Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

3 months ago, we were all wondering why the EU proudly launched their "Choose EU for Science" campaign, despite having much lower funding levels than in the US.

If they predicted this, then their actions would make a lot of sense. It is notoriously difficult for scientists to change careers after years in research. For people cut off from US funding like this, a EU-guaranteed middle-class income will appear much more attractive than hoping for this newly unpredictable US situation to turn out well.

Both the EU and its large member-states need to significantly ramp up funding to exfiltrate scientists from the US. This could be a force multiplier as important as getting German scientists was after WWII, or Russian ones during the Cold War. It would also be a tremendous amount of progress for not that much money, all things considered.

And I say this with no joy whatsoever, because all these developments are damaging great collaborations and personal relationships with friends and colleagues in the US.

As a fraction of GDP, the EU spends more on academic research than the US. And if you add the UK, the total is also higher in absolute terms. (The US spends more on R&D, but that's mostly business spending.)

From an individual perspective, the funding situation is (used to be?) better in the US than in Europe. Mostly because there is less competition, as the salary gap between the academia and the industry is wider in the US. Americans are less likely to do a PhD and pursue a career in the academia than Europeans.

"prediction" skills was not needed.

Intelligent, smart, critical citizens are a nuisance for absocapitalism goals.

Scientists please come to the EU, we can't pay you much, you won't be able to find a place to live and we don't do air conditioning, but plz come.

/s

It didn't need to be predicted, 3 months ago it was already clear what was happening. The list of banned words in applications, and so on, was already out by then.

This easily beats being persecuted because of your research. Humanity and researchers use to live on more modest means, and you don't need 100k's to do math research. So sure, come to France we would love to welcome all of you!

The government not funding something isn't persecution. If it were the vast majority of people on this forum would be persecuted, which clearly wouldn't be a right use of the term.

I was also surprised to read that. The EU were obviously acting in direct response to the US administration declaring it as their immediate intention to pivot away from science.

>The government not funding something isn't persecution

So you're not just getting down votes, worth noting that you are incorrect to state this as an absolute, as a matter of both law and common sense. It is very well established (and again, makes sense) that there are many many areas of life where it's utterly uncontroversial that the government is in no way required to offer people services. However, IF the government chooses to offer people services, then it must do so in a fair way. For example, a local government need not offer any of its building space for public use. But if it lets one group make use of it, it can't then disallow other groups from doing so based on disliking their race/speech/etc. Any restrictions must be content-neutral (this has been litigated).

Or for a broader theoretical example, there's nothing in the US Constitution that requires government to fund any sort of medical care. While it might be political suicide, Congress could choose to just sweep away Medicaid and Medicare completely whenever it wished, and that wouldn't be unconstitutional. Now instead imagine that the government said "to save money we're going to deny Medicaid or Medicare to filthy negroes or dirty jews going forward!" I would hope that you'd recognize that the government "not funding something" there would absolutely be a form of persecution. Conditioning funding on something the government would not be able to make a direct law about is not a universal Get Out Of The Bill Of Rights Free card.

The US government has all sorts of schemes that fund some groups whilst not funding others, so this rule you think exists doesn't really.

That's part of why Trump admin is on the warpath. They ended up funding educational schemes that discriminate openly against certain groups.

And are you claiming that academics are some sort of protected group, that the government can't exercise any agency inner which academics it gives money to? Because that's just not true, if so.