I heard that the dominant universities in the Unites States have lost a significant amount of assets due to the financial crisis since last autumn. It is said that prestigious universities like Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lost almost as much as 300 million dollars.
Even if it is impossible to know the exact amount of money, there is no doubt that universities have suffered above a certain amount of loss due to heavy declines of their financial assets.
Harvard University suffering allegedly as much as eight billion dollar loss in its own funds〔AFPBB News〕
It is the basic science researches in various fields that are most likely affected by these losses, because America has acted as the “stage of science” since the period of World War II. From nuclear weapons and computers to intercontinental ballistic missiles and space exploration, the key innovations of the middle and late 20th century were promoted by exiled scientists, and at the expense of the U.S. government.
Most of these scientists were of Jewish descent who had escaped from persecution by the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, etc. – although there are some exceptions like Bruno Pontecorvo, a physical scientist who was involved in the development of hydrogen bombs in the U.S.S.R. after escaping from Italy via Canada.
Generally speaking, America was undoubtedly taking the overwhelming role of the “laboratory of the world” during the 79 years from 1929 (the year of the Great Depression) to 2008.
A big move to the Green New Deal, without essential technologies
Currently, the United States is facing a great change of the target of research. Inaugurated right after the financial crisis from America, the Democratic Obama administration presented the “Green New Deal” as a major goal. This means that, in search of the next target of research, the U.S. government has made a major shift to ecological innovations.
However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that America does not have most of the essential technologies and core competences to support the Green New Deal that President Obama is advocating.
For example, as a result of many years’ steady efforts, the EU and Japan have accumulated the technologies for environmental programs and smaller power facilities, both of which are maintaining high competitiveness. Considering the past “progress” of the United States that failed to ratify the “Kyoto Protocol” compiled under the leadership of the U.N. and EU, this rapid “change” seems to be infeasible fundamentally.
In addition to such a situation, as many famous universities in the United States are suffering significant losses due to the collapse of financial institutions and it is feared that a large amount of funds for basic research might be reduced, it is likely that many troubles will emerge ahead of the Green New Deal.
In fact, the fall of America as the “laboratory of the world” had already begun quietly since the late 1980s.
Until the mid-1980s, while the nuclear arms race between America and its potential enemy, the U.S.S.R., was intense, the Unites States was holding a commanding lead over other countries in technologies such as particle/ nuclear physics and space exploration, by pouring its national expenditure into research in these fields in a literal sense. This achievement of America must have been brought about partly by its allergic response to the “Sputnik shock,” the event that showed the U.S. just how far it had fallen behind the Soviets, and the “Cuban Missile Crisis.”
America is no longer the “superpower” as the sole front runner
However, last year, eighteen years since the Cold War ended and shortly before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the operation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), a supergiant next generation accelerator, was started by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). This was a symbolic event, since it turned out that the United States was no longer the “superpower” capable of leading cutting-edge research for particle physics exclusively.
There was already an overabundance of standard nuclear weapons in the world at that time, while experiments on elemental particles to figure out the “Big Bang” as the origin of the universe were too enormous to be profitable, however useful they may have been in boosting national prestige. In the late 1980s when the Cold War was about to end, the Unites States was in the economic low point called “recession.”
Then came “Black Monday” in 1987. As New York stock prices plummeted, national banks such as the Bank of Japan and the central bank of the former West Germany made efforts to prop up the dollar amid concerns over a dollar crash. However, we have almost no chance to see such a scene under the current recession, which has already been referred to as a “depression”.
What caused the difference? One of the major reasons may be the rise of the euro as the second reserve currency, which has significantly influenced basic science.
The euro area was influenced even more than the dollar area by this recession, partly due to the dissemination of such internationalized financial products as subprime loans.
