General Science Thread

It's mostly due to the sheer size of the US economy and population. Other countries probably contribute much more in proportion to their economy and population, but for a country like Finland with a population of 5 million contributing a couple of parts to the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars Rover are pretty major projects, even if we can't actually build the whole satellite or rover by ourselves.

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As for science in general, again, the US contributes much less than many other countries if you relate expenditure and output to the size of each country's population or economy. It is simply the vast size of the US economy, as well as the tendency of US-based media to exclude everything non-American, that makes it look as if the US is alone in leading every field of science. If you look at international publications or comparisons of the scientific output of various countries that you notice that many European countries and Japan and South Korea put more effort into advancing science than the US.

Since the US has a population of 318 million, it is of course next to impossible for other countries to compete if you don't compare everything to the population of each country.

The EU as a whole probably does much more for science globally than the US, but our research, to the extent that individual countries get credit for it, is always reported as the work of that particular country, so of course it's going to be dwarfed by the massive US.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the US does very little - obviously it does a lot. This World Bank map of the percentage of each country's DGP that is invested in R&D shows the US as comparable to France (but behind countries like South Korea, Japan, and Finland) so it's not the case that the US doesn't invest in R&D. It's just that it gets overrepresented in media, especially in the US.

(I saw a post somewhere in these Fora where someone complained that nobody but the US is contributing to medical science, and that clearly is an indication that that particular poster - I don't remember who it was - doesn't read any international science publications, even those meant for the general public. If they did they'd know that countries like France, Germany, Japan, and Canada are far ahead of the US in some fields of medicine. This sort of thing is why I think US-based news and other media don't give proportional attention to innovation from other countries than the US.)

It seems that the US spends more than half of its federal R&D budget on the defence industry◊ - so if we're looking for general science spending I think it's very unlikely that the US actually spends more (in proportion to its economy and population) than just about any European country. That would mean that the US would have to seriously increase its civilian science spending to catch up to the rest of the West.