 I'm Robert Wright of the New America Foundation, thanks for coming. We're going to talk about science and technology policy. As some of you may have heard, there was a presidential debate last week and I personally emerged from it without much clearer understanding than I had going in about where the parties and the candidates stand on science and technology. There was, you know, some mention of healthcare and I think the word cylindra came up, but there wasn't. I still don't really have a sense for the stakes for science and technology policy, which covers, of course, a whole lot of things. I don't have a clear sense for why it matters, who wins the election. So that's what we're going to try to address today. We're going to have a panel discussion with me and three people, but first we're going to have a short presentation by Constantine Cacias, whose name I may or may not have pronounced. I'm pretty sure about the Constantine part, but who is a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. You wrote for the Economist for quite some time, I think. You were Mexico bureau chief for a while. I assume that means you'll be skeptical about something if you wrote for the Economist. So why don't you come on and start us off. Two quick ground rules, turn off cell phones and when we move into Q&A toward the end, just wait for the microphone to come to you. Great. Well, thanks very much, Bob. Yes, you either pronounced my name correctly or I've been saying it wrong my whole life, so I think we're all right. Sort of wanted to start us out by making a distinction, trying to make distinctions between the two parties, between differences in attitudes towards science and actually differences in effects. And I thought one way to start out might be by looking at sort of one of the great disasters of the last few decades, which was the superconducting supercollider, which we spent $2 billion on, ended up digging about a 20-mile tunnel outside of Waxahatchee, Texas, and then abandoned. And that was clearly an outcome that nobody of either party wanted. And neither did supporters of this wanted, neither did opponents of it. It was a sort of entirely suboptimal outcome. And the way that happened, basically, was that the Senate steadily supported the project and the House steadily opposed it. So you had a dynamic that wasn't so much a partisan dynamic, but it was a difference between the two bodies. Part of the reason it failed was a failure of physics in and of itself. And we looked, there was great excitement over the discovery of the Higgs Boson this summer at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. And I would say that if you're trying to ask the question of how do politicians influence the evolution of science, you would say that I don't think physics would be profoundly different today had the superconducting supercollider been built. What would be different is sort of the economy of the local area there. They would have spent probably another $15 billion. They said they would have spent nine, but I'm sure they would have had cost overruns. And what you see is that science proceeds with far less control than politicians like to claim that right around the time of the superconducting supercollider was also as the human genome project was getting started. And we see there what's on the one hand, a huge scientific triumph. We did sequence the human genome. We did it faster. We've done far more with it than anyone expected at the time. If you look at a metric of how fast can we sequence genes? If you look at what the claimed practical benefits were at the time, and what the practical benefits we've seen of gene therapy and things like that were far short of what was promised. So you see a sort of, I think, far more muted effect than politicians would like to claim in terms of the practical results of scientific research. I'd like to pivot a little bit and see because I, and I think that's true of Republicans and Democrats alike. What I do think exists is a profoundly different attitude towards science, which matters in ways that are sort of hard to evaluate. And this sort of came to the fore earlier this week when a statement that Paul Brown, a Republican congressman from Georgia made on September 27th sort of hit the press. And he said, all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bank theory, all that is lies from the pit of hell. And this is one of the few doctors in Congress, so one of the more scientifically literate according to his credentials members. He sits on the House Science Committee and you get a statement like that. And then that's not something you tend to see from Democratic congressmen. But, and this is something that on the Twitter sphere, the blogs provoked a lot of indignation. And I think on the one hand rightfully so, on the other hand you have to sit and ask how much does that attitude actually affect science policy? And we still, the National Science Foundation keeps chugging along. It doesn't actually provoke the sort of apocalyptic vision of the pit of hell that the quote would have you think. Two more sort of examples that take us back to the sort of commonality between Republicans and Democrats. Fracking, shale gas extraction, however you wish to call it, and missile defense. Missile defense, there was another report from the National Research Council, which is the sort of arm of the National Academies of Science and Engineering that is charged with sort of looking into public policy questions. As a non-partisan sort of, the best experts our country can assemble. And it found as have a series of studies over the decades that this is a sort of colossal waste of time. And you see even people on the right, and this sort of ends up in debates not so much of sitting politicians, but of sort of people talking in rooms like this, becoming a right versus left thing, which it really isn't. You get something like the National Interest, a neoconservative publication, saying once again, MDA, the Missile Defense Agency's plans were at odds with practical physics. The National Research Council report says, while technically possible in principle, boost phase missile defense is not practical or feasible, period. So you have something like this where the science is as crystal clear as science can be, that this stuff is a colossal waste of money. And we found that that waste has been done by Republicans and Democrats alike. We spent a total of about $150 billion since the mid-80s on missile defense, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. So you can sort of look and say, do we have a sort of difference in attitude? Perhaps, but the end result is because of the political dynamics at play, where Obama doesn't want to be seen as weak on defense. So he will keep funding something that is clearly ineffective for years. Clinton did the same thing. You did see a steeper increase in spending on missile defense under the second president Bush, but the fundamental question is, is this sort of soundest scientific advice being heated? And the answer is, no, by neither party. Similarly, with fracking, Ohio and Pennsylvania are swing states. That's a political reality. You've seen any number of studies on the environmental and medical risks of shale gas extraction as its practice, which are profound and unknown, but also not realized at the present. And the benefits, you do get a lot of natural gas, which burns relatively cleanly, which is a domestic source of energy. The benefits are realized in the present. So even though sort of the attitudes, the natural resource extraction industry is undoubtedly closer to the Republican Party ideologically than is to the Democratic Party, but the end result, because you have this dynamic where the benefits are realized today, while the costs as outlined by the scientific community are in the future, is that the actual policy differences between the two parties are much smaller than sort of partisans of either side would claim. So that, I think is, I mean, maybe by way of conclusion. And sort of come back to really trying to think clearly about drawing a line between the application of known science on regulatory issues, particularly, and scientific funding towards breakthroughs. And I think in the application of known science, it's easier to see distinctions between the parties, although even there, for the reasons I just outlined, they're smaller than you might think. Going forward for sort of claiming the benefits of research in the future, you see both parties making precisely the same sort of mistake, which is it's a matter of being a politician rather than being a politician of one ideological stripe or another. So you see Nixon declaring war on cancer in a sort of grandiose way. You see Obama making statements about a green energy future in a sort of grandiose way, which are both sort of fallacies for largely the same reasons. So, go. End up there at eight minutes rather than ten, but two more minutes for the panel. Thank you very much. And let me introduce our panelists to my immediate right is Stacey Klein, who is counsel to Senator Mike Enzi, who's a ranking member on a committee with several education and other stuff in the name. Health, education, labor, and pensions. And pensions? Okay, thank you very much. You're the only one here who's not a journalist. Sherry Fink has written a lot about healthcare. You've got a, you've written a book, right? Yes, War Hospital. Okay. And you wrote a magazine piece called The Deadly Choices at Memorial about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that got a lot of attention. And I believe won an award. Did the award have a name? Yeah. She won a Pulitzer Prize for that. Thank you, sir. And she is a future tense fellow at the New America Foundation. Is that right? Okay. Amanda Ripley is also at the New America Foundation. You are an Emerson fellow, I believe. You also have a book, The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why. I don't want to know whether I'm going to be one of the survivors. Don't tell me. And you've got a new book coming out. Yes, on education around the world. Okay, it's going to be called The Smart Kids Club. There's some debate about that. Ah, you've got a little tension with the editor that's going here. I like every idea, but my editor's boss is very picky about these things. I see. We could take a vote here today. I was thinking, maybe just- Yeah, dude, would you like to turn this into- No, apparently not. Very important to me. Okay. No way. Future of education. But afterwards, I would be happy to hold a little seminar on this. Okay. And I'm thinking, Stacey, maybe we could start with you, because I emerged from Konstantin's presentation thinking party doesn't matter in a very predictable way when it comes to position on science and technology. That there aren't some sorts of principal, philosophical, ideological differences that would allow you to predict very successfully what kinds of positions you'll see on science and technology in any very broad sense. Do you want to dissent from that or say he was right or what? I think that you're right in a general sense. And if you look probably over the course of our history, you're right. I think in this election, I think you do see some clear differences on science and technology proposals. And I think it's a factor of the difficult budget environment that we're in. So, and while Romney, I don't think, has really presented a technology proposal and neither has Obama from what I can tell from listening to their campaign speeches and reviewing their website. You do hear snippets in the news sometimes. And I think that I have heard Romney say that while he supports increasing funding for research and development and scientific exploration, that he's concerned about growing the deficit. And I probably have somewhere in the stack of papers his exact quote about wanting to keep funding level for a while while Obama has proposed doubling funding for different research programs. So I think that that's one area. And then the campaign, they haven't talked much about technology policy in this election. They did a lot in 2007 and 2008. But you have heard really clear differences on net neutrality from both of the candidates. So Obama campaigned on that in 2007 and 2008. And his FCC commissioner did push through net neutrality reform. And Romney is very clearly opposed to it as are basically all the Republicans in the house. And so net neutrality is the idea that if I'm running a website or something, I should not have to pay in order for people to be able to come to my website and stream any content or anything, any sort of special price. There should be no discrimination that's perpetrated by carriers, cable carriers or anything like that, right? Yeah, and that's how Democrats have characterized it. And that's one way of looking at it is that it's keeping the internet open non-discriminatory. What concerns Republicans and how Mitt Romney has characterized it as giving the FCC broad power to regulate the internet. And so they're concerned about cycling competition and innovation through FCC powers to regulate. So without taking a position on either of these takes, I just pointed out as a clear difference between the candidates on technology policy. It's really the only one that I can point to where I think they both have a clear position. And as I understand it, the Obama administration on mobile technology has kind of abandoned net neutrality, right? So as far as AT&T charging for special access for mobile providers to my website, charging me as a website provider, that's probably going to be possible. So that's exactly right. And the FCC is the rule that they passed. There are exemptions for wireless carriers. And I think this is a good example of the, this is a great example of the topic of the presentation, which was sort of campaign rhetoric versus legislative reality. And so this is an issue that Obama campaigned on in 2007, 2008 was open internet. And his technology advisor on the campaign is now Chairman Jannikowski. And I think that they, in an ideal world, they wanted to pass sort of a broad net neutrality rule that would have covered wireless carriers. But then when he gets into office, you realize that you have to make compromises. And I think this was, well, often you have to make compromises in order to get some sort of consensus from industry participants. And this is an example of where they reached a compromise. Okay. One more question for you. You mentioned the difference on funding that you thought Romney would be a little more conservative about funding research. Is it possible to say specifically how that would play out? Like, are we talking national institutes of health or do we know? So I don't think you can say specifically because that would all go, that would be sort of carefully vetted through the appropriations process. And I certainly don't know what specificities or what programs they would want to keep at a level basis or what they would want to cut or increase. But I just think that it's generally true that he's probably looking not to expand funding in a lot of areas. I think anybody who cares about research right now, particularly I'm looking at health care and biomedical research, I think it goes to what Constantine said in terms of what can you actually get done no matter what your priorities are and the fact that we might have sequestration as of January 1st, meaning due to the budget ceiling compromise that there may be across the board cuts throughout the government. They're looking for the NIH, the National Institutes of Health at a possible 8% cut. So in terms of like what you could actually accomplish and the specific programs that President Obama has proposed to double would be the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Standards and Technical Labs and the DOE's Office of Science. But it's just hard to imagine that that could actually get done. Interestingly, he proposed flatlining the NIH in his proposed budget for this year as Congress has as well. And I haven't seen any specifics from Romney. But the whole point is that if we're facing all these cuts, people in the government are saying it doesn't really matter what the lip service may be to research what could actually get done. And I don't know, you could also look at it the other way and say if you're cutting within agencies, perhaps if you have a strong sense of what your priorities are, then perhaps it's even more important in those really resource-constricted times. But in terms of growing anything right now, I think that there's not much hope of that at least at the moment. Are there any other areas in the realm of health science broadly speaking where there are clear differences between Romney and Obama? Well, certainly stem cell research, embryonic stem cell research is the most clear one. Romney opposes it, Obama supports. That's a matter of constituency. I mean, that's not a funding issue. I mean, it's not fiscally driven. It's a question of having a... Of values. But it will have fiscal impacts, I think several hundred million dollars in current embryonic stem cell funding. There was a Bush era ban on that. Obama overturned it. If Romney put it back, those would be cuts in this sort of regenerative medicine field that people are worried about. Interestingly, as we all saw, the Nobel Prize, one of the Nobel Prizes in medicine yesterday was to someone who, through his own values and wanting to get away from these debates, worked on different type of stem cells and was awarded the Nobel Prize. So that's one example. Another really interesting example gets to the healthcare debate. And we heard, those of you who heard the debates last time, there was a lot of talk of this 12-member panel that was going to make decisions about which healthcare interventions would and wouldn't be funded. And that is, of course, not true. In fact, there is the 12-member panel that is going to make recommendations on cost cutting. And those recommendations can be if Congress doesn't pass them or pass something equivalent to them, they would go into effect. But they are actually, at this point, prohibited from putting caps on particular treatments. So they would mostly be cost cutting from the perspective of payment to providers and other... So they will not be saying you can only reimburse this much for this specific procedure? That's right. They are prevented from doing that by law. But I think what Romney and the Republican Party are concerned about is that there will be ways for them to accomplish that eventually, either through changes in the law later or through recommendations that allow other entities to do that, such as Medicare or Medicaid. Well, I mean, some of them will have to do it. If they push through with a very severe cut, somebody's going to have to make those choices and they'll be in the executive branch, presumably. Well, the cuts that they're allowed to make are to provider payments. I mean, that's the other thing that you could cut. In other words, you cut what you pay doctors, you cut eventually what you pay hospitals. They're not allowed to do that yet, but in a few years, they would be... But isn't someone at some point going to have to be doing that in a fine-grained way, saying, for this surgery, this is what we pay? Oh, yes, possibly that's being looked at. But in terms of actually banning certain procedures that are viewed as not cost-effective, that's where the real fear is on the Republican side, this idea of rationing that we would say, if you have X, or this particular thing, won't be covered at all. And there's a whole research. There is, however, interest. Obviously, there are people on the other side of that who feel like we really do need to look at what treatments aren't effective. And so there is a very large, or not a moderately-sized research budget that's attached to this new healthcare law that set up something called the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute that's already been going and it's just come out with its priorities. It's very transparent. There's a huge amount of information on their website and they're actually gonna be funding research to compare treatments and look at effectiveness. And while this sort of makes sense, people on Romney and others on the Republican side are arguing that that could be taken too far, that some of the best practices that we know of today, if they were rigidly implemented, some of them in the past have turned out to be wrong and so we have to be very careful. But I don't think we can argue with the idea that it's good to get more of this information and that that's what that whole entity is going to be trying to do. Amanda, you've focused a lot on education policy. Can I first ask you about this acronym that I first became aware of about a year ago, STEM. ST is science, technology, I mean, and what, engineering and math. Now, am I right, I mean, it seems it's everywhere all of a sudden and my daughter's school it certainly is. There's now a STEM room, you know, like they got some sort of STEM funding and it has all this technology. But I gather that's just a generic term. There's no STEM program per se, right? STEM is just something people throw around as this good cause when they want funding from state governments or if private schools want them from donors, right? I mean, it's basically shorthand which is I think totally overused and misunderstood and stupid. I mean, STEM doesn't even do it anything. It doesn't even make, it's not, there's no sort of resonance, there's no poetry. So if I were the king of the world, I would just give her to that. And the problem is- Do you have a more poetic acronym you would substitute? Rigor, how about rigor? I mean, I think the problem fundamentally is that this country has a serious problem in math and science. And it runs through every demographic, every socioeconomic level. It runs through every state in the country with a possible exception. And we can talk more about this of Massachusetts and Minnesota. But it is a serious lack of rigor that starts very early on in schooling. And it's not just science and it's not, it's better in reading but it's a fundamental problem. So I think there's a tendency to kind of stovepipe these things that's not particularly creative or helpful. And you've looked around the world at successful and unsuccessful schools. And I think here in America, I think the thing about STEM is I think there's almost a confusion about the meaning of the T, the technology part. I mean, in the sense that I think what it's supposed to mean is education about technology. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think it's come to mean for people using technology in education, right? Like when I was ushered into the STEM room, it was like interactive whiteboard and all this stuff. And it so happened that it was a statistics class my daughter was taking in there. But the fact is all this stuff you could have used for any subject. So what have you found about the intelligent or not so intelligent application of technology to education? That's a great question. I mean, I think that I was really struck, I spent a year visiting the top performing countries in the world on education outcomes and spending a lot of time with kids in those countries to try to get the texture of life in these countries. Because we know a lot. We actually have a lot of good, relatively good data now on education outcomes around the world that we didn't have 10 years ago. And it's very striking and it's not, it doesn't correlate strongly with expenditure and all those things you already probably know. But anyway, one of the things that you just notice immediately is how low tech the classrooms are in the top performing countries in the world. I mean, I have been in some terrible schools in the United States and they all have smart boards which are basically digital electronic whiteboards sort of. So I think that's like, there's a number of reasons for that and we don't need to go too far down that rat hole. But one reason would be just, the relatively aggressive vendors that go into our school system and also it is something that is easy to see and sort of like the reason, you know, Homeland Security tends to focus on gear. Homeland Security spending is like about hazmat suits and things that aren't really like less so training to use the hazmat suits. So these are things that are easy to quantify. We spend a ton of money on it. There isn't good money comparing how much we spend internationally per student on technology compared to other countries, which is frustrating. But anecdotally, everyone who has visited many of these countries tends to see this trend line. Particularly if you don't visit the schools that the Korean Minister of Education takes you to, right? So if you visit the schools sort of on your own, you see very, very low tech classrooms. And that's not to say I don't think there's an important role for technology, but I agree that it's not generally the role that it's taken in the US. Okay. Let me, I mean, let me first of all say that at any point any of you should feel free to jump in on any of this stuff. Let me just ask you one more question. A kind of a skeptics question. There's so much emphasis on improving our science and technology education. And I'm wondering whether it's clear that there should be so much emphasis, actually. I mean, and maybe you can make the case, but it's so often framed as like, well, we need to beat China or something, you know? And my view of the government's responsibility to Americans is that they should try to help Americans have good lives. And first of all, for a lot of Americans, maybe very poor, not very well-educated ones, it's probably not very realistic that many of them are gonna become physicists as the next step in life. And they may or may not be well-served by that kind of emphasis. And more than that, I just think, you know, beating China per se just kind of doesn't make sense to me as a goal. There may be lots of reasons that better education of science and technology would make us a better country. Or maybe that is just in terms of sheer economic productivity. Maybe it is the best place to put our resources, but I don't know that. So are you convinced that it's really a crisis and there's a strong case for it? I'm convinced that there is really a crisis in math and science, particularly the ability to think critically and solve problems in real life. Okay, so do I think we need to beat China? I think we do beat China. We beat the crap out of China on education. This whole, you know, there's a lot of misleading information, a lot of confusion about this. Yes, Shanghai outperformed the rest of the world. That is not all of China, I mean, you know. So do I think the horse race is a little silly? Yes, but I think it's true that when American 15-year-olds are performing 24th in the world, 24th in the world on thinking critically in math, so solving real problems, right? And this comes from the PISA test, which is the OECD's test of critical thinking skills in math, reading, and science, which I've actually taken the PISA test because I wasn't sure they kept saying it was a test of critical thinking and I was like, what does that mean? I don't know if I believe you. So I went and took the PISA test and it is a test of critical thinking and when it turns out that means is you have to think to answer the question. So, and it's a very strange feeling because I was so used to taking tests where you just kinda, you know, you just kinda go through it and answer it and underline the main idea. But you have to write answers out, right? Even including in math and science. You have to, you're scored based on your reasoning, so it's not, even if you get the actual answer, numeric answer wrong, you can still get full credit based on how you thought about it. And so you're really forced to do that thing where your brain's actually grappling with something somewhat uncomfortable, which is thinking. And so, so in that, I think that's very important. And by the way, the US does much better in reading on the same test. So I do think it's, in that sense, we are, and you see this, right? I mean, how many people have little small children or had small children in the US education system at some point? And what I think you probably noticed very early on that reading is pushed with a sort of evangelical fervor and then increasingly so because of No Child Left Behind and so forth. But math is like this thing that we are gonna get to later. And then that changes eventually. But even in the third grade, US third graders are doing much easier math work than schools in the top performing countries in the world. Now, is it clear to you what the stakes are in this election for education in the realm of science and technology specifically? Right, well, as far as education. Yeah, does it matter in some clearly discernible way whether Romney or Obama wins in terms of how many resources are gonna go into education and science and technology and engineering? Or the quality of those? If we accept that there is a problem in the level of fluency that American kids have in math and science, if we accept that, which we could debate forever, right? But if we accept that, and if we accept that there are not enough people getting trained in the skills that for which there are jobs in these fields, then I would say that it looks like there's no difference between the candidates, but there actually is a difference and it's a pretty big one. So if you look at, you heard them at the debate, right? I mean, they sort of couldn't agree with each other fast enough about education. They seemed to have great overlap in what they thought. And this was similar actually in 2008, when, remember when McCain and Obama were both rushing to claim Michelle Rhee, who is the controversial chancellor of DC school, this is a very odd moment. And so it looks in some ways, and if you read Romney's education platform, it does look like he talks about a lot of the same things, you know, like imposing better, more meaningful teacher evaluation that's based partly on student achievement data. He talks about choice a lot, more so, pushes that harder than Obama, but Obama also has pushed more school choice. So there is some overlap. I think where there's a difference is in, again, the role of federal government. So here we've come sort of full circle. I think that the Obama administration has been incredibly effective at leveraging very little actual power over education into significant change. And that's partly because they had the stimulus money to throw around, and so they could sort of tantalize states and locals into doing things they wanted them to do in exchange for this money, and they did. So there were some pretty serious changes that I think have gone, some of them unnoticed, and much more impactful than any president in modern history on actual day-to-day life in schools, and that's still kind of playing out. So if into this, Romney comes, doesn't have the stimulus spending, and also has this ideology against, or at least constituencies with an ideology against federal involvement in education, that's gonna be almost impossible, I think, for them to have significant impact on actual life in American schools. Stacy, you have thoughts on that? There was one point in your comments where I was shaking my head, because I did think that they expressed different beliefs about education and the debate, and from Obama you heard, race from the top, and then from Romney, he was talking about school choice. But I think there's even some nuance there because in their commitment to using the federal government to make change in education, because Obama, for example, has been giving waivers to states from no child left behind, which was a big federal movement to set standards in education. And so he's been giving waivers to states to make changes, and race to the top is sort of trying to set standards. You could probably explain it in more detail than I can, because I don't work on education policy, but. And then Romney, on the other hand, in his education proposal, he's suggesting, using federal money, sort of the carrot of federal money, to get schools to use Title I funds to fund school choice. So I think that's, I mean, he's clearly using, trying to use the federal power of money in order to. Right, I think he said flexible block grants would, so he's not talking about more money, right? But so he wouldn't have the money, the additional money that Obama had under the stimulus package, but taking the money, some of the money, right, that they do have, which now just kind of goes out like an ATM, most of it, to states and locals. And in exchange for doing certain things, which would be federal intervention in education policy, then they could get more flexibility. So there is some, I think, overlap there. But I think the biggest change, honestly, for science and technology and math education is the common core standards. And I think that that's something that is in a very vulnerable stage right now, and we'll see how that plays politically. But this is, you know, 45 states have adopted these common core standards, which are only in math and reading. So science isn't even yet a part of it. But for the first time, this is actually a really big deal, for the first time we are doing what most, you know, top performing countries in the world do, which is to set relatively rigorous standards for what kids should know and all kind of agree on them. And it was done very carefully so that it didn't look like a federal mandate and most GOP governors have endorsed the common core standards. But they're just rolling out now, there's gonna be a lot of pain that goes along with this, and there is already a lot of local level resistance to common core standards, arguing that it's federal intervention. So it would be very easy for that to spread, like a wildfire. And I really can't state enough how much this country needs at least some agreement on rigorous standards for what kids should know. I mean, just to give you a very quick example, and then I'll shut up is a, the average eighth grade math textbook around the world is 225 pages. In the US it is 800 pages. Now why would that be? Well, the reason is that US educators are caught in this horrible matrix of what their school wants them to do, what the district wants them to do, what the state wants them to do, what the feds want them to do. Then you have textbook manufacturers coming in who are trying to sell to many different districts and states. So they need to appease all those different things. And it's very confusing. So individual teachers are left to sort of sort out what they should teach from the 800 page textbook, which means that there's almost no overlap what a lot of kids learn in, say, geometry from one school or even classroom to the next. And so we can't have sort of basic, just like running anything. You gotta kind of have a focus, right? And say this is what matters. So in the US kids learn about decimals for six years. Six years on average. So what this means is you repeat a lot. There's a lot of unevenness because you'll get some kids from the fifth grade who did decimals, some kids who didn't. So you have to redo the whole thing. It's just a cluster. And I think that it's just, it's pretty obvious to me that this is- Is it a cluster? It's a cluster. Is it a cluster? And this is a pretty obvious common sense, in my view, common sense step that could easily come undone in the next couple of years. Okay, Sherry, do you wanna say something about an earlier part of the conversation? Yeah, I just, just speaking about stimulus funds, I think in some ways we could look at that in terms of trying to ferret out what the priorities at least of this administration have been and could be. So from the research standpoint, just going back, I mentioned that the NIH budget is proposed to be flatlined. But of course during the two years of the stimulus, there was a little bit over $10 billion added there. So that was a priority. Obviously a lot of money went into exploring alternate energy sources. There's debate about over how effective that was, but that's another priority area for research. And then in terms of also trying to figure out where the two platforms stand, the two candidates stand, there's some good resources on the web that you might wanna look at after this discussion. One is debate science, where the two candidates actually provided answers to 14 questions that were devised with the help of the top scientists and anybody could write in, AAA asked the American Association for the Advancement of Science had a role in many other organizations. And the candidates actually answered them in some detail. And so it's somewhat helpful. And then Research America is another source. They also had a questionnaire and they go out, I believe to all the candidates even for more local or state elections. And I believe Obama has answered their questions and not Romney, but it's also quite detailed. And then I also just didn't wanna leave out the topic. You mentioned that we're two of us, our reporters. There's a huge role now for journalists in computer-assisted reporting and doing research themselves. And I think another thing to look at in terms of where the candidates stand is openness of data and whether that data will be able to be. You mean government data or? Government data that could be, that maybe not every researcher has time to look through, but maybe some reporters look through. Is there a clear difference between the candidates? You know, I think there's been a lot of lip service in this in the last four years in terms of more openness and reform of the Freedom of Information Act. And I think reporters are still not really completely satisfied with changes. I haven't heard in terms of the Romney side, whether they're planning to further look at that, but I think it is a valid question to maybe ask the candidates that I haven't heard out there. Okay, now the flip side of that kind of transparency question is privacy. Is transparency of me just as a regular American? Are there clear differences between the candidates on that, Stacey? I haven't heard. I haven't heard either candidate talk about privacy as a campaign issue, but I know that it's an issue that divides Republicans from within the party so that you have some Republicans, for example, well, I shouldn't name names, but there are some Republicans on the committees of jurisdiction that have taken a more active role in trying to look at what some of the big companies like Facebook and Google and what kind of tracking they're doing of their customers and then there are others who want to step back a little bit more. And I think that Democrats have those same divides as well. And so under Obama's FTC, they definitely have, they've reached settlements with Google and Facebook over privacy issues, but there are some people who think that they need to go further. There are some people who think that there should be federal standards so that companies know what practices they should divide by. There are people who think that the industry should just set those standards themselves. And so that it's definitely, it's a big issue for technology companies. It will be a huge issue going forward and you don't hear the candidates talking about it at all. I haven't, at least. It's surprising. You'd think it would resonate. Well, there is a mention in the Republican platform about privacy of medical information. Obviously on the, in this administration, there's been a huge, there has been a lot of money going toward development of IT solutions and healthcare and more getting away from paper and more into information technology solutions. And there was like a notable sentence on the Republican side about protecting privacy. But I don't think anyone on the Democrat side would argue with that. That comment and your earlier comment about stimulus funding though, it does bring out another area where we've seen investment in technology from the Obama administration. And so in the stimulus, they provided funds for rural broadband development. There was also funding in the stimulus for health IT. And but to speak first to the rural broadband funds, that was another campaign promise in 2008. He wanted to provide universal access to broadband services. And he's trying to try to accomplish that in part through the stimulus grants. He also, through universal service fund reform, there's some funding there for broadband build out as well. I think that Republicans on the House have shown, and I haven't heard Romney speak to this issue, but Republicans on the House have shown that there were a lot of problems with those grants. Funds being returned in a lot of cases. And we still have a lot of questions about the funds that haven't been returned, whether they have complied with the requirements. So who returns funds and why? You mean that the states just can't find a way to spend them well? That they can't find a way to spend them in the ways that are required. So they're required to use the funds in rural areas. But their loans basically, when I said grants, I think, but I mean their loans in most cases. And so they haven't found a way to use them so that they can be repaid. I mean, this is not true of all of the loans, but a lot of them have been returned and the House has had several hearings on it. And is the administration's push all about terrestrial broadband, or is it also wireless, 3G, 4G? Is there much emphasis on subsidizing the expansion of that? Well, I think they try to introduce competition and wireless and build out wireless through other means, trying to allocate spectrum differently. And so I haven't heard as much talk about that from either campaign really. I just don't hear them talking much about technology issues. But I know that Republicans in general, and I think the Romney campaign would probably say the same, is that they think that maybe the focus on building out broadband has been misguided because consumers are turning so much more to wireless and so rapidly in big numbers. Okay, I wanna open this up for questions in a couple of minutes. Sherry, I wanna ask one more thing of you. There are a couple of issues broadly in your realm that I'm wondering if you see any clear partisan differences on. One is FDA research. You would, one would predict on ideological grounds that one of the two parties would want. But I say FDA, I mean FDA, drug approval. You would predict Democrats to be a little hands-on and I guess on ideological grounds. And then the other, essentially unrelated, except that they both deal with biology, is bioterrorism. Do you see on either of both of those, I mean defenses against bioterrorism, not government committing it? Oh heaven, for various reasons. At least not in this country. Yeah, actually those are very related questions because the FDA has a big role in the medical countermeasures enterprise. So this idea of coming up with protective technologies or drugs for the common threats, whether they be terrorism related or pandemic related, et cetera. So the FDA I think is a very interesting example of where there are differences. There was a recent talk that Peggy Hamburg gave, I think CSIS, is that right? You can find it on their website. I can email it to you. But in essence, really talking about this real, really big change in the focus in terms of international regulation and the idea that very many of our drugs and the components for drugs are coming from overseas. I mean it's a huge percentage. I think, let's see, FDA regulates products that account for 25 cents of every dollar. 80% of the ingredients of our drugs are manufactured in other countries. 40% of the drugs themselves are manufactured in other countries. 85% of the seafood, 50% of fresh fruit and nuts all coming from overseas. So under this administration, they've really looked at changing the model of regulation and doing a lot of trying to get capacities up in other countries and work in collaboration with other countries and try to reframe that regulatory system with a worldwide frame to it. And obviously whatever administration comes next, we'll have to deal with these realities, but the question is whether they would have the same attitudes. There was an FDA question on that questionnaire that debate science put out there and I think a lot of the emphasis from the Romney side was more on, as you would expect, trying to get rid of regulatory barriers that could be barriers to innovation. There has been that effort in this FDA as well. They've been reforming, making reforms, huge overhauls and changes apparently. I think the Republican side is not feeling that those go far enough, feels that they're still stifling of innovation, innovation going overseas rather than being done here in terms of drug development. And so I think those may be some more salient differences. Nothing on bioterrorism? Yeah, well, so the, I mean, the bioterrorism kind of fits right into that and there's just been a, I think, hugely problematic countermeasures development. It started under the Bush administration and there was some monies put aside to fund anthrax vaccines and these specific countermeasures for bioterrorism. A lot of problems in the contracting for those, a lot of problems just with trying to empower small companies that were taking on these projects to have the qualifications to actually do them. And so there was, under this administration, a huge review of that whole enterprise and a refocus. They've just released new goals for the next four or five years. On the Republican side, they also are saying that they feel that the countermeasures are very important for bioterrorism preparedness and public health preparedness in general, but they haven't given real specifics as to how they would change these things except to note these regulatory barriers and to really try to emphasize that they want to help streamline the process, have more investment in research. I think Romney has said there is a federal role for research, but it should be research that can then leap over into the private sector that can make that next step so that the private sector is empowered to come up with solutions and that these barriers and red tape in the system would go away a bit to allow faster development. And maybe on the Democratic side, you also see some of that language, but also with an emphasis on protecting people, wanting to still have some protections not going too far in the deregulating side. So that would be the difference that I would detect. Okay, so before we go to questions, does anybody have anything that's just been dying to interject? You have to have been dying to interject. I was actually curious when I thought it was really interesting when you asked her about whether we put too much focus on science and math education. Did you all see that article from maybe a few months ago in the New York Times that Op-Ed that everybody was passing around about whether we even need to teach our kids algebra? And I think I could guess what you would say about it. But what do you think? Well, my friends and I were passing it around and sort of thinking, well, we studied philosophy, we never would have been able to get through philosophy if we hadn't had algebra because you need that to do logic and there just are all sorts of ways that you don't anticipate maybe how algebra is going to help you, but it actually just teaches you how to think abstractly and analytically. Yeah, yeah, and I should have said an answer to your question. Performance in math in particular has been shown to predict future earnings in a way that other things do not. Now, take that for what you will. It could be more of an aptitude thing. I mean the kinds of people who are good at math are going to be. No, I mean when you control for lots of other things. And aptitude tends to be a little overrated in the US. There's a lot of, the US tends ironically to have a real belief that you're either good at math or you're not. Other countries don't have that belief to their credit and the research doesn't support that as much as we feel it, right? Like we feel like we're either good at math or we're not or we're good at science or we're not. But anyway, I agree with you that algebra in particular is a great example. And the US math is taught very sectioned off, like algebra, trigonometry, geometry. In Korea, for example, and many countries that outperform the US, it's taught as all one universe where things are connected. So for example, you can't do physics without algebra, right? Or at a certain level calculus. So, and it's much more interesting that way, it turns out. I mean I spent a lot of time following this American teenager from Minnesota who went to a very high performing high school and spent a year in South Korea. And the only class he loved was math. South Korea is a pressure cooker system, right? And it's got lots of problems with it. But math is taught in a way that is much more applicable to the real world in general. I mean I'm making sweeping generalizations, obviously. But, so these things aren't kind of a stovepipe. So the fact that we would even be sort of talking like, maybe algebra is a problem. Like these are, this is a, as you all know, I mean math is a way of ordering the universe, right? I mean these are, this is like a language. Like you can't be like, let's just not do verbs. You know what I mean? So that's my response. One thing that was interesting about the article is that he says that it's algebra that prevents a lot of people from graduating at all. I believe that. I mean, you know, I mean how many people, well this is not a good audience. But if I ask a normal audience, how many people remember having just a traumatic math class in their background? Even here. You know, look. Global helpers. Yeah. You know, if math is not taught well from the beginning, you get a crack in your understanding that becomes widens. And then you can't catch up, right? I mean, it's very hard to catch up. And we know in the US that math is not taught well. I mean, there's just a stack of studies showing this year after year after year. And we also know that when you test future middle school math teachers in the United States, they perform around, you know, what was it? The level of, they perform below average. So they perform just like they're students. I mean, there's no shock. I mean, okay, so 2010 study of teacher prep programs in 16 countries, the US tested 3,300 teachers to be in 39 states. So relatively decent study. And our future middle school math teachers knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand. And know we are near what future teachers in Taiwan and Singapore knew. So particularly elementary level math education in the US, those teachers tend to have a below average SAT score for the US. So, and this, you know, it's just not that complicated, right? I mean, if you don't have a real kind of understanding and comfort with math, and these are the people that we tend to be recruiting as teachers, then right from the beginning, kids are learning math in a way that isn't very interesting and it's easy to get lost. On the point, I'll close with my pet pee before we open up the audience. It's true that algebra is useful in ways beyond, you know, what you need to become an mathematician. Calculus in high school, I mean, my daughter has now taken two years of calculus. And if you ask, I mean, the chances of her using that are exceedingly low. And the reason it's so common and standard is basically because then they wanna take the calculus AP and they wanna impress colleges and then they can get into colleges. And what is much less common in high school is a good statistics course, which has 38 times the practical value. Or computer science. Yeah. It's good for her brain. It's good for her brain. All of you get there. Okay, okay. It looks like we're gonna need a Q&A. It's absolutely impossible to teach statistics with any rigor without understanding calculus. Oh, that's not true. That's absolutely not true. That probability and regression analysis, two things which would make the average person much better able to cope with the landscape of reality involve no, you need no calculus whatsoever to understand those things. Ah, that's wrong. I mean. I mean, the average person, the average person, I promise we're about to turn it over to Q&A, but the average, we have journalists writing about these presidential polls. This poll is meaningless because it's a plus or minus, it's a 3% confidence interval and there's only 3% difference. That's a totally stupid thing to say. And you don't need calculus to know it's stupid, right? You're arguing for more rigorous math education that's closely tied to reality. But that's just my pet peeve. That's over. I'm over this. I'm totally over this. I got it out of my system. I feel better. We're gonna open it up to Q&A. Please wait for the microphone. There's a story in last week's nature that perfectly encapsulates the question I'm gonna ask. So you know that a couple of months ago, the D&D just gave NASA to Hubble quality, Hubble-sized mirrors. So if we don't need them, you can launch them if you can. And nature last week had an article where NASA perhaps was given a tour of the facility that makes these telescope mirrors. And the administrator was quoted as saying, this was a factory built to stamp out Hubble space telescopes. So this just enraged me as somebody who writes about science and as a taxpayer. But the question is, why isn't there any serious discussion about the priorities of what we spend in a military versus everything else? So the budgets of every agency you named, NH, NSF, are partly rounding errors compared to the size of a military spending. So I'd like, I wonder if you can comment about how the Romney and the Obama campaigns come down on these issues. I think there's been a big focus on military spending in the last year just because of the sequester. And I think that it's even brought out a lot of divisions on the right, more libertarian types, saying that there's room to cut in the military budget and then the more hawkish side saying that it's absolutely essential to our security that we keep funding where it is. And I can't really comment specifically about funding specific science programs instead of the military. But I do think it's been a healthy discussion about military spending in the last year. And I think we'll see a lot more of it in December, November, December, after the election. We'll pretty much, it'll be all we're talking about. Okay, other questions? Are we back there? Yeah, I wanted to see what you think about the financial system becoming more of a servant of scientific progress rather than what it seems now is that the scientific progress is held hostage by the limits of the financial system. And I think, I mean, for me, we should be setting up 10 of these laboratories on Mars, like what we just did with Curiosity. We could figure out the history of life in the solar system. Here on Earth, we could do big water management regulation on a continental scale, turn floodwaters into relief of drought. We should be putting to use all of our cement factories, steel factories. All these kind of big projects we could have, it seems to me that some periods in our history, like during John Quincy Adams presidency, the bank funded the canals and the rails, and I just came from a discussion on debt at the Brookings Institute. And it seems to be the thing that's lacking is the people discussing the budget need to get together with the people who are discussing science. And then that one group come up with what scientific projects will move our economy forward so we can grow. Otherwise, we're just cutting off our legs with this budget stuff. So yeah, my question is, how can we make the financial system a slave of scientific progress like we've done at various periods in our country? By financials in the private sector, or you mean the fiscal situation, the government's? I mean, the whole way in which credit becomes available for projects. And the whole way the banks are regulated, can we revamp the thing to fit what we need to move forward for productivity? I wonder if Constantine, that's your area. But how do you know ahead of time what's going to be profitable? That's the challenge, right? Well yeah, which side? Yeah, I mean, so you lumped a lot of different things together there, and you could maybe start slightly piece by piece. Why send 10 things to Mars, right? I mean, I'm a proponent of spending on the national dominant for the humanities and spending on the NSF for the same reason. And that science, I think it's fair for the government to spend on cultural products because that's, as a society, something we wanna do. Science as a cultural product, I think is worth spending on. The Mars mission was not cheap. 10 of those would not cost 10 times as much because you get some economies of scale, but it would be even more for what benefit. So I think you need to disaggregate, and I don't think we do a good job of this because I think scientists are complicit because they wanna get as much money as possible, so they tend to over promise what science can do. But you need to disaggregate what we want, our reasons for funding science, which are in part practical benefit and in part exploration. And we're not, nobody's honest about this in debate because everybody wants more money. In terms of the financial system, I mean, that's a much broader question of how we structure ourselves as a society. Apple is sitting on, I don't know, $80 billion in cash, $60 billion, something like that, tens of billions of dollars in cash. That's just kind of there now. Could we use that to improve math education? We could, but it'd be a weird thing to do, right? So it's kind of like the fact that our financial system is not in service of scientific progress is a sort of artifact of living in a sort of modern, sort of capitalist market democracy of the stripe that we have. And I think the question you're driving at a profound reordering of our society that I don't think is really immediately in the cards. I should point out that Apple has worked very hard to get iPads in the hands of every great creator in America. So in that sense, the little dollar. In a purely selfless, there is a political interpretation of that. Oh, that's the only interpretation. One thing about the space program, I think there was a notable difference in terms of the Republican platform supporting a return to manned space exploration, which is more expensive than some scientist feeling that more should be invested in unmanned where you could do more experiments. Yeah, I mean, which comes to the question about this sort of defense versus non-defense spending. And it's not, I mean, the non-defense spending is not around here, right? It's about half and half. If you sum together NIH, NSF, NIST, other sort of odds and ends, like the FDA has a small research funding program, and you compare it to defense R&D, they're roughly similar in size. And then you look at the defense. You know, I have any number of friends who are professors in academia and they get a grant from the NSF, great. They get a grant from the Air Force, great. Like they don't really care where the money comes from. And really disentangling the defense spending, what part of that is very much applied towards development of a particular weapon system versus basic research. That's a sort of subtle accounting that no one that I've seen and I've looked has really been able to do unambiguously. I think the stronger way to ask the question is not so much defense versus non-defense, but sort of black versus non-black, which goes to your point of the two Hubble Space Telescope like mirrors that the National Reconnaissance Office had, that nobody outside of the NRO knew existed until six months ago. And I think that goes to questions of sort of government transparency and sort of realistically difficult but tractable questions while sort of not radically overthrowing our system of government and saying just how much sort of secret expenditure is justified versus not. Okay, look, I think we have a couple in the back, yeah. We have been talking about some briefs here, calculus, geometry, but I think that on a major scale, when we are talking about the national elections, when the principal candidate for one party at his convention, Poo Poo's basic scientific understanding of climate change. I don't think there is any question of choice. I mean, that is reinforced by so many people in his ranks, like you referred to Georgia congressman and so on and so forth. I don't think there is much of a choice who stands for good science, good technology and who not. Do you agree there's not much of a choice? There's no way we should vote for a Republican candidate? Well, I think that even if you have the Obama administration's position on climate change, did they pass the climate change bill? They didn't, so, and. The question is, your standard there stands up and Poo Poo's some basic standards of science. Well, I just think. It doesn't have the guts to stand up and say that there has to be some national thinking. I think certainly that people can choose a lot of reasons which candidate they're going to vote for and that is one that would be, a lot of people care about and it's a perfectly valid reason to choose one candidate over another. I think that I'm not, I couldn't quote you what Romney has said about climate change because I don't work on that issue, so I'm not sure what his statements have been on that. But I do think it's a fair question that even if he had the same scientific beliefs that the president has, that it's not clear what the result would be if the result would be different. I think, I mean, from my reading and research, I think that's a good point and just you might have a look at this debate science because Romney actually, some people made a big deal about the fact that in his answer on the climate change question he actually came out and said somewhat differently from the speech that you're referring to that the climate, you know, research shows the climate is changing and that humans are having an impact on that. And then in the next sentence kind of went back and said, but, you know, there's a debate, there's not consensus on the scientific side about how much and then, you know, step back from it. Yeah, what I thought the Romney position was that it's clear that the climate is changing, but that it's not clear what we can do to change it, to stop it. That's what I, is that, okay. Yeah, well, I mean, scientists did take issue with that second part. The person who holds the record for having had his hand at the longest is back there and then we do have time for the other. Hi, there's been a lot of cant and verbiage about IP and IP projection in this campaign, mainly about certain foreign countries. But as just as New York Times pointed out, there are some huge questions about exactly what we do when we protect IP in the yesterday's times in the patent case, but as most of you know, since you're reporters, there are big questions about copyright and the like. Have either of the campaigns or either of the parties dealt with the question of IP reform or they all exhausted from two years ago? Oh, they definitely have talked about copyright and IP reform, but it's interesting that even the Romney campaign, I think even the Romney campaign attacked the PIPA SOPA bill that was being debated, but they have often talked about the need to enforce copyright abroad in China. So that's the discussion that I have heard. I've heard of New York Times patents. I haven't seen it yet. Oh, well there's a huge issue about what the patent system protects and whether it helps or not. And it similarly applies in copyright. And I think most people are familiar with the issue, would say it's a much more useful issue, an interesting issue than Chinese copyright. Yeah, no, I feel, I agree, and I think that that is something that will definitely whoever is president, that that's another issue like privacy that the next president's going to have to take on as some sort of rethinking of the copyright patent system or some kind of reform of the system. And unfortunately, I don't know much about what the Romney administration would do because I don't think they put out any white papers or really talked about it much in depth. And I also don't know what the Obama administration will do. You want to interject something quickly? Yeah, I'm just saying that we have two people. Yeah, having read the New York Times article you're referring to, I mean this is a classic case of the way our government is structured, right? It's clear that the IP regime we have in the US now is bad for consumers. But consumers are a dilute constituency who don't have a strong voice in the policymaking process while the incumbents who stand to benefit from continually extending copyright terms, continually strengthening patent protections do. So I mean, it's again a question of sort of what you expect to happen. It's like the old joke about the crossing the river where the alligator eats the guy who's riding on his back. So what do you expect? I'm an alligator. And that's exactly what our political system has always done and will do. So we can complain about it, but it's not gonna change. I'm glad that's not the thought we're ending on. That would be kind of a downer. So we have two more people. So as a scientist who is constantly overselling what I can do in order to get more money, I just wanted to address a couple of things. Having science not be a slave to funding and some of the other things that are mentioned here, I think I'll come back to more rigor in scientific education because I think the problem we have is one of scientific literacy. It's not that we need more scientists and engineers, but it's that we need more people who can think critically and understand science. You know, I'm trying to ask for more money because everybody wants to know when I'm gonna have a cure for cancer. I don't work on cancer, that's just an example. But there's never going to be a cure for cancer and it's hard to get the public to understand that. And we exist in a society now where people are saying that there's some great debate about climate change, there's not. And we live in a society where political candidates are asked if they believe in evolution. You don't believe in evolution. You believe in Santa Claus, you believe in God. Evolution is a theory and there are people who are trying to, you know, who want to make arguments against it, but the question isn't do you believe in it? The question is do you understand the evidence enough? And when you can understand the priorities of the country and you can understand the priorities of science and you have the ability to think critically, then we can decide as a country what we'll fund and what our priorities are. And I think rigor is a great word. I think we don't all have to be rocket scientists, but we have to understand enough to be able to have a say in where our tax dollars are going. That's interesting. So to be an informed citizen in a democracy, leaving aside the economic benefits or lack thereof. I mean, I think, sorry. President Obama has mentioned basic science research more than any politician I've ever heard in my lifetime. And I think we don't realize the benefits of basic science because it's not a cure, it's not a drug, it's not a treatment and it's so far away from those things that we find it hard to invest our dollars in it, but that's where the treatments come from. That's where the cures come from. And it might take 10 years. And I think if we have a better understanding of science, then we'll know that we do have to make these investments that don't maybe make a return in a couple years, but that will get us to Mars or to cures or to things like that. The other thing about basic research is it's hard to confine within borders. Not that you might want to anyway, but the fact is that the value of it, because the research tends to be public, the value of it is available to all countries everywhere. So there's a kind of a national interest question about whether we should be funding the world's thinking. I'd like to follow up on something else, but I'd like to answer one aspect of that is that where as basic research is international, global, the application of it requires a scientifically literate population. And so if we're just funding basic research and aren't developing the scientific and mathematical literacy in our general workforce, we're not gonna be able to use it. So that's just one point. But the other question I have, or I'd like people to comment on is you have one political party now which isn't just a home to many people who appear to be anti-science, they become anti-scientists. That is, they're attacking the individuals, the people, the actual scientists, because they're saying things which they don't like ideologically. And I think that is quite frightening. You got the attorney general of the next state down who's been on a witch hunt against scientists. And this particular political party has really gone off the deep end. And so that's the comment I would like you to comment on. How could that party be repaired? I have, if you do, I mean, I have a comment on your earlier point about the fact that the application of basic research requires a literate, scientifically literate population. I mean, one interesting question is whether, to what extent even the economic and practical fruits of applied research stay within your borders in an age when especially who knows where the manufacturing will actually ultimately be done and so on. And I just realized it ultimately becomes an intellectual property question, right? I mean, whether it makes sense to subsidize things that would lead to a lot of applied research in the United States, gets back to the question of how much value is retained by the people who do the applied research, right? But, Constantine. Quickly on that point. I mean, if you cast it in that light as an IP question, then, and you sort of accept a certain sort of degree of nationalism as both acceptable and desirable, then you're sort of the consequence of that is, oh, we should have stronger IP that we should capture more of the benefits. That sort of empirically is not how the world works. You can create stronger IP, then it'll just be violated, as we'll have seen in China. And again, you can sort of rail against that and complain to the Chinese, but this is always what's happened. It's what happened in the US when England was developing sort of cotton technologies in the industrial revolution. Is there not progress on balance in the international acceptance of these things where the world is not kind of falling in line at all? What I think happens is that there's some sort of equilibrium in how technology is naturally spread. And if you strengthen the legal protections against that spread, you'll see more violations of those legal norms. And the margins, you'll see some change in the rate, but you're not gonna see a profound change. The same way that you can make drugs super illegal and you'll still see a certain rate of drug use. What is important is that, and I think this is often sort of forgotten because it's not a very sexy subject, is that capturing the benefits of that technology don't have a lot necessarily to do with how you're capturing them versus other people. And I wanna go to the point of Sherry's sort of experience of the day on infrastructure. And you tried to take Amtrak today. The technologies to build good trains exist in the world. We haven't implemented those technologies here, not because of a failure of IP, but just because of a sort of overgeneral failure to be willing to invest in infrastructure. And this isn't confined to transportation. So it's not a question of basic research of, we need to redouble our efforts of research into better trains. Like humanity knows how to build a decent train system. We just haven't been willing to expand the resources it takes to do that. Although that happens to be a realm where if the investment happens, it happens in the public sector for whatever reasons. There aren't private companies laying out railroad tracks or something like pharmaceuticals. The actual application happens in the private sector. I'd just like to pick up one strand that the last questioner raised. And this idea about, can you have an effect without necessarily just the money when it's about the words and the public relations and just what you say and what you put out there. And I think that there is power to that. And I think we need to really think about that particularly at times like this where we are resource restricted. And a lot of times we think about money and we think about the latest technologies. There's a heck of a lot we know how to do that we don't implement. And Constantine just gave some examples of that. There are low tech ways of doing things that could be more cost effective. But in terms of the lip service and the value given to scientists, I believe this administration has implemented White House science fairs and just that message that we give to younger people for a low cost I think can be powerful. So I think that's a very good point. I think that's a good, I know we're not done, but that's a good point I think to take with us is that, this is a question of vision and getting people behind an idea at least on education, I can't speak to the other things. I don't think either candidate has really created a compelling vision for what education can look like. Like I said, I think Obama's been shockingly effective in making changes whether or not they'll be effective. But I don't think there's a, again the poetry is missing the vision, the thing, the politics. These are far more important than most of the things that I spend a lot of time looking at like the policy, right? We have one more question. May have time for both if we don't have any answers for the first one. A comment concerning the education aspect of this discussion and I think there is a difference in vision between not just the candidates but the parties in general. It has to do with the recognition of the public good aspects of education. And not many decades ago there was a general agreement that it wasn't just a benefit to the individual student but a benefit to the larger society and so we were concerned about districts that had poor popular tax bases and we wanted to assure quality education at that level, post-secondary education. We wanted, maybe there's a lot of state money but there's still concern keeping tuition down because not just good for the individual student, good for the state, good for the country. I think the difference now is we think if you want good education, pay for it, right? So not that we don't recognize public good aspects but it's a diminished part of our recognition of the value of education. It's more viewed as the individual should get the education that they can afford or their parents can afford for them and I think that's a difference of vision between them. And you mentioned in term of public good we should not let the day pass without mentioning that in theory the way you approach questions about whether the government should support something is to ask will the private sector take care of the problem itself or is it a problem that's not going to get solved unless we collectivize it and I would ask Stacey how often that question actually comes up in the councils of government but I fear the answer would be so depressing that you know I mean they're truly rigorous way of looking at the, you know you ask questions like that you ask would the benefits be contained within our borders? This is just the, the analysis is fairly simple but I worry that that's not really the thing that tends to shape government policy unless you want. Can you restate? Well I mean just an economist would say that well let's, you know like with any technology like say broadband, you know they'd say well what is the private sector going to do by itself? You know and if the private sector is not going to solve the problem and we agree that it's a problem then you, then it's a role for the government well and the flip side of that is to what extent do the benefits, a part of that analysis is to what extent do the benefits that accrue to an individual student spill over beyond the student and are there positive externalities or negative externalities? But my, I was just being kind of cynical you don't have to, you know, you don't have to disabuse me in my cynicism. Quickly disabuse you? Yeah, yeah, if it's quick enough to let her ask have the final question. Just because the line you propose sort of presupposes a stark distinction between the private sector and the government which I don't think exists and in reality that line is very blurred with many sort of government, private sector partnerships, incentives, regulatory structures and I think that the assumption that underlies your question sort of drastically limits the role of government in a way that actually hurts the public good. Well, for the public good then my analysis would not prevent the spending of the money. I mean, that's the thing, and I'm just saying that the question I'm asking is what the question should in theory be asked before you blow those lines, before you, the government subsidizes. But I mean those lines have been blurred ever since ever since we've had government and had a private sector. Well and there have been wars forever but I'm still against it. Thank you so much for your time. And my question, I actually have a question bringing some of the policy to the very individual level and it's an actual question which is for a teenager who happens by pure luck to have an excellent physics teacher, good math teachers, is good at them and tends to like those subjects but also interested in sort of political science, you can have social sciences heading toward college. How do you explain kind of you should answer the call, you're able to do this, there's society needs you to study these things versus oh, just do whatever you want. And I'm just wondering kind of at the real level, how do you talk to, in this case it happens to be my kid, but I actually sort of see it as, you have to answer the call, you actually know how to do physics, which I don't, I'm not a scientist. But I guess I'm wondering if you have any comments on that and to the extent you think the candidates would, although I think honestly they would probably give platitudes like of course young man go forth or what have you. But actually it's a real question and kind of this is at the trench level of our policy objectives, so thank you. I actually think this is a really practical and meaningful question. I mean what you're asking is how do you make science, engineering and math professions attractive to young people? And lots of countries do this. I mean, yeah I was at an Applebee's this weekend and do you know, maybe you've seen this, in Applebee's they started putting, they have wallpaper that is photos of local high school sports athletes in action. So hitting a tennis ball or throwing a football. And with the name of the high school over it and you know, I went to a high school in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania a few months ago and every football game there are four news reporters there, four sports reporters rather I should say. It's broadcast on cable TV. I mean we send very clear messages to our kids about what is valued. We are training many of them and we put much of our energy resources and passion to be athletes. I don't know why, I don't know why. But that is what we are doing. The top countries in the world, sports is not part of school. It's a separate thing. It's something you do. The parents organize it. You do it, but it's a separate thing. And it's very clear what school is for and engineers in some countries are very valued. I'm sure it's a lot of lobbying for 30 seconds and that's exactly what there is. College students a lot and I guess I have two quick answers to that. One is that there's a whole wide world there with so many causes and so many important things and if she can find a passion, what is it that outrages her? What is it that and match that to those abilities? That would be great. And then you can also warn her and tell her about all those people who reach middle age and realize that their careers have no meaning and go back and like retrain and become scientists or doctors. And you know, that happens. So at this point that philosophy relies on math. I mean there is these intersections that I don't think are always fleshed out well when you're in high school. So those are things that I think might be fruitful to stress the connections between these things so that people understand journalists need to know statistics even though they don't. He's literally holding up a stop sign. I think that means, but we're leaving inspired. Thanks for bringing out the motivational speaker in them. I had no idea they had it in them. Thanks to the three panelists and Constantine for illuminating a far flung subject.