It's Not a Science Gap (Yet)

Robert Samuelson has a good article in the Washington Post today that deals with the issue of the US's rapidly declining scientific advantage.

"As late as 1975, the United States graduated more engineering and scientific PhDs than Europe and more than three times as many as all of Asia, reports Harvard University economist Richard Freeman in a recent paper. No more. The European Union now graduates about 50 percent more, and Asia is slightly ahead of us. By Freeman's estimates, China has reached almost half the U.S. total and will easily overtake us by 2010. Among engineers with bachelor's degrees, the gaps are already huge. In 2001 China graduated 220,000 engineers, against about 60,000 for the United States, the National Science Foundation reports."

Samuelson rightly points out that the US has structural advantages that make our scientific discoveries more valuable than discoveries made in other nations. Samuelson is more optimistic than I am about this issue.

Like many things, in the past 15 or so years many nations have moved towards free markets and the protection of intellectual property, once again other nations are starting to do the things that gave the US a competitive edge and sustained higher wages in the US.

"We must be doing something right. Our decentralized research and development system (corporate, government and university laboratories, venture capitalists, and freelance inventors) excels at moving ideas to market and constantly reinvents itself. Here's an example: In 1980 Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act to encourage universities to license discoveries to companies. It worked. In 2002 universities earned $915 million from licensing fees, almost four times the 1993 level, according to economists Richard Jensen and Celestine Chukumba of Notre Dame."

Timothy Burger
timothyb(at)timothyburger.com