[SamReidHughes]

What do you mean by a decline in scientific progress? The rate at which science is done? Per capita? Do you perceive some kind of long-term trend? Spending per capita on R&D by the U.S. was moving upwards last I checked, maybe that was just in the Bush administration, but I'm missing the trendline here. And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on that could be better parallelized with more funding?

What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding, that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology, why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?

I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi," and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.

[mwhite]

> If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased?

I read a fair amount about energy issues, but mainly for my own understanding and less so to be able to readily explain it, so forgive me if I get something wrong and for the lack of citations, but I believe it's basically that the increase in oil production is pretty much completely due to unconventional sources like shale oil (and fracking for natural gas) which have a much lower Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), which means they're only profitable when the price of oil is very high.

What expecting these unconventional sources to save the day fails to account for is that they are still very finite, and more importantly, that when the price of oil gets high enough, it hurts the economy, which then decreases demand for oil, which causes the price to drop, which makes it unprofitable to operate and/or develop new unconventional wells until the price rises again due to low supply. This cycle is not really compatible with a healthy economy. We are seeing the beginning of this as we speak, with oil companies laying off people because shale oil isn't profitable at current prices.

Also, the technology for shale oil and fracking has been around for a long time, so it's not exactly technological innovation, just a new source that became profitable to exploit as easily accessible oil becomes scarcer and prices are high.

> And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on that could be better parallelized with more funding?

Maybe space travel?

Or viable renewable energy that could actually sustain civilization?

http://energyskeptic.com/2014/science-no-single-or-combinati... http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-will-never-work-and...

[nostrademons]

That cycle is how capitalism works, for any good which requires a large capital investment for financial returns that drop whenever there's excessive competition in the market. Historically, we've seen it with textiles, railroads, steamboats, automobiles, office parks, farm crops, telecoms, and airlines. If we actually got space travel and viable renewable energy, we'd almost certainly see it with them as well.

No, it's not pleasant for the people who are laid off or businesses that fail. But basically the entire financial industry has evolved to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this cycle, providing the capital to get the boom started and then recycling the carcasses of overcapacity into productive uses when the boom ends. It's business as usual for a capitalist economy.