What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding, that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology, why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?
I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi," and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.
I read a fair amount about energy issues, but mainly for my own understanding and less so to be able to readily explain it, so forgive me if I get something wrong and for the lack of citations, but I believe it's basically that the increase in oil production is pretty much completely due to unconventional sources like shale oil (and fracking for natural gas) which have a much lower Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), which means they're only profitable when the price of oil is very high.
What expecting these unconventional sources to save the day fails to account for is that they are still very finite, and more importantly, that when the price of oil gets high enough, it hurts the economy, which then decreases demand for oil, which causes the price to drop, which makes it unprofitable to operate and/or develop new unconventional wells until the price rises again due to low supply. This cycle is not really compatible with a healthy economy. We are seeing the beginning of this as we speak, with oil companies laying off people because shale oil isn't profitable at current prices.
Also, the technology for shale oil and fracking has been around for a long time, so it's not exactly technological innovation, just a new source that became profitable to exploit as easily accessible oil becomes scarcer and prices are high.
> And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on that could be better parallelized with more funding?
Maybe space travel?
Or viable renewable energy that could actually sustain civilization?
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/science-no-single-or-combinati... http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-will-never-work-and...
No, it's not pleasant for the people who are laid off or businesses that fail. But basically the entire financial industry has evolved to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this cycle, providing the capital to get the boom started and then recycling the carcasses of overcapacity into productive uses when the boom ends. It's business as usual for a capitalist economy.
I do see a lot more cooperation between the Industry and University though. And as we enter an era of smaller corporations, the burden of industrial research might shift to consulting/academic sponsorship programs instead.
Since the 1970s, we've seen elective decline in the U.S., in science, and in technology. Abstractly people want scientific progress, but no one wants to pay for it, and people within the masses would rather be guided by their resentment of academics than fight back when academic or research jobs get cut. When state legislatures cut funding for public universities, the hoi polloi don't care because their resentment for professors is stronger than their sense of a need to keep up the society.
One might hope for Silicon Valley to be better, and look to it for leadership, and it may have kept its integrity for longer, but the current "M&A has replaced R&D" era is just fucking disgusting. It's easy to focus the hatred on a few unlikeable celebrity founders (and I've done my share of that) but the truth is that the problem is really deep and probably unalterable. We have a front-row seat, if we work in science and technology in the U.S., for elective decline-- why it happens, the individual actors who push it forward (not wanting decline, but valuing self-interest more), and the often one-way erosion of trust that tends to make it irreversible-- but we have no power to change it. And, just as one might read about a civilization that collapsed 3,000 years ago and think, "They would have been fine if they just <X>", we can easily come up with solutions that will work but never see implementation, because (as seems to be a constant of human organizations) the wrong people are in charge.