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Comment by mikhailfranco | Hacker News Reader

Same people.

Many refugees (mostly Jewish) from Vienna went to Manhattan, or the Manhattan Project. A few, like Freud or Popper, stopped in Britain, but many passed through to New York. Bernays (Freud's nephew) used his uncle's psychological insights to invent propaganda, marketing, advertising and PR. Others invented atomic and hydrogen bombs (probably less devastating than therapy and ads :) Some were Soviet atomic spies that reported back to the USSR.

Much of American pre-war/post-war intellectual life is due to European refugees. It's interesting to posit what might have happened without the influx.

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The world probably would have missed out on a lot, since American industry (and exploitation) funded their R&D. Additionally, the next generation of (American, born-and-bred) scientists and engineers took us from their breakthroughs to more recent ones. The amazing things that can happen when people who were able to get an education are paid and tasked with something other than selling ads and opioids.

> American industry (and exploitation) funded their R&D.

Don’t forget that European industry was demolished in the war

> when people who were able to get an education are paid and tasked with something other than selling ads and opioids.

Efficient market!

And arguably much of current decline in intellectual standards in the public space is to blame on the integration and Americanization of their descendants.

Woah! what? Lol. Considering the number of nobel laureates, manhattan project scientists, turing award winners not to mention industry pioneers, prominent cultural figure etc that group has produced it would seem they did the opposite.

That's what I'm saying, read my comment again. America's highest intellectual achievements came after WW2, when there was the highest influx of European intellectuals (who studied in Europe, or were first generation). The current state of affairs is imo a kind of regression to the mean, where the culture that created them couldn't be reproduced in the US system - thus the integration and americanization of their descendants.

I think they are essentially claiming that "Americanism" has lower standards than the ethnicities that moved to America as refugees. So the people who were refugees, like all the jewish physicists in the Manhattan project came from culture that valued higher education and socially liberal society and all those good things, while American culture doesn't, so getting them "americanized" makes them value higher education etc less.

Which would be incorrect, as Manhattan ALSO has a hyper conservative Orthodox jewish population which did not assimilate largely and basically caused measles outbreaks because they are vaccine "hesitant"

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