@maxxrosenblum
Instagram · Talking Head Edit
@maxxrosenblum The great American brain drain has started, and it began with an email. What would you do if the Chinese government offered you decades of guaranteed research funding, any city, any university, all expenses paid? Most people would delete it. America’s top scientists are receiving these offers for real, and a growing number are saying yes. The strange part about US scientists leaving America is that Congress never actually cut the science budget. What the 2025 science funding cuts broke was the ability to forecast: around 7,800 NIH and NSF grants were terminated mid-project, and a lab that loses its grant has nothing left to cut but people. Nobody bets a 30-year career on a business that can’t see tomorrow. Within two months, China, France, the EU, Canada, and Japan were recruiting American scientists with billions in dedicated programs, because a trained researcher is a pre-paid asset: 25 years of American investment, inherited for the cost of a relocation package. Economists call the stakes agglomeration economies: talent clusters run on increasing returns, every arrival makes the place more valuable for the next one, and the loop runs in both directions. Germany proved it in 1933 when it expelled the 15% of its physicists who produced 64% of its physics. The labs it lost to bombs recovered in 20 years; the labs that lost their people hadn’t recovered 47 years later. That’s the lesson of this brain drain for anyone who runs anything: trust is infrastructure, your best people leave first while the attrition numbers still look fine, and markets forgive expensive mistakes in physical capital but never forgive treating a compounding asset like a line item. #economics #science #geopolitics #strategy
