The Change Mariner

America: Losing Its Technical Dominance

The New York Times:

The United States remains the pre-eminent scientific and technological power in the world, but there are signs that it is losing ground to foreign competitors. To some extent this is inevitable -- and even desirable. The greater the diffusion of scientific capabilities, the better off the world will probably be. Still, the situation in the United States is worrisome. Fewer and fewer young Americans seem interested in technical careers, and fewer young foreigners will be arriving to take their places. If this trend is not reversed, the pool of trained scientists and engineers in this country will shrink, and the shortfalls may harm economic growth and the technical underpinnings of national security.

These measures of America's success and decline were laid out in articles this week by William J. Broad of The Times and in a voluminous report by the National Science Foundation. The United States still spends far more on research and development than any other nation. That has enabled this country to dominate high-technology exports, publish more scientific papers and win more Nobel Prizes than other nations, but they are closing the gap.

The number of articles published in scientific and technical journals by American authors has flattened out for the past decade after three previous decades of growth. Western Europeans now publish substantially more papers than Americans do. The American researchers' share of Nobel Prizes has fallen to about half.

Posted by Timothy Fredel at May 7, 2004 08:35 PM | TrackBack
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