Our changing position

For a fair while now I've been carping about our country's declining role in innovation. The National Academy of Science has just come out with a report on the state of physics today and the challenges it faces. The report is for sale but Ars Technica has a review of it. The following excerpt from this review is what I see as the key points.

The report identifies six key questions that will represent the grand challenges that materials science will face over the coming decade, the ones most likely to produce the next revolution. But it also raises fears that those challenges will be met by researchers outside of the US. It highlights the fact that government funding has not kept up with the rising costs of research at the same time that the corporate-funded research lab system has collapsed. As a result, US scientific productivity has stagnated at a time when funding and output are booming overseas. The report makes a series of recommendations that it hopes will get US physics research booming again.

Emphasis added.