[Mb-civic] The Fake Science Threat - Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Fake Science Threat

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, February 6, 2006; A15

Five years ago China recruited Gavriel Salvendy, an American scientist 
from Purdue University, to set up a department of industrial engineering 
at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Salvendy didn't speak Chinese -- "not 
a word, apologies" -- but that didn't matter. In the department he 
created, 75 percent of the lectures and 100 percent of the textbooks are 
in English.

Tsinghua is China's top science university, and it had global ambitions 
even before Salvendy arrived. Professors were rewarded with $700 bonuses 
every time they published in an international journal, which they did 
slightly more than 800 times in 2001. Salvendy turbocharged this system 
by extending bonuses to graduate students. By offering a ridiculously 
small sum -- $125 -- he created a powerful incentive, because the 
standard pay for a research assistant at Tsinghua is around $60 a month. 
Pretty soon, students were churning out work that appeared as papers 
co-authored with professors. By 2005, Tsinghua's international-journal 
count had jumped eightfold.

Salvendy has no doubt that Tsinghua scientists will soon be claiming 
Nobel Prizes, but the trickier question is what this means for the 
United States. The U.S. science establishment, led by the big research 
universities and high-tech companies, has just persuaded President Bush 
to ramp up math and science spending. Part of the rationale for this new 
"American Competitiveness Initiative" is that it's needed to defend U.S. 
economic leadership. But while generous math and science funding should 
be a government priority, the invocation of the threat from China is 
mostly spurious.

Science and math advocates have been harrumphing about national 
competitiveness for at least a quarter-century. In the early 1980s the 
National Science Foundation predicted "looming shortfalls" of scientists 
and engineers, and the National Commission on Excellence in Education 
declared, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on 
America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might 
well have viewed it as an act of war." But the American economy went 
from strength to strength over the next decades, while supposedly more 
technical countries such as Japan and Germany foundered.

This hasn't stopped the science lobby from making the same arguments 
again. According to the recent report from the National Academies that 
inspired the administration's new competitiveness initiative, "the 
scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are 
eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength." 
Further, the link between technological decline and economic decline is 
certain, since "85% of measured growth in US income per capita is due to 
technological change."

This is embarrassingly flimsy. When economists say that technological 
change drives living standards, they don't mean that scientific 
ingenuity achieves this by itself. What matters is the way science is 
diffused through an economy: the availability of venture capital, the 
flexibility of workers, the quality of corporate leadership, the 
competence of government policy, the reliability of public 
infrastructure -- all help to determine how science is absorbed. The 
United States scores well in nearly all these areas, which is why it's 
defied alarmist predictions for a quarter of a century and will continue 
to do so.

The science lobby should also stop pretending that countries compete the 
same way companies do. Firms such as Toyota and Ford really do go 
head-to-head against each other; if Toyota has superior technology, it 
will steal Ford's customers -- and Ford may even disappear. But if China 
produces Nobel-quality science, it won't put the United States out of 
business; rather, Chinese discoveries will help American scientists 
discover more, too. Equally, Toyota doesn't sell cars to Ford workers, 
so there's no benefit to Ford's people if Toyota's quality advances. But 
China does sell to Americans, so whatever makes it more productive has 
some upside for the United States as well.

In short, the "China threat" argument ignores the ways that competition 
between countries, unlike companies, is a positive-sum game. Moreover, 
to the extent that Chinese institutions -- firms or university 
laboratories -- compete against American ones, the alarmists 
underestimate U.S. strengths.

In the race to turn scientific ideas into businesses, the United States 
is hard to beat. There's no dividing wall between academic labs and 
commerce, and scientists surf from one world to the other on waves of 
money and cultural approval. Harvard's Richard Freeman, an economist who 
has studied the market for scientific talent, recounts a conversation 
with a physicist who'd collaborated with foreigners. "Ah, so you are 
helping them to catch up with us," Freeman commented. "No, they are 
helping us keep ahead of them," came back the answer: Because of the 
superior U.S. business environment, the research was being turned into a 
company in the United States.

Equally, in the competition to retain the best research scientists, the 
United States has a lead that tends to reinforce itself. Because nearly 
all the world's top universities are American, the world's top 
researchers flock here; provided enough visas are available, it's hard 
to see why this would change. The story of Gavriel Salvendy, which some 
might see as an omen of America's declining status, is in fact more 
subtle. Salvendy has long recruited star Chinese graduate students to 
Purdue, where he still does most of his research. Of the 18 Chinese who 
have completed PhDs under his supervision at the Indiana campus, 15 have 
stayed on in the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/05/AR2006020501059.html?nav=hcmodule
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