Cutting Off Your Nose…

Every step of modern American progress, from the Industrial Age, the Information Age to the Digital Age has been built on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Some of that technology has found horrific uses, from nuclear weapons and smart bombs to income-equality shifting computer analytics giving the edge to those who can afford them. Some of it has created new jobs, cured diseases and given the United States its current but fading economic preeminence in the world. We know that as artificial intelligence escalates, applying massive computing power to feed a never-ending supply of data until the software begins to recognize patterns with uncanny consistency giving rise to automated but very informed decisions, we have some very fundamental questions to answer about who we are as humans.

Our rise in technology has been driven by electricity and internal combustion, creating life-as-we-know-it-threatening climate change. It has fueled “growth” to the point where natural resources, renewable or not, are being consumed at unsustainable levels. Still medical science has made unbelievable strides. Diseases once thought incurable are stabilized and often vaporized in time. We’ve mapped the human genome. Result: More people, living longer, consuming more resources. It’s pretty much the major economic model on earth; we measure success by gross domestic product growth. As impoverished nations scream for growth to lift them out of their misery, the Western world has just begun to come to terms with the impact of unfettered “growth.” Younger generations are finally learning to live, happily, with less. “Growth” no longer means “good.” But massive contraction is equally “not good.” A conundrum.

But here’s the rub: humans have become dependent on STEM not just to support ourselves economically but to survive ecologically. There has been yet one more form of polarization in the world between those who can deal with complex technology and those who yearn for a return to a much simpler yesteryear and are either unwilling or unable to embrace it. Even for some of us with some formal STEM training or with a proclivity to keep informed, the level of detailed sophistication to understand the routine underlying “machinery” of technology, from writing software, analyzing data, understanding complex chemical reactions and medical treatments, still eludes our total grasp. We at least try and live with, “OK, I get it… enough.” Know what we know and trust the rest.

For those not inclined to try and understand even the general vectors of this complexity, the question is how do we deal with a world where everything around us is wrapped in high tech? We can embrace a general, “well, if the problem is big enough, I have to believe in a scientific solution.” Or, “God will save me and give me a better place anyway – God does not require technology at any level – so I replace science with faith.” Or “we need to balance science with humanity.” Or “scientific research is an essential part of our ability to survive on this planet.” Or my personal take: “technological progress may have blessed us with riches, cursed us with huge medical and environmental problems, but without continued research, humanity is just shortening its own quality of life and life expectancy.”

Having a massive mysterious body of specialized knowledge, requiring prolonged and specialized education and heavily concentrated in larger urban pockets, is threatening. People with that knowledge, plus regions that control the results of that knowledge, can be just plain scary. Denial, hatred, fake news and conspiracy theories – encouraged by a crass political system that uses those tools for the achievement of selfish personal goals with no real social benefit – arise and find those easily identified targets. “Elites” and “Scientists.” Silicon Valley. Boston and New York. “Liberals.” Even as those pockets of education and research are the only places from which pandemics can be contained and defeated, where the ability to resume social functioning must begin.

We’ve prioritized protecting and building wealth as the primary value in the land, at least the way it is run today. So many wealthy constituents are willing to trade supporting social conservatism if those voters, acting against their own best interests, will support tax cuts, smaller government and deregulation. In times of austerity, those conservative elements have elected to cut repair and rebuilding of infrastructure, restoring a competitive public educational system and supporting scientific research. Just to keep more money, far more than they could ever spend.

Even as the economy returned after the last big recession, expenditures for those essential elements did not. Tax cuts the likes of which are unprecedented followed. Unneeded and that produced little more than corporate stock buyback and more acquisitions, which increased demand for stocks raising the market, with very little in the way of adding genuine value for the rest of us. The rich got cash; the rest of us got deficits. Schools suffered. Infrastructure crumbled. Government supported scientific research faded.

I’ve blogged about education and infrastructure, but in this time of our massive unpreparedness for the COVID-19 pandemic, we may simply witness a trend towards reopening the economy before there is a vaccine or more than a hope that Remdisivir (an inflammatory) will join with other medications to take the sting out of the virus, that just might just kill more people than the first wave. Our failure stands in stark contrast to other countries that have committed increasing government support to scientific and medical research. Taiwan, South Korea and Germany were reasonably prepared to contain CV19; the United States dramatically was not. We relied on faith-economic-driven hope, delayed action, and were simply wrong. Today, we have the highest CV19 infection rate and death toll on earth.

Writing for the April 30^th Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik examines how this revulsion against “elites” and science has diminished the United States to its core: “Among the many ways that the coronavirus crisis has exposed America’s decline as a world leader, one that has gotten insufficient attention is the federal government’s decline as a supporter of scientific research.

“One can look at the consequences in several different ways. One certainly is the collapse of the American healthcare infrastructure in the face of a challenge that could more easily have been met with even minimally competent federal technological leadership… Another is the government’s ceding responsibility for basic research to private enterprise, which doesn’t like to do much of it. Then there’s the politicization of science, which undermines institutional research and drains government programs of talented researchers.

“The topic of America’s scientific preparedness has been receiving an airing lately against the backdrop of the pandemic… Conservative economist Alex Tabarrok calls ‘the failure to spend on actually fighting the virus with science ... mind boggling’ and ‘a stunning example of our inability to build.’ (He frets that we spend too much on defense and ‘welfare,’ meaning Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and not enough on ‘innovation.’) Venture financier Marc Andreessen points to a ‘smug’ absence of desire to invest in education, housing and other public goods.” I’ll put it another way: America’s federal policy seems to have invested primarily in wealth creation for those at the top of the economic ladder and military hardware… and almost nothing else.

It is important to understand the difference between private research and development (R&D) and that which is government supported. Private investors tend to eschew pure scientific research and efforts that do not lead to a commercial product within three to five years. The serendipity of innovation and discovery generated by university-driven pure science – a huge part of America’s rise in global power – is now relegated to a very, very low and easily cut priority. Medicines that do not benefit a large swath of potential consumers just do not get private R&D funding… and aren’t getting much from the federal government.

Hiltzik continues: “As we’ve reported, since at least 2000, scientists have become increasingly concerned about ‘a growing U.S. innovation deficit,’ as a 2015 report by MIT put it… The report listed four landmark scientific breakthroughs of the prior year: the first spacecraft landing on a comet; the discovery of the Higgs boson, a new fundamental particle; the development of the world’s fastest supercomputer; and new research in plant biology pointing to new ways to meet global food needs… Then came the punchline: None was a U.S.-led achievement. The first two were the products of European-led consortia, and credit for the second two belonged to the Chinese — ‘reflecting that nation’s emergence as a science and technology power.’

“The report attributed the absence of U.S. leadership in these innovations ‘in part to declining public investment in research.’ In a follow-up report a year later, researchers from a dozen top research institutions examined tangible results from basic science, including an Ebola vaccine and a practical demonstration of the principle underlying quantum computing and ultra-secure quantum communications.

“One field in which basic research was shortchanged, the MIT report noted, was the fight against infectious disease. Writing in 2015, the authors focused on Ebola, the most dangerous viral disease of the time, but their conclusions could apply almost as well to COVID-19… The problem, the authors suggested, was an overreliance on ‘privately funded research in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.’ The private sector was successful at devising ‘drugs, tests and procedures needed to combat the diseases of the developed world,’ but ‘existing priorities and incentives are not sufficient to prepare for diseases that emerge by jumping from animals to humans in impoverished parts of the developing world.’

“Creating drugs and tests for known diseases is applied research. But ‘if we are to be prepared for the next viral epidemic, we need to invest in the basic research to characterize and understand all known viruses with the potential to be highly infectious,’ the MIT report warned. Its words reverberate today.

“Because private commercial companies seldom invest in research they can’t reliably link to their core businesses, it falls to the public sector to fund basic research — for the same reason that government made the initial investments in basic infrastructure such as interstate highways, Hoover Dam and the internet… Since about 1986, however, U.S. government investment in R&D has stagnated at around $100 billion a year, according to the nonprofit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (with a brief spike to $126 billion in 2009, due to the post-crash stimulus). Business R&D, however, increased from $70 billion in 1980 to $300 billion in 2016, an increase of 329%.

“It’s also true that, while America’s funding of basic research has remained stagnant in dollars and declined in relation to the burgeoning growth in its economy, the absolute numbers remain impressive… The $100 billion a year spent by U.S. government agencies is more than that of any other country’s public sector, according to UNESCO. China’s outlay of roughly $80 billion from the public sector and $300 billion from business adds up to about 2% of its gross domestic product spent on R&D of all forms, compared with 2.7% in the U.S… Yet if we measure a country’s commitment to R&D in relation to the size of its economy, the U.S. lands behind much smaller countries, including Germany (2.9%), Japan (3.4%), Israel (4.2%) and South Korea (4.3%).

“In the U.S., basic research has long been hampered by political narrow-mindedness and ideological roadblocks… In subsequent years, Republicans in Congress have tried to stifle research into climate change, presumably at the behest of their patrons in the fossil fuel industry. President George W. Bush blocked research into embryonic stem cells, a bow to Christian conservatives who saw it as a violation of religious principles. (Bush’s action prompted California votes to create a $3-billion state stem cell program in 2004.)” The irony of these reports may rest with the fact that the were created, of necessity given the required expertise, by academic “elites.” But there is a harsh lesson here.

To put this into simpler terms: The United States is losing global competitive advantage, the retention of better paying jobs and the development of a healthcare system to protect us from the inevitable pandemics by failing to prioritize government support of infrastructure, education and scientific research against naked wealth creation for the rich and funding a military that absorbs 41% of the entire global military budget but one that has not won a significant and decisive military victory in 75 years! China is smiling as we unravel ourselves.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and as we grapple with the morality of “growth” at any cost, our addiction to a STEM-driven social and economic structure actually requires us to reexamine and reprioritize federally supported STEM research just to keep us alive!