It’s driving everyone away. No demographic is better off, other than obscenely rich people, under this administration. We have effectively killed what the brain “gain” we’ve been benefitting from for decades.
> In 2025, only 2.6 million people immigrated to the United States, a sharp decline from the 5.8 million who entered in 2023 and the 4.6 million who entered in 2024.
Key finding: "We conclude that net migration was likely close to zero or negative over calendar year 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. For 2026, we project net migration is likely to remain in negative territory."
You misunderstand me. I'm not discrediting. I'm not one to dismiss data just because of where it comes from, without looking at its merits.
My point was there are other credible sources that come to a different conclusion (e.g. net inmigration). Most official trackers still estimate positive net migration rather than a net outmigration. Over the last year or so, Brookings estimates up to -300K, while US Census estimates +1.3M, CBO estimates +410K, Goldman Sachs estimates +500K, and CIS estimates positive (in)migration.
Money of course. that doesn't mean this is a good place to live let alone do science.
I personally am still very bullish on living in America compare compared to a lot of places, but it's getting harder to ignore the stresses and costs of living here compared to the money that once made this place worth it
Because the comment you replied to is wishful thinking and not facts. Highly qualified people are still falling over each other trying to secure US visas, whereas the international press loves to print headlines like “scientists are leaving America in droves”, naming a grand total of three specific scientists who left.
The world doesn’t operate the way we want it to, and US salaries are head and shoulders above what you can get anywhere else in the world. That’s what people really care about, and not the news cycle surrounding the current administration.
> Highly qualified people are still falling over each other trying to secure US visas, whereas the international press loves to print headlines like “scientists are leaving America in droves”, naming a grand total of three specific scientists who left.
Not from my group of colleagues. The only person who actually did end up going for a green card is actually the most politically unaware and least competent.
> US salaries are head and shoulders above what you can get anywhere else in the world.
This may be the case but the cost of health care, child care and homeownership are so much higher now than they used to be that for a lot of people it doesn't make any economic sense anymore.
I see a lot of people going for a few years, working their assess off, then leaving before they even have to start thinking about a mortgage.
Immigrant scientists may be leaving America, because federal funding for some sciences areas have been rather abruptly cut. But, scientists are a small portion of high-skilled migrants.
You can have a significant downward trend in quality of life in the US and still be an appealing destination for people in war zones or whose families have been killed by gangs.
The US isn't the worst place to live, by any means, but we are currently machine-gunning ourselves in the foot and it would be nice to stop doing that.
Much the same reason why millions play the lottery each year. There is a chance, however small, that you'll win and join the obscenely rich mentioned earlier.
They're saying that asking why millions still come here if it's a worse place to be is analogous to asking why it can be cold outside if global temperatures are rising.
For all of America's many problems, if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense. Do you want to make $400k a year, have great investment options, and retire at 40, or make €80-100k a year with extremely heavy taxes?
(Bias disclosure: grew up in norcal, moved to Europe from California in 2013. I like living here but it certainly wasn't great for my career. It's like living in a forgotten backwater. You watch the future being built from abroad.)
It seems the optimal solution is to move to the US for your early earning years, build a nest egg, then leave once you get older and especially once you plan to start a family, for a number of (non-exhaustive) reasons:
* Vacation time in the US is paltry and often downright exploitative.
* Our for-profit healthcare system can easily wipe out any wealth you've accumulated upon a major medical episode, depending on what kind of coverage your insurance provides. Said coverage is usually determined by your employer.
* Education in the US is a joke compared to virtually every other developed nation.
* The homocide rate in the US is higher than 75% of other countries.
* Consumer protections in the US are virtually non-existent.
* Food quality is poor - e.g., virtually all foods have tons of corn syrup and other sugars added.
* The country as a whole is overly car-centric. Your day-to-day in the US virtually requires the use of a car, as most cities are not designed with walking or biking in mind, and only a few have useful public transportation.
Yeah, big part of why I live in the Netherlands. Though having lived in NL and IE I wouldn't say the health care I've had here has been particularly good.
Food - well that varies. Dutch food is... unexciting, to say the least.
> if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense
I entirely agree with this conclusion, especially if you don't plan to raise a family in the US, but still I think the difference isn't as great as what you say.
You have similar investment options in the EU vs US. Tax is high in California. And you probably won't retire at 40 with $400 a year unless you've been very agressive and lucky with your investment.
I can talk about my person situation, big tech in EU, I contemplated relocation in the US (which my company would sponsor). I'd be better off financially in the US after a few years but worse job security and WLB, but it's not night and day. Main issue in EU + UK is lack opportunities compared other US, but there are some.
Retirement is going to be pretty boring for a high performer, so you either have to convert that cash into starting your own business or likely keep working the same job you already have. Entrepreneurship might have a certain appeal, so I wouldn't discount that to those who have that dream, but if you stay in a job then you have to start asking what all that money is going to actually buy you. Both incomes are going to get you to a point where you already won't be able to spend it all.
Realistically, the question isn't meaningfully answered in isolation. One would have to see the bigger picture to put it into context.
There is no good way to measure quality of life. Honest measures of Norway and the US (picking two "rich countries" at random) will have a lot of "it depends" and error bars and in the end concluding they are statistically equal.
If your information doesn't have those error bars it is just a feel good headline to make someone feel better about themselves by putting others down - this is EVIL and you shouldn't fall for it!
There are at least four widely accepted measures of quality of life, and the US ranks at the bottom of the top 10 of one of them. Are you really sure that you're smarter than all the economist and sociologists who put those measures together? Or maybe we've screwed it up and needs to purge a lot of poison from our system.
I don't have to know anything about them to tell you they are worthless poison that should be purged. Well is is possible that they are useful for some niche and should never be taken outside of that narrow context.
There are far too many subjective parts of quality of life to ever put a single ranking on them.
Top 10 isn't bad. There are roughly 30 countries (a debatable number) with really great quality of life. The difference between 1 and 30 is not very great. The bottom of the list is really bad. The top is all really good
Almost certainly. Quality of life for well educated people is absolutely higher in many parts of the world. Whether you are in parts of Europe, New Zealand, east Asia, you can definitely land in better places.
The idea that the US is "the best place to live" is a persistent cultural myth. It's mostly good for a lot of classes of people, but even that's changing as of late.
Western Europe and New Zealand are great places to live (east Asia is too big - I had to qualify Europe as well for similar reasons). However the US is also a great place to live. You cannot make any universal statement that one is better than another. There are pros and cons, but for the most part things are similar, and the difference is only slightly different sets of trade offs. In the US you will probably make more income which can lead to better quality of life in the form of things you can buy - but things you can buy isn't everything (and there are people who would make less in the US)
Yeah, from what I understand those that leave are living much better lives. Wive has a Masters in Biotech and is being pulled to European opportunities.
Those who are leaving are certainly leaving for better opportunities and better lives. Otherwise they would stay, or at least not be away for long.
But would everyone except for "obscenely rich people" be better off somewhere else? If so, then where, and why aren't they leaving by the tens of millions for those places?
Its fine, QoL is anyway in many aspects higher in many parts of Europe (no, not salaries but overall quality and happiness definitely, triple that if you have family with kids or ever plan one).
Maybe smart folks don't want to be in racist xenophobic regime which marks them as undesirables from Day 1, run by publicly voted-in outright senile pedophile who managed to insult every single human being currently living at least once, mostly much more. It happens with narcistic egomaniacs, quite a lot in fact.
Since folks willingly voted in such person twice as the best person under the sun to represent and rule them, it tells something not-so-nice about future that even many not-too-smart folks catch easily.
At least that would be my logic if I would be in such situation. I never was since US was never an option for me, Switzerland offers much more for me than US ever could. And my taxes are not used for mass murder and start failed wars half around the globe, a small but significant detail. Most scientists have more morals than typical faaangs of these days from my experience.
QoL in Europe is better if you are a below average to average earner. Many excellent perks and social benefits to cover things that are usually very expensive.
QoL in the US is better if you are an average to above earner, and dramatically better if you are are high earner (like SWE's). In large part why the US brain drained so much talent from Europe over the last 30 years.
If you think that the comment you're responding to is even a tiny bit objective, I'd encourage you to take a break from Internet ragebait. I'm no friend of the Trump regime, but that doesn't mean I have to endorse people posting furious substance-free rants.
They explicitly said that they're not living in the US! This what I mean when I call the comment substance-free; it's made up of words and sentences, like any other comment, but you immediately recognized that it would be silly to engage with the text in detail. What the commenter means is "RAAAAGH", so a person living in the US might agree because they also feel "RAAAAGH".
It's funny how blatantly clear it is that corruption was engineered by the extreme rich to serve their own interest at the cost of everyone else. And yet, somehow, I still get comments debating that fact -- people actively defending the status quo of this late capitalist hellscape. It's like these idiot want to protect a system of abuse, hoping one day they will be the abuser. It will not ever happen. The game has been rigged against you.
I think, for some people, it just takes a long time for them to finally see the light. You can coast a long time on what you were raised to believe and what you want to believe.
It's a valid criticism but no, it actually did not "kill" research, as evidenced by the US's extreme concentration and outperformance on any relevant scientific metric per capita.
instead of comparing country-to-country, why not compare within the same country over all time: it's pretty unique to the US in the post-1980s ish era.
Politicking for grants is unique post 1980? How did folks get awarded grants before? Folks just popped by to say “hey really appreciate all the heads down work you told nobody about here’s a million dollars?”
I’d want to compare grant funding and sources pre and post, as well as the diversity of institutions receiving funding, etc. my hypothesis would be that in order to build up institutions across the country politicians did try to steer grants to regional institutions, etc but it’s still a ton more money. (But I am not an academic)
... and a culture that couldn't explain to the public why half of these experiments were worth a single tax dollar.
If you're barely making ends meet, can barely afford gas, and hear that $390,000 just went to some scientists to stick plastic dinosaur tails on chickens to study walking dynamics, with zero practical applications for the knowledge gained, you're angry. Also this example actually happened, it's not hyperbole.
Malarkey, San Francisco tried to spend $1.7M on a single-stall toilet. There's plenty of blame on both sides, and much of the mud they throw at each other is true.
Again, if you are someone who can barely afford gas and hear about this... you don't care about strict principles, you just want to set those in power on fire. You're also not going to be easily convinced the government cares about spending your tax dollars wisely, or that all of this planning and research and science is worth it.
I personally believe that we should have a crystal ball which will tell us the result and future applications of all currently-contemplated research projects. Then we just need to look into the crystal ball and pick the silly lizard venom studies that lead to life-changing and life-saving results for hundreds of millions of people, and we can ignore the silly lizard venom studies that yield nothing!
"We shouldn't be funding all this frivolous stuff!"
"Okay, how would you figure out what to fund?"
"We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research has impact."
(If people don't understand, this is currently how it's done)
> We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research"
This is not accurate. There is the first gatekeeper which is program managers and junior program managers which have to gloss over your project and pick you. They (especially the juniors) don't necessarily have a the sophistication to judge your project and so are easily swayed by hot topics or reaching claims of national security/health applications.
Grants get awarded to people in the habit of telling little white lies about what their research is good for, then its people who are awarded grants that get promoted, and then those are the people who are reviewing projects, so being dishonest becomes cultural. Disastrous for science.
The glp-1 story is super overblown. GLP-1s were a highly desired target LONG before gila monster venom was discovered to be an agonist. And it really was around the same time that lipid attachments were becoming appreciated for their half-life attenuation, so even if amylin (the company) never took on exenatide as a (shitty) drug candidate, proper glp-1s with lipid attachements were kind of inevitable. Obviously we can't know this for sure, but cmon. How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two?
so, you should really recalibrate being taken in by just-so stories of basic science being SUPER important.
the point was about the nonsensical nature of dismissing things out of hand just because you can't imagine a "practical application" for it on the spot.
the earlier habener results that actually got us to glp-1s via anglerfish pancreas would have been similarly derided. substitute that in if it helps.
Your rebuttal is that GLP was a highly desirable target for a long time before we stumbled upon a way to hit it... and this is evidence that the "stumbling upon a way to hit it" was not a super critical and super fortunate event...?
> How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two?
Why'd you put "a year or two?" here and not "a decade or two?" or "a century or two?" Do you have reason to believe it was a year or two away, sans Gila monster? If so, can you provide your reasoning? Per your own point, GLP was a desirable target for a long time without successful hits. We have plenty of targets that are desirable for decades without figuring out a way to actually drug them.
Do you know the full story of glp-1 from a pharmacokinetic point of view? It seems not, since I explained clearly why I assigned a short time in my above comment.
> couldn't explain to the public why half of these experiments were worth a single tax dollar.
The funny thing about that is the controversial “impact statements” that are part of grant funding are supposed to be the part where you explain how your research matters to the broad community. But it’s become so political the only thing you can feel safe writing is “we will help people learn about science” because “we’ll start an after school program for disadvantaged youth to learn about science” is too DEI for some folks.
EU has much bigger brain drain problems to the US that will not be solved anytime soon. Even just recently Heart Aerospace announced that they were relocating completely to California after several years of warning the EU that the regulatory and economic environment was impossible to navigate for emerging technology companies.
>As part of this transition and to better focus its resources, Heart has decided to close its operations in Sweden to enable a bigger scale up of the U.S based team.
The French government may want to invite researchers but it faces budget issues in research and education, and growing social unrest. The French language is also somewhat necessary to live in France. It can be a deterrent.
Eagerly recruiting doesn't translate to active recruitment imo, unfortunately. With the coming elections, it is even more tenuous.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine moved to France for a postdoc. Just a few months in, he was informed that while the university would like to keep him, they were not likely to get the money for that.
French schools K-12 and university do not have better education outcomes than New York state, despite having nearly double the taxes. 53% of New York State residents go to a SUNY university for free and the rest pay a maximum of $7,000 a year on average.
New York state pays teacher pensions through the New York State Teacher Retirement System. About $8.5 billion a year, ~$4,000/mo per teacher on average. $7,000/mo+ with 30 years of teaching history. It's also protected under the NY State Constitution.
Large cities like Paris and Lyon have a good budget and amenities. You have to go outside the rich centers to see how schools are being failed.
You can't look at Louis Le Grand and tell yourself the situation is fine.
I recently started a program in ecology and the worry I've heard from scientists is that going forward funding is going to be very politically uncertain. It's hard to run a lab when you might just have grants get cancelled capriciously and have funding dry up for years at a time. I know I'm going to be looking outside the US for PhD programs once I finish my master's.
Four years of this is a huge blow to the field, eight would mean a wipeout of a generation of talent.
yes, we know. yes, this was an obvious consequence of trumps policies.
The entire administration has done one thing: sell of all of the US's assets, and convert it into profits for the trump family. thats it. Every action taken since the first 40 executive actions signed, through doge, defunding USAID which murdered over a million children, or bombing Iranian schools, has been to enrich trump and his friends.
Thats it. It's very simple.
They traded away every piece of soft power they could find and exchanged it for cash in their pockets.
The past two years is not a good summary of the United States. The policies that led them to leave are clearly wildly unpopular. They will be back.
While government funding may not grow above previous levels I would posit this is actually a feature - I’d expect to see a better public / private blend that is more resilient.
These are underestimates if anything. I know of programs at Caltech and other top schools with cohorts that are 33% to 75% smaller in physical science/ engineering disciplines.
We are at the point where AI researchers are worried about having to use the term "super intelligence" and avoiding any use of the prefix "trans-" in their terminology in order to get federal grants. So yeah, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do their research here.
I was pretty astounded and heartbroken watching my colleagues pass around a list of banned words so they could scrub their proposals. Then again, what options do they have? Either you get money from the government, corporations who have a very narrow idea of what they want to research, or you move to a country that takes research seriously.
It's not just AI researchers worrying about this specific issue! I personally had to revise wording in NIH grant applications, and have many stories from colleagues about awkward phone calls they have gotten from their program officers about this or that word in their project description, or even this or that _column_ in their projects' data products.
No idea why you are being downvoted. Everything you said is literally true and a genuine concern for researchers.
The right was so concerned about what you couldn't say because it maybe damaged your credibility. But what we're having now is that same group doing find and replace cuts on grants that use a laundry list of banned words.
There's no longer a point in receiving academic training in the United States because no one will trust it. A prospective scientist won't want to define their research by hedging against zionism and fascism. I don't have an extensive publication list but I would rather not publish anything if I have to give Israel and Nazi's a seat at the table for every research project.
Even though I'm sure it's factually true that there is a decrease in interest from international young researchers to come to the US, articles like this are always a bit dramatic and have a political bias. More problematic are the budget cuts than the decreasing flow of talent from abroad. The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.
Absolutely, I'm just saying it's better to focus political energy to counter the cuts specifically, to mitigate the damage of the current administration.
> The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.
No, not really. I mean, we potentially could, but not at the scale needed to run our intended research programs, and not with the state of education as it is -- the top career goals for US highschoolers are athlete, youtuber, musician, actor... they want fame and fortune. And why shouldn't they, that's what America tells them is important.
Then, we load those who do go to college with so much debt, graduate education is not financially possible for most of them. Careers in research require higher degrees and a decade of study, it's just not worth it when you have $50k-$100k in debt upon graduating, and a graduate stipend is like $2k a month.
At my university, we fill our masters and PhD ranks with international students. Even if we admitted 100% of the domestic students who apply each year, we wouldn't have a full cohort. And if we did do that, and they all did attend, the 15 other schools they applied to would fall short.
When I started engineering undergrad 20 years ago, they told us domestic students grad school only makes sense if you want to be a professor. Why? They put the numbers up! Opportunity cost!
Of course, now the goalposts have moved: American talent must be worse because they don’t have these degrees which are required of foreign students to get in the country. And, of course, grad school working conditions are notably terrible. Exploitable labor lowers working conditions.
And these budget cuts you blame are in no way political? The cuts are just naturally occurring and not introduced by Trump or right-wing politicians? Sorry that the truth and reality has a liberal "bias".
You do care if a cut is political. "We cut farm subsidies because Iowa voted against us" is a political vote. "We cut defense spending because we believe in peace through diplomacy" is a political cut. "We cut disease research because we think vaccines cause autism" is a political cut.
It was a pretty good high for a while. Which is the logic of crack addicts. It's one thing to blame people for doing things that are venal. But bending the knee to Trump is inexcusable for people who claim to be very smart.
Resistance would have accomplished nothing and these people have no principles. They kept their companies running, enjoyed tremendous benefits for 2-4 years, and will suffer no consequences from it.
That's not exactly true when you look at the history of how fascism works. Actually, capitulation is futile, as there is no bottom to what the autocrat will demand. If you give in, all it shows is you are an easy mark. Resistance is the only winning move.
Timothy Snyder put out a great book about this called "On Freedom", which explains most of the power an autocrat has is given freely by people who anticipate what he would want and just offer it without being asked, precisely because they have a notion that resistance is futile. Tech leaders were right there at the inauguration, they didn't even try! So the role these tech guys played early on was teaching Trump the extend of his power.
If you look at how Trump handled schools and law firms, you see an excellent case of capitulation vs. resistance and how that played out. Take the situation with Columbia compared to Harvard. With Columbia, they capitulated to Trump illegally withheld $400m and agreed to all sorts of demands, only to be met with more demands. Harvard faced similar pressure, but decided to fight it and won in court.
In the law world, Trump made demands to several high-profile law firms. Paul Weiss, Skadden, and Kirkland & Ellis all capitulated to the demands, other firms saw these law firms capitulate and just offered up settlements themselves. 11 law firms entered into agreements with the administration, and they didn't even have to ask all of them! Meanwhile, every firm that challenged demands made by the Trump admin, including Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block, won in court.
Tech giants didn't capitulate to the Trump administration because they felt they had no other choice, they did it because they felt it would be best for their bottom line. They have no principles, no backbone, and are opportunists who will say anything if a dollar is on the line.
Why not instead of being a defeatist whiner and contributing to the impression that there's no need for justice and consequences, you actually demand justice and consequences? Too much work to call your representatives?
5calls.org
Figuring out the right amount of justice-seeking versus forgiveness is the top point of argument right now among the newly elected dominant party.
You want to toss your vote in the "let's just move on" bucket?
It’s driving everyone away. No demographic is better off, other than obscenely rich people, under this administration. We have effectively killed what the brain “gain” we’ve been benefitting from for decades.
>It’s driving everyone away.
Then why are millions moving to the US every year?
It's a strong downward trend:
> In 2025, only 2.6 million people immigrated to the United States, a sharp decline from the 5.8 million who entered in 2023 and the 4.6 million who entered in 2024.
source: https://forumtogether.org/article/the-consequences-of-net-ne...
Yes, there are still people migrating to the USA, but it is a lot less than it used to be.
But still more than any other country.
For now! Look at the derivative.
Are you including undocumented?
They're not anymore. See: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implication...
Key finding: "We conclude that net migration was likely close to zero or negative over calendar year 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. For 2026, we project net migration is likely to remain in negative territory."
That's from Brookings and the data/conclusion is disputed by other sources
They're literally the most cited think tank in the world [0], and they're a highly trustworthy source [1].
How can you even pretend to discredit Brookings?
[0] https://thinktankalert.com/rankings
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/brookings-institute/
You misunderstand me. I'm not discrediting. I'm not one to dismiss data just because of where it comes from, without looking at its merits.
My point was there are other credible sources that come to a different conclusion (e.g. net inmigration). Most official trackers still estimate positive net migration rather than a net outmigration. Over the last year or so, Brookings estimates up to -300K, while US Census estimates +1.3M, CBO estimates +410K, Goldman Sachs estimates +500K, and CIS estimates positive (in)migration.
Does that clear up my comment?
Every fact is disputed by other sources. You are mudslinging with imaginary mud.
But then the word "throwaway" in usernames has become an indicator of this, lately.
Money of course. that doesn't mean this is a good place to live let alone do science.
I personally am still very bullish on living in America compare compared to a lot of places, but it's getting harder to ignore the stresses and costs of living here compared to the money that once made this place worth it
Because the comment you replied to is wishful thinking and not facts. Highly qualified people are still falling over each other trying to secure US visas, whereas the international press loves to print headlines like “scientists are leaving America in droves”, naming a grand total of three specific scientists who left.
The world doesn’t operate the way we want it to, and US salaries are head and shoulders above what you can get anywhere else in the world. That’s what people really care about, and not the news cycle surrounding the current administration.
> Highly qualified people are still falling over each other trying to secure US visas, whereas the international press loves to print headlines like “scientists are leaving America in droves”, naming a grand total of three specific scientists who left.
Not from my group of colleagues. The only person who actually did end up going for a green card is actually the most politically unaware and least competent.
> US salaries are head and shoulders above what you can get anywhere else in the world.
This may be the case but the cost of health care, child care and homeownership are so much higher now than they used to be that for a lot of people it doesn't make any economic sense anymore.
I see a lot of people going for a few years, working their assess off, then leaving before they even have to start thinking about a mortgage.
Immigrant scientists may be leaving America, because federal funding for some sciences areas have been rather abruptly cut. But, scientists are a small portion of high-skilled migrants.
We can't even employ the PhDs we have
You can have a significant downward trend in quality of life in the US and still be an appealing destination for people in war zones or whose families have been killed by gangs.
The US isn't the worst place to live, by any means, but we are currently machine-gunning ourselves in the foot and it would be nice to stop doing that.
Much the same reason why millions play the lottery each year. There is a chance, however small, that you'll win and join the obscenely rich mentioned earlier.
>Global temperatures are rising.
Then why is it cold outside??
Are you joking? It's hard to tell. Here's what many parts of the world are dealing with today: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/21/super-el...
edit: That's the better interpretation, thanks!
They're saying that asking why millions still come here if it's a worse place to be is analogous to asking why it can be cold outside if global temperatures are rising.
For all of America's many problems, if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense. Do you want to make $400k a year, have great investment options, and retire at 40, or make €80-100k a year with extremely heavy taxes?
(Bias disclosure: grew up in norcal, moved to Europe from California in 2013. I like living here but it certainly wasn't great for my career. It's like living in a forgotten backwater. You watch the future being built from abroad.)
It seems the optimal solution is to move to the US for your early earning years, build a nest egg, then leave once you get older and especially once you plan to start a family, for a number of (non-exhaustive) reasons:
* Vacation time in the US is paltry and often downright exploitative.
* Our for-profit healthcare system can easily wipe out any wealth you've accumulated upon a major medical episode, depending on what kind of coverage your insurance provides. Said coverage is usually determined by your employer.
* Education in the US is a joke compared to virtually every other developed nation.
* The homocide rate in the US is higher than 75% of other countries.
* Consumer protections in the US are virtually non-existent.
* Food quality is poor - e.g., virtually all foods have tons of corn syrup and other sugars added.
* The country as a whole is overly car-centric. Your day-to-day in the US virtually requires the use of a car, as most cities are not designed with walking or biking in mind, and only a few have useful public transportation.
Yeah, big part of why I live in the Netherlands. Though having lived in NL and IE I wouldn't say the health care I've had here has been particularly good.
Food - well that varies. Dutch food is... unexciting, to say the least.
> if you're a 20's-30's high performer, moving to the US can absolutely make sense
I entirely agree with this conclusion, especially if you don't plan to raise a family in the US, but still I think the difference isn't as great as what you say.
You have similar investment options in the EU vs US. Tax is high in California. And you probably won't retire at 40 with $400 a year unless you've been very agressive and lucky with your investment.
I can talk about my person situation, big tech in EU, I contemplated relocation in the US (which my company would sponsor). I'd be better off financially in the US after a few years but worse job security and WLB, but it's not night and day. Main issue in EU + UK is lack opportunities compared other US, but there are some.
Retirement is going to be pretty boring for a high performer, so you either have to convert that cash into starting your own business or likely keep working the same job you already have. Entrepreneurship might have a certain appeal, so I wouldn't discount that to those who have that dream, but if you stay in a job then you have to start asking what all that money is going to actually buy you. Both incomes are going to get you to a point where you already won't be able to spend it all.
Realistically, the question isn't meaningfully answered in isolation. One would have to see the bigger picture to put it into context.
Are these people better off somewhere else?
If they aren't why are we so sure they would be so useful here?
Look at where the US ranks in quality of life measures.
There is no good way to measure quality of life. Honest measures of Norway and the US (picking two "rich countries" at random) will have a lot of "it depends" and error bars and in the end concluding they are statistically equal.
If your information doesn't have those error bars it is just a feel good headline to make someone feel better about themselves by putting others down - this is EVIL and you shouldn't fall for it!
There are at least four widely accepted measures of quality of life, and the US ranks at the bottom of the top 10 of one of them. Are you really sure that you're smarter than all the economist and sociologists who put those measures together? Or maybe we've screwed it up and needs to purge a lot of poison from our system.
I don't have to know anything about them to tell you they are worthless poison that should be purged. Well is is possible that they are useful for some niche and should never be taken outside of that narrow context.
There are far too many subjective parts of quality of life to ever put a single ranking on them.
Did you just claim being at the bottom of the top 10 countries in the entire world is bad?
If you're trying to prevent a brain drain to Europe, and your quality of life is poorer than in Europe, that's bad.
Top 10 isn't bad. There are roughly 30 countries (a debatable number) with really great quality of life. The difference between 1 and 30 is not very great. The bottom of the list is really bad. The top is all really good
Almost certainly. Quality of life for well educated people is absolutely higher in many parts of the world. Whether you are in parts of Europe, New Zealand, east Asia, you can definitely land in better places.
The idea that the US is "the best place to live" is a persistent cultural myth. It's mostly good for a lot of classes of people, but even that's changing as of late.
Western Europe and New Zealand are great places to live (east Asia is too big - I had to qualify Europe as well for similar reasons). However the US is also a great place to live. You cannot make any universal statement that one is better than another. There are pros and cons, but for the most part things are similar, and the difference is only slightly different sets of trade offs. In the US you will probably make more income which can lead to better quality of life in the form of things you can buy - but things you can buy isn't everything (and there are people who would make less in the US)
The expression "parts of" means "not all of". I didn't want to type out every neighborhood in Japan, Korea, China, etc.
Yeah, from what I understand those that leave are living much better lives. Wive has a Masters in Biotech and is being pulled to European opportunities.
Those who are leaving are certainly leaving for better opportunities and better lives. Otherwise they would stay, or at least not be away for long.
But would everyone except for "obscenely rich people" be better off somewhere else? If so, then where, and why aren't they leaving by the tens of millions for those places?
> If so, then where, and why aren't they leaving by the tens of millions for those places?
Because life is messy. Because leaving is expensive. Because being accepted into a successful country requires opportunities and circumstances.
Its fine, QoL is anyway in many aspects higher in many parts of Europe (no, not salaries but overall quality and happiness definitely, triple that if you have family with kids or ever plan one).
Maybe smart folks don't want to be in racist xenophobic regime which marks them as undesirables from Day 1, run by publicly voted-in outright senile pedophile who managed to insult every single human being currently living at least once, mostly much more. It happens with narcistic egomaniacs, quite a lot in fact.
Since folks willingly voted in such person twice as the best person under the sun to represent and rule them, it tells something not-so-nice about future that even many not-too-smart folks catch easily.
At least that would be my logic if I would be in such situation. I never was since US was never an option for me, Switzerland offers much more for me than US ever could. And my taxes are not used for mass murder and start failed wars half around the globe, a small but significant detail. Most scientists have more morals than typical faaangs of these days from my experience.
QoL in Europe is better if you are a below average to average earner. Many excellent perks and social benefits to cover things that are usually very expensive.
QoL in the US is better if you are an average to above earner, and dramatically better if you are are high earner (like SWE's). In large part why the US brain drained so much talent from Europe over the last 30 years.
Objectively correct statement. Flagged. What a joke.
If you think that the comment you're responding to is even a tiny bit objective, I'd encourage you to take a break from Internet ragebait. I'm no friend of the Trump regime, but that doesn't mean I have to endorse people posting furious substance-free rants.
I mean, the rant makes sense if your view of the US comes purely from social media.
Or a policy angle. Or a real person living in the US angle.
They explicitly said that they're not living in the US! This what I mean when I call the comment substance-free; it's made up of words and sentences, like any other comment, but you immediately recognized that it would be silly to engage with the text in detail. What the commenter means is "RAAAAGH", so a person living in the US might agree because they also feel "RAAAAGH".
It's funny how blatantly clear it is that corruption was engineered by the extreme rich to serve their own interest at the cost of everyone else. And yet, somehow, I still get comments debating that fact -- people actively defending the status quo of this late capitalist hellscape. It's like these idiot want to protect a system of abuse, hoping one day they will be the abuser. It will not ever happen. The game has been rigged against you.
I think, for some people, it just takes a long time for them to finally see the light. You can coast a long time on what you were raised to believe and what you want to believe.
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We killed it decades ago with an academic science culture that promotes grantsmanship and politicking for advancement over good science.
It's a valid criticism but no, it actually did not "kill" research, as evidenced by the US's extreme concentration and outperformance on any relevant scientific metric per capita.
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I don’t think that’s unique to the United States is it? That seems like human nature.
instead of comparing country-to-country, why not compare within the same country over all time: it's pretty unique to the US in the post-1980s ish era.
Politicking for grants is unique post 1980? How did folks get awarded grants before? Folks just popped by to say “hey really appreciate all the heads down work you told nobody about here’s a million dollars?”
I’d want to compare grant funding and sources pre and post, as well as the diversity of institutions receiving funding, etc. my hypothesis would be that in order to build up institutions across the country politicians did try to steer grants to regional institutions, etc but it’s still a ton more money. (But I am not an academic)
... and a culture that couldn't explain to the public why half of these experiments were worth a single tax dollar.
If you're barely making ends meet, can barely afford gas, and hear that $390,000 just went to some scientists to stick plastic dinosaur tails on chickens to study walking dynamics, with zero practical applications for the knowledge gained, you're angry. Also this example actually happened, it's not hyperbole.
More like: you were lied to and mislead by bad actors. Aka, the Republican Party and its associated media
Malarkey, San Francisco tried to spend $1.7M on a single-stall toilet. There's plenty of blame on both sides, and much of the mud they throw at each other is true.
Again, if you are someone who can barely afford gas and hear about this... you don't care about strict principles, you just want to set those in power on fire. You're also not going to be easily convinced the government cares about spending your tax dollars wisely, or that all of this planning and research and science is worth it.
You should sell your services as a fortune teller, so bravely confident in asserting the value of every study before it's even conducted.
"What kind of IDIOT wants to WASTE valuable TAXPAYER MONEY on gila monster venom research" - man currently on a GLP-1.
Do you believe then that scientists should have a blank check for any form of science they would like to research? I don't.
I personally believe that we should have a crystal ball which will tell us the result and future applications of all currently-contemplated research projects. Then we just need to look into the crystal ball and pick the silly lizard venom studies that lead to life-changing and life-saving results for hundreds of millions of people, and we can ignore the silly lizard venom studies that yield nothing!
Super easy!
These discussions always go the same way:
"We shouldn't be funding all this frivolous stuff!"
"Okay, how would you figure out what to fund?"
"We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research has impact."
(If people don't understand, this is currently how it's done)
> We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research"
This is not accurate. There is the first gatekeeper which is program managers and junior program managers which have to gloss over your project and pick you. They (especially the juniors) don't necessarily have a the sophistication to judge your project and so are easily swayed by hot topics or reaching claims of national security/health applications.
Grants get awarded to people in the habit of telling little white lies about what their research is good for, then its people who are awarded grants that get promoted, and then those are the people who are reviewing projects, so being dishonest becomes cultural. Disastrous for science.
What would you change the system so it doesn't create a culture of dishonesty and decisions aren't swayed by hot topics?
The glp-1 story is super overblown. GLP-1s were a highly desired target LONG before gila monster venom was discovered to be an agonist. And it really was around the same time that lipid attachments were becoming appreciated for their half-life attenuation, so even if amylin (the company) never took on exenatide as a (shitty) drug candidate, proper glp-1s with lipid attachements were kind of inevitable. Obviously we can't know this for sure, but cmon. How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two?
so, you should really recalibrate being taken in by just-so stories of basic science being SUPER important.
the point was about the nonsensical nature of dismissing things out of hand just because you can't imagine a "practical application" for it on the spot.
the earlier habener results that actually got us to glp-1s via anglerfish pancreas would have been similarly derided. substitute that in if it helps.
Yeah, there's absolutely no way anyone would have ever identified any human hormones in humans without anglerfish research.
...?
Your rebuttal is that GLP was a highly desirable target for a long time before we stumbled upon a way to hit it... and this is evidence that the "stumbling upon a way to hit it" was not a super critical and super fortunate event...?
> How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two?
Why'd you put "a year or two?" here and not "a decade or two?" or "a century or two?" Do you have reason to believe it was a year or two away, sans Gila monster? If so, can you provide your reasoning? Per your own point, GLP was a desirable target for a long time without successful hits. We have plenty of targets that are desirable for decades without figuring out a way to actually drug them.
Do you know the full story of glp-1 from a pharmacokinetic point of view? It seems not, since I explained clearly why I assigned a short time in my above comment.
> couldn't explain to the public why half of these experiments were worth a single tax dollar.
The funny thing about that is the controversial “impact statements” that are part of grant funding are supposed to be the part where you explain how your research matters to the broad community. But it’s become so political the only thing you can feel safe writing is “we will help people learn about science” because “we’ll start an after school program for disadvantaged youth to learn about science” is too DEI for some folks.
It is driving away mid-career scientists too. France is eagerly recruiting them though and the EU as a whole.
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/choose-cnrs-opportunities-scie...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00405-2
EU has much bigger brain drain problems to the US that will not be solved anytime soon. Even just recently Heart Aerospace announced that they were relocating completely to California after several years of warning the EU that the regulatory and economic environment was impossible to navigate for emerging technology companies.
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/mastering-the-shift-...
A month later they moved to USA
https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
>As part of this transition and to better focus its resources, Heart has decided to close its operations in Sweden to enable a bigger scale up of the U.S based team.
This is morbid.
The French government may want to invite researchers but it faces budget issues in research and education, and growing social unrest. The French language is also somewhat necessary to live in France. It can be a deterrent.
Eagerly recruiting doesn't translate to active recruitment imo, unfortunately. With the coming elections, it is even more tenuous.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine moved to France for a postdoc. Just a few months in, he was informed that while the university would like to keep him, they were not likely to get the money for that.
There are too many countries that speak french for the language to be a deterrent.
I’m told French schools are particularly bad right now, although I have never seen a reason for why.
French schools K-12 and university do not have better education outcomes than New York state, despite having nearly double the taxes. 53% of New York State residents go to a SUNY university for free and the rest pay a maximum of $7,000 a year on average.
French education budget also accounts for teacher pensions. I don't think that's the case for NY. So it's somewhat apples and oranges.
New York state pays teacher pensions through the New York State Teacher Retirement System. About $8.5 billion a year, ~$4,000/mo per teacher on average. $7,000/mo+ with 30 years of teaching history. It's also protected under the NY State Constitution.
Large cities like Paris and Lyon have a good budget and amenities. You have to go outside the rich centers to see how schools are being failed. You can't look at Louis Le Grand and tell yourself the situation is fine.
Then again that's just what France's like. It's a very Paris-heavy country in many respects.
I recently started a program in ecology and the worry I've heard from scientists is that going forward funding is going to be very politically uncertain. It's hard to run a lab when you might just have grants get cancelled capriciously and have funding dry up for years at a time. I know I'm going to be looking outside the US for PhD programs once I finish my master's.
Four years of this is a huge blow to the field, eight would mean a wipeout of a generation of talent.
yes, we know. yes, this was an obvious consequence of trumps policies.
The entire administration has done one thing: sell of all of the US's assets, and convert it into profits for the trump family. thats it. Every action taken since the first 40 executive actions signed, through doge, defunding USAID which murdered over a million children, or bombing Iranian schools, has been to enrich trump and his friends.
Thats it. It's very simple.
They traded away every piece of soft power they could find and exchanged it for cash in their pockets.
The past two years is not a good summary of the United States. The policies that led them to leave are clearly wildly unpopular. They will be back.
While government funding may not grow above previous levels I would posit this is actually a feature - I’d expect to see a better public / private blend that is more resilient.
Two years? Try ten. Biden didn't undo political behavior of Trumps first term.
These are underestimates if anything. I know of programs at Caltech and other top schools with cohorts that are 33% to 75% smaller in physical science/ engineering disciplines.
We are at the point where AI researchers are worried about having to use the term "super intelligence" and avoiding any use of the prefix "trans-" in their terminology in order to get federal grants. So yeah, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do their research here.
I was pretty astounded and heartbroken watching my colleagues pass around a list of banned words so they could scrub their proposals. Then again, what options do they have? Either you get money from the government, corporations who have a very narrow idea of what they want to research, or you move to a country that takes research seriously.
It's not just AI researchers worrying about this specific issue! I personally had to revise wording in NIH grant applications, and have many stories from colleagues about awkward phone calls they have gotten from their program officers about this or that word in their project description, or even this or that _column_ in their projects' data products.
No idea why you are being downvoted. Everything you said is literally true and a genuine concern for researchers.
The right was so concerned about what you couldn't say because it maybe damaged your credibility. But what we're having now is that same group doing find and replace cuts on grants that use a laundry list of banned words.
What I'm saying here might seem hyperbolic to some, but these are the discussions I'm hearing at faculty meetings.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are driven away equal..."
Related:
Top Astrophysicist Leaves U.S. After Trump Policies Affect Her Work
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50414524
https://www.aip.org/fyi/nsf-adds-dei-and-israel-boycott-rest...
There's no longer a point in receiving academic training in the United States because no one will trust it. A prospective scientist won't want to define their research by hedging against zionism and fascism. I don't have an extensive publication list but I would rather not publish anything if I have to give Israel and Nazi's a seat at the table for every research project.
Even though I'm sure it's factually true that there is a decrease in interest from international young researchers to come to the US, articles like this are always a bit dramatic and have a political bias. More problematic are the budget cuts than the decreasing flow of talent from abroad. The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.
The budget cuts also have a political bias.
Absolutely, I'm just saying it's better to focus political energy to counter the cuts specifically, to mitigate the damage of the current administration.
> The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.
No, not really. I mean, we potentially could, but not at the scale needed to run our intended research programs, and not with the state of education as it is -- the top career goals for US highschoolers are athlete, youtuber, musician, actor... they want fame and fortune. And why shouldn't they, that's what America tells them is important.
Then, we load those who do go to college with so much debt, graduate education is not financially possible for most of them. Careers in research require higher degrees and a decade of study, it's just not worth it when you have $50k-$100k in debt upon graduating, and a graduate stipend is like $2k a month.
At my university, we fill our masters and PhD ranks with international students. Even if we admitted 100% of the domestic students who apply each year, we wouldn't have a full cohort. And if we did do that, and they all did attend, the 15 other schools they applied to would fall short.
When I started engineering undergrad 20 years ago, they told us domestic students grad school only makes sense if you want to be a professor. Why? They put the numbers up! Opportunity cost!
Of course, now the goalposts have moved: American talent must be worse because they don’t have these degrees which are required of foreign students to get in the country. And, of course, grad school working conditions are notably terrible. Exploitable labor lowers working conditions.
Are you sure?
Gasp! The "P" word?!
And these budget cuts you blame are in no way political? The cuts are just naturally occurring and not introduced by Trump or right-wing politicians? Sorry that the truth and reality has a liberal "bias".
How many trains of dollars does the country in debt? I’m not sure I care if a cut is political. Cuts have to be made.
Not actually though, most reasonable people know that the only solution out will be war and massive restructuring.
You do care if a cut is political. "We cut farm subsidies because Iowa voted against us" is a political vote. "We cut defense spending because we believe in peace through diplomacy" is a political cut. "We cut disease research because we think vaccines cause autism" is a political cut.
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It was a pretty good high for a while. Which is the logic of crack addicts. It's one thing to blame people for doing things that are venal. But bending the knee to Trump is inexcusable for people who claim to be very smart.
Resistance would have accomplished nothing and these people have no principles. They kept their companies running, enjoyed tremendous benefits for 2-4 years, and will suffer no consequences from it.
That's not exactly true when you look at the history of how fascism works. Actually, capitulation is futile, as there is no bottom to what the autocrat will demand. If you give in, all it shows is you are an easy mark. Resistance is the only winning move.
Timothy Snyder put out a great book about this called "On Freedom", which explains most of the power an autocrat has is given freely by people who anticipate what he would want and just offer it without being asked, precisely because they have a notion that resistance is futile. Tech leaders were right there at the inauguration, they didn't even try! So the role these tech guys played early on was teaching Trump the extend of his power.
If you look at how Trump handled schools and law firms, you see an excellent case of capitulation vs. resistance and how that played out. Take the situation with Columbia compared to Harvard. With Columbia, they capitulated to Trump illegally withheld $400m and agreed to all sorts of demands, only to be met with more demands. Harvard faced similar pressure, but decided to fight it and won in court.
In the law world, Trump made demands to several high-profile law firms. Paul Weiss, Skadden, and Kirkland & Ellis all capitulated to the demands, other firms saw these law firms capitulate and just offered up settlements themselves. 11 law firms entered into agreements with the administration, and they didn't even have to ask all of them! Meanwhile, every firm that challenged demands made by the Trump admin, including Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block, won in court.
Tech giants didn't capitulate to the Trump administration because they felt they had no other choice, they did it because they felt it would be best for their bottom line. They have no principles, no backbone, and are opportunists who will say anything if a dollar is on the line.
Why not instead of being a defeatist whiner and contributing to the impression that there's no need for justice and consequences, you actually demand justice and consequences? Too much work to call your representatives?
5calls.org
Figuring out the right amount of justice-seeking versus forgiveness is the top point of argument right now among the newly elected dominant party.
You want to toss your vote in the "let's just move on" bucket?
Are there any Trump suck ups who actually prospered after being discarded? The examples were all there before the second inauguration.
I think you make your money while you can use him.