The U.S. Brain Drain: How Policies Are Driving Talent Away

Yeah, his brain's cooked

“Mr. President, there was a car bomb in Moscow this morning that killed a Russian general,” one reporter noted over the sound of the plane. “Do you have any reaction to that?”

“Who killed what?” Trump asked.

“Russian general, killed by a car bomb,” someone reiterated.

“Wow,” the president replied. “No, I just heard– you’re just telling me that for the first time. Where did this take place?”

“It took place in Moscow,” came the reply.

...........................................


Time: “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?”

Trump: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”

Time: “It’s right here.”

 

Starting to get some real data.

A Georgia Tech study shows that there is a net out-migration from states with total abortion bans which is particularly acute among single-person households. Even considering all other migration patterns, including COVID issues, they found total-ban states lost about 4.9 people per 10,000 residents every quarter, which comes out to a total loss of almost 1.5%. The numbers are fairly consistent across the months since Dobbs. Doesn't sound like much, but it is the equivalent of a super-high murder rate or lots of air pollution. When you consider that most are probably female and young, the long-term demographic, economic, and property values impacts can't be understated.

A notable but lesser percentage of family households also out-migrated.

Note: These are permanent relocations, not kids going to college out of state.

(This link is a draft. The final paper is behind a paywall: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33328/w33328.pdf)

Another study by the American Association of Medical Colleges finds that states with total abortion bans saw drops in applications for residency to the tune of 10.7%. Emergency medicine residency applications were down the most at 21.4% while the much smaller group of OB/GYN specializations were down by 10.5%.

https://www.aamcresearchinstitute.org/media/4846/download?attachment

This was entirely predictable and a result of really bad policy: brain drain from red states to blue and from US to other countries. Haven't seen much on non-academic migration to other countries, but I'm confident it's happening.

 

Is 75% a lot?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/t...amid-funding-cuts-the-science-world-is-ending

 

Things are going well.

Well, everyone except us.

https://www.ft.com/content/cd809af5-e0b7-46e3-91a1-c019090ea057?shareType=nongift

 

I’m really good at working with really smart people. Does that count? Can I go too?

 

This Gallup poll should scare the bejeezus out of everyone regardless of politics. There is no way to spin or dismiss this. When 40% of young women want out, that is a huge red flag that your country is on the wrong track.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/697382/record-numbers-younger-women-leave.aspx

As a Dad of two twenty-something daughters, both of whom are pursuing grad degrees abroad as are some of their friends, I am not surprised by this poll at all.

Now, it takes smarts, effort, and means to move to another country. Not everyone who wants to will be able to--but the ones who can will be your smartest, most capable, and most determined. And as the Gallup article says, they will take families (and friends) with them. Again, in the US, three women get PhDs for every two guys and that percentage has been rising.

 

This will make it hard for folks who want those degrees to get student loans and possibly affect professional liability insurance and just make these jobs more difficult for no reason. I mean, sure, who needs more nurses, social workers, teachers, and engineers? Those slackers should be in the fields picking my fruits and vegetables.

 

How disgusting is that? Trump doesn't give a damn about professionals who help, treat, or teach others, if they aren't able to help him financially. The only "professionals" he gives a sh*t about are bootlickers who will serve him. Billionaires, lawyers, media hosts, celebrities come on down. Trump has a position or power for you.

 

Worse, all except the engineering and business degrees are ones that are primarily earned by women.

 

Welcome back to the old days. Trump's world is a man's world. He has a history of disrespecting women, and Hegseth is just as bad, if not worse. Trump wants women who are eye candy, trophies, and servants to him, not professionals.

 

So you come to the BBS to slum, then?

 

lulz. CF has an amazing mix of very smart and diverse people. I dip my toe into Reddit and its a crap shoot. The few real idiots occupy my ignore list.

 

The National Science Foundation has cancelled all social science research grants. NSF's Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences has just quit issuing calls for applications, There's nothing there.

This traditionally provided small but critical funding to those working on research in fields like archaeology, cultural anthropology, geography and spatial sciences, linguistics, biological anthropology, economics and economic statistics, law and social science, political science, engineering statistics, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology. This also includes the critical multidisciplinary grants which encourage exchanges of ideas on complex problems. These grants have been around since the 1950s and have helped thousands of PhD students and established faculty learn new things.

As a guy who has been a small member of a group applying for these and similar NSF grants (the latest was aimed at the social and political characteristics of rural community understanding of disaster risk under the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program), I can tell you they are extremely competitive--almost impossibly so. It can often take years of submissions and incorporating feedback from NSF before you maybe get an approval.

In short, all the messy research into humans and the systems they create that we need to function as a complex society is no longer supported and just at a time when it is most critical, given the challenges we face from things as diverse as AI, digital literacy, and climate change.

 

Canada just announced two programs aimed at the turmoil in US higher education. They are recruiting 100 top researchers to chair positions and will fund those and related grad student researchers at $1 million each for 8 years.

They also are going after young scholars with their Emerging Leaders program, which will use $120 million to fund faculty positions.

That's not nearly enough to capture all the academics who want out of the US right now, but along with efforts in the EU and elsewhere, the cumulative brain drain will be noticeable. When top red state academics leave, they won't be replaced in kind. When top blue state academics leave, they will raid red state universities and the result will be a major redirection of talent in the US with the red states ultimately holding the empty hand. That includes both Longhorns and Aggies.

 

Wow, I had missed this post and poll when it came out a couple of weeks ago.

It's looking like the GOP is creating a national climate that will mean... they will have no choice but to embrace trannies.
They'll be just like the Alonzo Mourning gif after a while. "No, hell no... well... okay, maybe."

 

Russell Vought has decided he will dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is not an agency or a research arm of an agency. It's a National Science Foundation-supported effort that was started in 1960 to provide the university community with world-class facilities and services that were beyond the reach of any individual institution. NCAR is run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium of 122 universities. NCAR is, in many ways, the backbone of US science as many, many scientists make their way through NCAR at some point in their career or certainly work with someone who has--or use the supercomputing and other resources NCAR provides. It's influence is immense, its contributions incalculable.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/major-...mp-administration-dismantle-climate-alarmism/

In the headlines, (like the one linked) you'll see Vought's framing that NCAR is a bastion of climate change. Of course, they think about and consider climate change, but the focus is different than say, NOAA's National Climactic Data Center. Many of the innovations given credit to the National Weather Service over the last several decades started out as NCAR projects, including severe weather warnings, seasonal drought forecasts, water availability outlooks, snowpack/meltwater predictions, midwest storm patterns, hail forecasts, tornado forecasts, and coastal storm surge predictions. There's also the wind shear, turbulence, and icing alerts for pilots. There is no separating NCAR's weather functions from climate. It's a false construct.

NCAR also looks at changing ocean patterns and how those affect North American fisheries. Water quality, algal bloom monitoring, current modeling and a host of other ocean projects assist everyone from international shipping companies to the Coast Guard doing search and rescue.

NCAR developed the underwater gliders and hurricane dropsondes used to gather data and improve hurricane predictions. They built satellites expressly for studying hurricanes. NCAR has built the world's most advanced weather models that inform every daily forecast you read, be it here or abroad.

NCAR built the system that analyzes data collected from commercial and other non-weather specific satellites to assist NOAA in weather forecasts--and that includes space weather and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt GPS, comms, and power grids. NCAR also tracks the solar cycle and is developing predictive models for solar flares, which is a massively complex undertaking.

A major social science initiative is looking at how to discuss storm risk to the public so they can make good decisions.

NCAR developed a tool that almost instantaneously detect the source and predict the plume of toxic releases. That's good for industrial accidents and definitely has military uses. Speaking of the military, NCAR developed programs that can provide fine atmospheric detail at military test ranges so weapons can be tested under different conditions.

Finally, for wildland fire, NCAR has developed wildfire behavior models, smoke forecast tools, and air quality predictions. They also created the long-range models that underlie our wildfire potential analyses.

Barbarians running amok, destroying without thinking. We are approaching Khmer Rouge levels of anti-intellectualism. This will not only hurt science worldwide, it will also hurt the US economically by creating more uncertainty about the world.

 

I worked at a university group the did fire spread modeling, drought modeling, plant growth models, etc. We used ncar/noaa weather data as input into those models. I remember ncar developed their own file formats and tools for reading that data. I just looked it up - NetCDF was the format.

I bet they send the money going to this research straight to the accuweather douchebag.

A quick google later - yep that's it. The Trump admin is a kleptocracy.

• Barry Myers, the former CEO of the private forecasting company AccuWeather, was nominated by the Trump administration to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA oversees the NWS. His nomination was controversial due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the potential for the privatization of government weather services to benefit private companies like his. His nomination was never confirmed by the full Senate and had to be resubmitted after the 2019 congressional session ended.

• Russell Vought, a key figure in conservative policy circles and the current Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the second Trump administration, has been associated with the development of Project 2025.

• The connection between the two men is that the Project 2025 manifesto, which Vought helped spearhead, includes a policy to "fully commercialize its [NWS] forecasting operations". Critics allege this policy is intended to benefit Myers and other Trump donors in the private weather industry.

 

There is a lot of kicking and screaming from males, especially white males between 30-55 --- but the US is going to see a major shift in power with women taking a larger and larger prominence. There are a lot of younger women that have no real desire to juggle motherhood and their professional life and are choosing their professional pursuits.

Right now, there are a lot of older powerful men that are pushing for men in positions in leadership, but that will change when women have a larger percentage of the educated populous and when businesses show they are successful with women leaders.

This is going to push men into more blue-collar positions and into likely more "helper" roles than they are used to. Older men are balking at the change, but teenage and younger males are already somewhat used to it.

 

The level of quality secondary education in China is very poor.

In Europe, it depends on where you are.

The problem in the USA isn't the cost of the top 25 universities - those schools are worth every penny.

The problem is when you are paying 50K a year to go to Northern Illinois University or Bob Jones University where you get a poor education and a crappy degree.