> that promotes mediocrity. The difference lies in the factors that
> make
> transaction cost minimizing behavior easier here than in other
> countries.
>
> BTW, as Joanna aptly pointed out, the openness to immigration is
> perhaps the
> singular most important domestic factor that propelled many US
> institutions
> to excellence. It makes a stark difference to most other developed
> nations
> that remain largely closed to immigrants. However, that fact eludes
> nativist populists on this list and elsewhere.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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