(no title)
mofeing | 2 years ago
Why are you harsh? Science is a good investment and BSC has proven to be a research center where a lot of quality research is done.
Anyway, there are many plans to continue growing beyond the NextGeneration EU funds, which usually the steering committee explains on the yearly anual meeting. Keep in mind that "growing" does not always mean to grow the amount of people in a research group, but to try to create new research groups to keep it stable.
rewmie|2 years ago
Like any high-risk investment, science is a good investment because sometimes one out of N researchers is able to have meaningful output, while the remaining N-1 barely manage to justify their existence. This might be a easy risk to take for those who take in funding, but it is also has negative tradeoffs for society in general and researchers in particular.
Think for a minute about research candidates and their careers. They are admitted as researchers fresh out of college, they spend years doing hard intellectual work on subjects with little to no relationship with industry in an environment which arguably makes you even less suited to work in industry, their livelihood in the short term becomes dependent on their institution's ability to attract funding and in the long term depends on some research institutions opening tenured positions.
Look at BSC. Do you think there will be 500 tenured positions being opened in the next decade for these researchers alone? And these are the guys already in the pipeline. 300 tenure positions per year is unthinkable. More will enter it next year, and the next year, and the next year, etc. What's your plan for these people? How do you expect them to enter the job market?
Academia is a meat grinder that's fed by graduates and spits them out, most of the time with nothing of value in terms of relevant skilsets and professional experience, and dumped onto the job market already with an age band that's incompatible with entry-level positions.
In the meantime, the money spent on these research positions could be used elsewhere. A low/mid density residential building costs around 1 million to build, and houses a dozen families or so for life. God knows Barcelona is experiencing a major housing crisis. Is this a good tradeoff?
How do you classify this as a good investment?
xondono|2 years ago
Pretty much all BSC activities are EU funded.
> Why are you harsh?
Where is the harshness? Asking “What’s the plan when the gravy train stops?” Is a perfectly valid question.
> Science is a good investment
Some science has been a good investment. Most (especially public funded, particularly in Spain) has been a very poor investment. As an obvious example, the new accelerator CERN is pushing for will have an atrocious ROI, just like most money spent on space exploration.
We should not be taxing blue collar workers so that middle class “scientists” can call dibs on historic milestones.
mofeing|2 years ago
Depending on the department, about half of the private investment can be up to 50%.
> Where is the harshness? Asking “What’s the plan when the gravy train stops?” Is a perfectly valid question.
I'm pointing to the other comments. I also try to answer question in the last paragraph.
> Some science has been a good investment. Most (especially public funded, particularly in Spain) has been a very poor investment.
In _general_, science is a good investment. I don't agree that there have been poor investments in Spain. Do you have numbers or reports about that?
Most cases I know are that in Spain the Big Crisis cut investment and getting stable long-term fundship is almost imposible, which makes scientists' situation very unstable. And you need long-term investments in science to make returns.
> As an obvious example, the new accelerator CERN is pushing for will have an atrocious ROI, just like most money spent on space exploration.
It's not obvious to me. The LHC and space exploration have had huge indirect returns from the technology designed around it.