No. of Recommendations: 6
"Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the top of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.
Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.
Special interests and Trump’s pettiness aside, my sense is that there’s something more visceral going on. A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. As evidence, consider the extraordinary collapse in Republican support for higher education over the past decade: (graph showing just that)
Yet the truth is that hostility to science and expertise have always been part of the American tradition. Remember your history lesson on the Scopes Monkey Trial? It took a Supreme Court ruling, as recently as 2007, to stop politicians from forcing public schools to teach creationism. And with the current Supreme Court, who can be sure creationism won’t return?
Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity. But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.
Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up." ——Paul Krugman, Actual Economist
