Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)

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• Hacker News
• Isn't much of the science work just taking money for doing basically nothing? I don't think that is a loss for the us.
  by mono442
• You are motivating me to get enough reputation points to be allowed to downvote.
  by beng-nl
• For real. How much more do we need to spend to learn that plants crave Brawndo?
  by estearum
• You presumably spent 15 or so years in school to learn things of which many only have very indirect applications, and at most a small minority directly applied to your career.

  Should we similarly get rid of mandatory education? Most of it is useless after all.

  by MITSardine
• It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.
  by lefra
• "Science work" is NOT doing nothing. All the modern conveniences we have today came through such work, which usually go for long stretches of time before payoff.
  by skeledrew
• Hacker News really isn't what it used to be, huh.
  by pjc50
• Yea, exactly. You should send all your top scientists to Europe. Great idea to get rid of them. Totally just dragging down your country. Send them to Europe.
  by victorbjorklund
• No. It is for research that wouldn't be funded by companies, since it is either too risky or has too long of a time-horizon. If all academic research was removed from the world you would notice a vast stagnation in technological progress. This can be confirmed by looking at what technologies have come from this process, and what private research built upon public research.
  by zipy124
• Experts in flies reproduction leave fro Netherlands.
  by blueaquilae
• The US once was proud of its scientific achievements, now parts of it replaced that with being very proud of their ignorance
  by bergen
• You mean the thing that held Screwworm at bay for decades and kept our beef prices low? That we will now need to spend $Billions re-curtailing because we don't have as much of the capability to do that anymore?
  by mrguyorama
• America is like a trust fund baby given all the advantages and then the baby goes "fuck it, life is too hard, I am just going to do coke and die early”.
  by Herring
• I think you meant to write "boomers."

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1trcILsBHkE

  by greenavocado
• The article has failed to prove that anybody has taken the bait and left.

  > For the researcher, the qualities must, from an international perspective, far exceed what is customary within the international peer group. The institution receives a maximum of €1 million per researcher for the next five years.

  Let's be generous and assume you are one of the chosen ones. Your institution will take 20% off the top leaving with you 1million×.80/5 or 160k EUR per year.

  After income taxes, your take home pay is €90,868.00 or $103k USD. Not bad for the average man, but not good for a top researcher like they want.

  EUR 160k works out to about $182,640. For that level of income in a top tier institution in a state with an income tax like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, MD you would take home $121,565, or 15% more.

  https://thetax.nl/?income=160000&startFrom=Year&selectedYear...

  by greenavocado
• From the article, it sounds more like these funds are the research budget (what you pay other people with). This is quite attractive, students are typically < 200k / PhD, so you can fund quite a few theses with this right off the bat. Basically max out the lab for the grant duration.

  I don't know what their salaries would be exactly. This is probably most dependent on where they land, as salaries are very often standardized in Europe. There's usually salary grids per institution dependent on seniority with some milestones being merit-based. Quick google search indicates gross salaries for Professor level (mid/late career) researchers to be around 110-165k€ in NL.

  That seems pretty sweet. It's comparable to what US professors make in the hard sciences, as far as I know, with lower CoL than most areas where professors make similar salaries.

  And again, salary isn't everything to a researcher. If they can't hire, they're pretty strapped. At this career stage, they're managers, not so much individual contributors. I'd say a maxed out lab for 5 years off the bat is pretty enticing, which also gives time to get up to speed on European funding schemes like ERC grants.

  I was a postdoc in the US during Trump's reelection and there were several months where my institution and others had completely cut off scientific staff (such as postdocs, research scientists and engineers) recruitment due to NSF defunding and other threats. Even now, they got taxed on endowment and lost basically 10% budget. This is considerable, and a source of stress for researchers and their current/prospective staff. You can't work properly if you're under the Damocles sword of being laid off / having to lay off your staff.

  by MITSardine
• Assume you are correct, and the Dutch offer a terrible proposition. Yet still they come.
  by 28304283409234
• Academic pay is standardised in many EU countries. For example in the UK you can look up union rates of pay. At UCL (I'm still currently affiliated as I finish my PhD) the pay for a professor starts at £82,157 and goes up to a minimum of £139,882 for the top band. There is an additional £4,678 on top as a London allowance. This roughly lines up with your figure per year, so seems reasonable as an allocation of cost.

  Also there are usually very very generous pension schemes here, so total pay is actually quite a lot higher than stated. In addition there is very generous holiday allowance, 41 days at UCL for instance, since you get extra holidays when the university is closed over certain holiday days.

  by zipy124
• This assumes the 1 million is all they get or can use to pay them with. The 1 million is a subsidy, not their salary.

  Besides, 90K after taxes is upper middle class. 160K / year is 13K / month which is nearly twice the average income of the richest country in Europe (Switzerland) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...), or top 0.1% according to https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i.

  And that's just salary based on that number, it doesn't include other income sources.

  by Cthulhu_
• Will they be exempt from providing ID to post on the internet or nah?
  by drstewart
• I can post on the Internet whatever I want without providing any ID whatsover.
  by michalpleban
• They are going to live in Netherlands where? In what housing?

  Maybe Europe will engage the top American intellectual power into ejecting the real estate prices into orbit.

  by lifestyleguru
• Who are those "top" researchers? and how many?
  by blastonico
• Wishful thinking
  by loorke
• Hopefully it isn't lithography researchers.
  by cactusplant7374
• Why hopefully?
  by JSR_FDED
• This title is very misrepresentative of the actual article.

  This is an article about initiatives to attract scientists to the Netherlands, not about some supposed ongoing brain drain.

  by mbmbn
• How did you find this out? Not sure if its true!
  by Z4cki
• Another news article in English: https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/07/top-us-scientists-come-to-n...
  by HelloUsername
• The last paragraph has some important context:

  "De Jonge Akademie, an association of young scientists, warned last year that the fund could end up recruiting academic stars who are not under threat, at a time when Dutch universities were cutting jobs because of government cutbacks. The new cabinet reversed those cuts last month, pledging up to €428 million a year extra for research."

  by derbOac