I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024...
(But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.
You mean economists ultimately employed by the corpo ownership class, who were using those "beliefs" as cover to put money into their own pockets for shipping entire production lines overseas. Of course the corpo ownership class hasn't sat still - now that the jig is up, they've moved on to the next scam of destroying what remains of our distributed economy so they can continue centralizing. They've even come up with revanchist political movement based around rallying cries that would have helped the common person iff done decades ago, to make the average joe think they're finally being listened to...
Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.
It's treason if you or I leak secrets to China, and I'd argue that it would also be treason if Lockheed or Boeing wanted to make jets vital to US military interests in China. But if you sell public assets that are subsequently bought by the Chinese, or you move manufacturing that feeds the logistical supply chain, and subsequently erode local capability, that's apparently fine.
The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests. It's that second part that has been lacking, hence why I said in my previous post that this stuff was given away. It didn't need to be stolen.
True but one is the consequence of the other.
> The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests.
True that! But the US government is defanged (where it matters), lobbied to death and captured.
Also you never know what could one day prove to be critical to sovereign interests. It’s not one industry. It’s all of them together at the same time, from building the screws to hold your phone together to the advanced chips that AI runs on.
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.