Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of years, you know that Spain, along with many other countries, is going through the worst economic crisis in recent memory. While we haven’t quite reached the level of Greece just yet (“Spain is not Greece” is a popular meme), wave after wave of austerity measures have been taken, with no clear end in sight.
In June, the newly-elected Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation, Carmen Vela, wrote an article for Nature, in which she called for a nearly 25% reduction in the budget for R&D, claiming that Spain had “too many researchers.”
I’ll repeat that, in case you think you read it wrong: the Secretary of State for R&D is asking for less money to be allocated for R&D.
Among her arguments were statements like, “Currently, there is a biotechnology research centre or a science park in almost every Spanish region.” [Almost 17 research centres for a country of 47 million people, talk about excess!] And in a master stroke of irony, she closes with a quote from Albert Einstein (“one of the few scientists whom people in Spain were able to name in a survey last month”). Oh, well it’s a good idea to slash the science budget, then.
The total amount of cuts to the R&D budget? €475 million (US$591 million).
This morning’s big news, on the other hand, was that the Catalan government is announcing a plan to build six (yes, six) new theme parks on the land adjacent to an existing theme park. The project is called Barcelona World, despite the fact that it’s in Tarragona, approximately an hour and a half drive south of Barcelona. (For the sake of comparison, this would be like dedicating a memorial to the World Trade Center in New York, but building it in Philadelphia.) The concept is for each park to represent a different part of the world (Europe, the U.S., China, Brazil, Russia and India), in order to attract visitors from those countries. In other words, “hey Russian tourists, why not come to Barcelona (or thereabouts) and experience…Russia?”
The total investment, between public and private funds? €4,732 million (US$6 billion)…enough to cover the cuts in R&D&I ten times over.
You don’t have to be a scientist (luckily) to look into the future a decade or two and see how this movie ends.