No. The West since 1950 has done FAR MORE scientific research than the USSR did. Soviet scientists did good work and were smart. But the Western Enlightenment model -- open communication, tolerance of dissenting voices, pursuit of truth and rejection of propaganda, and funding for basic science -- was a huge shining scientific success over the past century. Its success dwarfed that of other models. (Today the biggest threat to that model is propaganda - largely from wealthy oligarchs pursuing maximal wealth, both Russian oligarchs and Western oligarchs like the Koches and Murdoch.)

There's a reason to be proud of Western enlightenment values, which are closely connected to Western liberal democracy.

I don't know that the causal link between the West's scientific output and the West's enlightenment values is that clear. It's certainly correlated.

But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.

The politicians today who are cutting NASA's budget, talking about shutting down DoE, etc. aren't simply victims of Koch propaganda or disbelievers in the enlightenment - they just no longer have political cover for publicly funding research to the same extent that it was funded previously. Nobody believes that the US is at a technical disadvantage against the people we're currently at war against. They still have the political cover to fund the military itself, which continues to get large amounts of funding from political parties that generally want to lower taxes, but that base won't let them fund basic research as much as it did in the past.

The US NIH has a $30B budget to do research on cancer and human disease. Most of that is about helping people and has zero connection to the military.

--- Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS created by American oligarchs like the Koches. They have created a propaganda machine to push for tax cuts for the rich. And part of the propaganda, pushed by outlets funded or controlled by GOP billionaires, like Fox, Limbaugh, Cato(founded as Koch), Sinclair, Heritage, SPN, Cit U, Jud Watch, Bradley, Searle, etc etc. is that we need to shrink government (so we can cut taxes on the rich.)

One description of that strategy is here [1] Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-tax-c...

>But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.

Are you implying that the USSR spent a smaller percentage of tax revenue on the war effort?

Stalin's favorite scientist was Trofim Lysenko, to whom he gave an enormous amount of power to direct research in the USSR. And Lysenko was pretty ruthless in using that power to suppress science he didn't like, esp with regards to genetics and evolution. He set back Soviet science by decades. And Mao repeated his mistakes: Lysenko's literal bad seeds contributed to the famine of the Great Leap Forward.

>> create this quite nifty Liberty bubble

> worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR

You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a political agenda quite different than that of the USSR.

> "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy"

He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.

There was definitely a reference to scientific advancement: "As an engineer ... After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist ... this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in."

That is why I interpreted the "quite nifty Liberty bubble" as referring to the ability to participate in technical / scientific endeavors - the "freedom I have to do this work" - not about liberty in the abstract.

('criley2, if I'm misreading you, please let me know.)

> There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway.

The vast majority of chips produced in Asia come from Taiwan, not the RoC. That’s a big difference, given that this discussion is about the innovation of democratic vs. autocratic governments, and the Taiwanese and Chinese governments are on completely opposite sides of that spectrum.

I’m not saying that Taiwan innovates more than a China because it has a democratic government, but it’s at least worth distinguishing between the two countries.

haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.

I'm sure Soviet times joke that "our microschemes are biggest!" came out of nowhere.. I wonder why all the consumer tech in USSR was so backwards if research was so flourishing :)

It seems like their we're ideological reasons at first. But you are leaving out crucial details afterwards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_...