4 key steps to transform the USA back into a scientific nation | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Mar, 2025
We’ve wasted our time and resources ideologically policing and punishing each other for far too long. Here’s a better route to prosperity.
In every civilized society around the world, there’s a trade-off that must be made. The protection of individual freedoms, on one hand, enable the people living there to pursue their own goals, dreams, and ideals, whatever they may be. But those pursuits must not infringe on the rights — including the health, safety, and general welfare — of others. When it comes to issues like the health, safety, and long-term prosperity of our society, there is no greater tool or resource we have to assess accurately them than science.
It might seem like, at the start of 2025, we’re headed in absolutely the wrong direction. Mass firings and layoffs at the NIH, the NSF, the CDC and more, coupled with the installation of a number of prominent anti-science cabinet members, the first deadly measles outbreak among children in a decade, and the USA’s withdrawal (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement all signal a national move away from science.
But this is not new. The fact is that Americans have been resistant to heeding the scientific consensus on matters of public policy for…
