Alexandre Trilla, PhD - Research Engineer |

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Ridiculous Spanish Government anti-crisis measures threaten R&D budgets

30-Sep-2009

A few days ago this opinion column appeared in a Spanish newspaper. Its author, Dr. Rodriguez, criticizes the budget cut on R&D that the Spanish Government has proposed to fight the present crisis. Since the column is written in Spanish, I am just going to translate it in this post, please excuse my skewed Spanish constructions.

"R&Desolation
I am a professor with more than 20 years of research experience and at least with a decent career with international publications (over 60), projects and Ph.D. Theses advisories. For a long while I believed that this country would be advancing in the scientific aspect, but the figures are stubborn and I have to lend myself to the evidence. The latest absurd proposal of the Government has been a 37% R&D budget cut. But worst of all is that this proposal has barely had any consequence in our society. The so renown social agents (political parties, syndicates, employers, associations) have shown an absolute indifference about the affair, which means that this society considers R&D totally accessory and useless. In summary: we are sentenced to be a country with high unemployment rates, low qualified jobs and derisory salaries and which principal economic activity will be taking care of holidaymakers and retired people from all over Europe. One last note, dedicated to the youth that wish to follow a research career: finish your theses and get out of this country!

J. ENRIC RODRIGUEZ GIL
Artes"

Earlier in this blog (see Post 6) Dr. Goldberg already attributed the present scientific wealth of the U.S. to the big budgets that the U.S. Government invested in the universities for research purposes after WW2. Definitely not the way things look here in Spain.