Dear List,
I share Gunter's perspective, just wanted to add that young scientists might want to add Hong Kong to the list of places they should consider. It's about as far away from Trump as possible, and I can assure you from personal experience that both the working environment and the quality of life are excellent, with consistently high levels of funding for science and higher education, as well as plenty of academic freedom and civil liberties. (With the impending US TikTok ban, the HK internet will soon be among the least censored in the world, to give just one example). Singapore and Australia are also worth looking into.
You can add to Gunter's succinct and as far as I can tell entirely accurate summary of the new administration's war on US institutions the fact that Trump is fatally undermining America's economic and technological leadership position. For example, America's trade deficits continued to increase greatly and China's progress in key technologies clearly accelerated since Trump kicked off his counterproductive trade wars in 2020, but facts have never mattered to Trump, so the fact that his policies demonstrably fail to achieve their aims does not diminish his zeal or that of his cult members. In the long run this will mean that the best resourced and technologically most advanced research institutes will increasingly not be in the US. To some extent this is already underway. I just recently visited a new scientific infrastructure building in Shenzhen that has the capacity to house 2000 primates and has 3 FMRI scanners, 1 PET scanner and 1 cyclotron in the basement. In pretty much all respects and in absolute and relative terms the outlook for the US looks quite negative to me - and all of this, I should add, is entirely due to unforced errors created within the US political establishment.
I am also very pessimistic about what carefully crafted and noble statements by distinguished members of our auditory neuroscience community can achieve. Donald and Elon certainly aren't going to pay any attention. And, as I put it to Perry in an off-list email, if the American public didn't listen to Taylor Swift in November, why would they listen to a few crusty hearing science professors now? If you are serious about wanting to bring about change in US politics, then letters by scientists, even if published in the NYT, are such a tiny drop in the bucket as to be a waste of time. You would need to get organised on a much bigger scale and reach well beyond the scientific community, across all the parts of US society that is upset about what is happening, and organise a US-wide general strike and mass rallies. Action on such a scale would of course require a huge amount of organisation and leadership. Chuck Schumer's recent supine and invertebrate approach to federal budget negotiations suggests that little help can be expected from the Dems. Still, either you do something that even Trump and the MAGA ideologs cannot ignore, or don't bother, give up on US politics and look for ways to minimize its impact on your own personal development. These are dark times, but there are still opportunities for those who are ready to look for them.
Kind regards,
Jan
---------------------------------------
Prof Jan Schnupp
Gerald Choa Neuroscience Institute
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Sha Tin
Hong Kong