More than eighty Nobel Prize laureates published an open letter on Thursday declaring that the scientific policies of Vice President Kamala Harris are “vastly superior” to the ones proposed by her opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Representing scientists from fields including chemistry, economics, medicine and physics, the 82 scholars said Trump’s opposition to federal funding for the sciences, independent universities, immigration rights and international collaboration “would undermine future U.S. leadership” on issues like expanding life expectancy and improving living standards. "Harris also recognizes the key role that immigrants have always played in the advancement of science," they added.
The laureates negatively contrasted Trump’s stances with those taken by Harris, concluding that “this is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States. We, the undersigned, strongly support Harris.”
This is not the first time a collective of experts praised Harris’ scientific policies as superior to Trump’s. Speaking with Salon earlier this month Mark Peterson, a Yale University historian, bluntly stated that American founding father Thomas Jefferson “would have been repulsed by Project 2025's rejection of scientific knowledge."
Among the 82 scholars there were 23 economists, representing more than half of the living US recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics. In a separate open letter, the collective economists criticized Trump’s proposal for higher tariffs and tax cuts to benefit corporations and wealthy individuals. These policies, they argued, "will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality." They contrasted this with Harris’ policies, which have focused on strengthening the middle class by encouraging entrepreneurship.
Similarly Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills told Salon earlier this month that Harris' economic policies were similar to those of President George Washington, saying that like Harris he had to try to make "this a national economy." Similarly Dean Caivano, an assistant professor of political theory at Lehigh University and author of "A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy," told Salon that "Vice President Harris follows this tradition, advocating for federal government intervention in economic matters to maximize positive social outcomes."
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