Samuel Cohn

The End of US Scientific Preeminence This action is one of several that endanger American scientific and technological dominance. The damage comes in four distinct ways. 1. Degradation of the Effectiveness of Science Funding. Control over NIH is consistent follows the document Science: New Golden Age issued by the White House Science Advisor Michael Kratsios. Politicization of funding in the way envisioned gives bureaucrats and political appointees authority rather than scientific experts. This is how mRNA research gets derailed, short run advances become prioritized over longer run advances, and applied science is prioritized over theoretical work who payoffs may be far greater. 2. Degradation of US Universities. The various attacks on American universities, be it overall reduction of research funds from the Federal government, efforts to reduce overhead percentages, punitive funding cuts, all will reduce the quality of science for the obvious reason-lower resource input, low research output. 3. Degradation of the Talent in the Scientific Community. The actions by the Trump administration to reduce F-1 visas, threats to reduce H1-B visas, implement $100,000 OPT fees, limit the number of years foreign national can study in a given program, will all reduce the flow of talent to the United States. As China's scientific establishment grows, the comparative attractiveness of the US to international talent is already under threat. Europe's potential to do the same is vast. When 2/3 of Silicon Valley employees are foreign born, these policies are madness. 4. Degradation in the Effective Development of Domestic Talent Attacks on diversity policies at US institutions are also harmful. Chang-Tai Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles Jones, and Peter Klenow, in "The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth." Econometrica 2019, concluded somewhere between 20%-40% of US economic growth between 1960 and 2010 involved improved allocation of women and African Americans along comparative advantage lines. Whatever putative inefficiencies are alleged to be associated with DEI and affirmative action policies is dwarfed by the magnitudes of more efficient matching that were found.(There is remarkably little evidence on this. The best evidence wrt efficiency is by Peter Ardiciacano on effects of affirmative action on STEM majors. The finding does not imply AA inefficient per se, but that universities need to account for difference in skills at time of admission in constructing programs, but that is a separate matter.) As for the current outstanding state of US science, I am remind of this "Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time—like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest." Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

Who is An American? I am reposting this story about my paternal grandmother since my feed has been polluted this week with defenses of the despicable attacks on ethnic Indians prompted by a demogogic posting about about attendees at the Saturday UTexas football game. The idea of Heritage Americans is both profoundly un-American (with putative defenses exhibiting historical and philosophical illiteracy) and is also deeply personally offensive. My grandmother is an example of the sort of person who, according to Heritage Americans, was less of an American they are. I am not sure how mutts such as myself or my children fit into their schema. My paternal great great grandfather came to the US from Bavaria and spent four years in the Union Army in the Civil War. If this is supposed to give me or my children greater status than my grandmother, it is a good example of why self-proclaimed Heritage Americans deserve to go to hell. Sophia Ruderman Durlauf was born in Dnipro (then Ekaterinoslav) Ukraine (then Russian Empire), in 1899. When she was a little girl, she survived a pogrom in the now-forgotten village in which she was growing up. It was a close call; she was trampled by a Cossack’s horse and badly injured after somehow leaving the cubbyhole in which her parents had hidden her. Her family travelled to Minsk, from which her father left for America and sent for my grandmother and the rest of her family, arriving in 1906. Had her family stayed in Ukraine, they likely would have died in the Holocaust. She and her family, in other words, were refugees. My grandmother spoke perfect, accent free English. She told me of her vivid memories of being taunted as a child for lack of English, and her vow to learn to speak the way she in fact did. She also shared recollections of all the anti-Semitic epithets she heard growing up in poverty in Manhattan; many of these words are happily unknown to my children's generation! She was apparently a terrific student. But in her senior year of high school, she was told by her principal that she was too poor to go to college and that her responsibility was to get a job and support her family, which she did. These barriers did not stop her from having a rich and fascinating life, including taking night courses from at the New School for Social Research and the Labor Temple School (where she studied with Will Durant). She was a secretary for Margaret Sanger and worked closely with her, so she was present at the beginning of Planned Parenthood. My father grew up in reasonable comfort as my grandmother was an incredibly skilled typist and typed manuscripts for movie studios-when you are typing with 8 carbon copies, errors are problematic. Her Heritage American husband largely lived off her. When my grandmother died, I helped my father clean out her house. I found hundreds of cancelled checks she had written over the years, carefully organized by type of bill. There were many donations to charities and political causes, small in amounts but vast in causes. She also saved all her checks made out to the government; for these, she routinely wrote “Thank You” as the memo. When I asked my father why she did this, he answered immediately and in complete seriousness that she was saying “Thank you for asking me to pay my bill rather than smashing down the door to my home and taking anything you wanted.” This lover of the United Nations, deep believer in the Civil Rights movement, and the many other features of post WWII liberalism, is in only way that matters, the most patriotic person I have ever known. And this is what Heritage Americans will never understand. This survivor of a pogrom possessed a life long hatred of discrimination that was certainly stronger than white Heritage Americans in the South during Jim Crow and the heyday of the Civil Rights movements. There is a general message. Immigrants and their children have been integral to breaking the deviations of America from its aspirational *moral heritage* as manifested in the Declaration and the Constitution. My grandmother was an example of why Jews were so prominent in the Civil Rights movement, starting with the support in the creation of the NAACP-those who directly or via parents or grandparents had experienced persecution understood something others did not. Another classic example is the German immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s, most notably the "Forty-Eighters," who played an important role in anti-slavery movements and an essential source of manpower in the Union Army. These German immigrants were often despised by the Heritage Americans of their day. No one has a stronger claim to be the inheritors of the country than those who have brought it closer to its ideals.