I'm not trying to argue there is a single cause, either (sorry if my either-or phrasing implied that). I think attributing any general feature of an academic discipline to a single cause would be missing a dozen other contributing factors.
Of course three letter agencies are watching this carefully, and I'd believe they were weighing in somehow, as they have in cryptography in the past. My point was that we shouldn't ignore the overall sparsity of funding in pure math and science projects. A lot of (probably most) contributors to bleeding-edge research have a number of other jobs in their position.
I'm not trying to argue there is a single cause, either (sorry if my either-or phrasing implied that). I think attributing any general feature of an academic discipline to a single cause would be missing a dozen other contributing factors.
Of course three letter agencies are watching this carefully, and I'd believe they were weighing in somehow, as they have in cryptography in the past. My point was that we shouldn't ignore the overall sparsity of funding in pure math and science projects. A lot of (probably most) contributors to bleeding-edge research have a number of other jobs in their position.