> > Carl Remick wrote:
> >> How come Americans get all those patents and Nobels?
> > This is too big a topic for one (over)post, but I think you're
> > staring at a rearview mirror, Doug.
>
>Carl's right, Doug.
>Even according to establishment US sources - 1. There was a big
>NYTimes piece summarizing the evidence of a rapid fall in number of
>USer patents, Nobels, papers in scientific journals- Monday, May 3,
>2004 "U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance In the Sciences" By William J.
>Broad - it costs money to get it from the NYTimes site now so no URL
Highlights from the New York Times article "U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences" (William J. Broad, March 3, 2004):
* "[T]he numbers of new doctorates in the sciences peaked in 1998 and then fell 5 percent the next year, a loss of more than 1,300 new scientists, according to the foundation.
* "[T]he American share [of the Novel Prizes], after peaking from the 1960's through the 1990's, has fallen in the 2000's to about half, 51 percent. The rest went to Britain, Japan, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and New Zealand."
* "The United States' share of its own industrial patents has fallen steadily over the decades and now stands at 52 percent."
* "CHI Research, a consulting firm in Haddon Heights, N.J., found that researchers in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea now account for more than a quarter of all United States industrial patents awarded each year, generating revenue for their own countries and limiting it in the United States. 'It's not just lots of patents,' Francis Narin, CHI's president, said of the Asian rise. 'It's lots of good patents that have a high impact," as measured by how often subsequent patents cite them.'"
* "[S]cientific papers by Americans peaked in 1992 and then fell roughly 10 percent, the National Science Foundation reports. . . . In a study last year, the [European] commission said Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990's as the world's largest producer of scientific literature."
* "Physical Review, a series of top physics journals, recently tracked a reversal in which American papers, in two decades, fell from the most to a minority. Last year the total was just 29 percent, down from 61 percent in 1983."
The New York Times included vivid graphics to illustrate the scientific decline of the United States: "Overtaking the U.S." <http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/03/science/0503_RESE_graphic1.gif> and "Tracking Achievements" <http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/03/science/0503_RESE_graphic2.gif>.
The causes of the decline? Relatively rising standards of living outside the USA, especially in Asia and Europe, and the US's "costly and unique military role": this year's federal budget allocates more than $126 billion to research, but more than half of the research budget -- $66 billion -- goes to military research.
What is interesting is that "the United States began to experience a number of scientific declines in the 1990's, boom years for the nation's overall economy" ("U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences"). -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
