Where are the billionaires to fill the gap? Carnegie and Rockefeller left a legacy that transcended their businesses.

The American economy has absolutely roared ahead of the rest for the world in its pandemic recovery. We even have an opportunity to put an aging and newly doubtful Chinese economy in the rear view mirror for a century. What a thing to squander.

Where are the new Rockefellers? The Carnegies? At least in the Gilded Age, we got nice public libraries and research centers. All our robber barons do is shit post and sell memecoins.

Western governments are now out of the funding science game. Which is going to be rough, because it's hard to compete against the CCP when you are trying to maintain competitiveness in basic science using handouts from mercurial billionaires.

However, reading the tea leaves in recent announcements at DoD and wholescale gutting of NIST and NSF, it looks like any foundational or curiosity driven investigations will have to look to private

Experimental device and condensed matter has been able to hang on due to (sometimes nebulous) links to applications.

Tbf we have been headed that way for the past decade. Astronomy and Astrophysics largely depend on large private foundations (Keck, Perimeter, Simon's, etc).

NSF hasn't funded anything on a ten year span since it's founding....we are being tipped back into requiring a rich private patron to do any curiosity driven science.