There Goes Another Failed Five-Year Plan

Remember kids: nothing in reality ever happens without a targeted government objective and planning.

Europe risks missing the train of scientific progress. The EU is advancing too slowly in the sciences to narrow the gap with leaders U.S. and Japan, while China rapidly makes up for its ancestral backwardness. The targets of the failed Lisbon process have been postponed for no less than a decade, from 2010 to 2020. Naturally, concern is growing that budget cuts will only put brakes on a research sector still heavily dependent on state investment.

So let’s try and understand the natural conclusion a reader of the paragraph above would come to. Is it that one should stamp your feet like a 6 year old and demand government funding and direction? Or would it be to find a way despite the government, to do research in the natural way in civil society, the way those who are succeeding at it are doing?

I guess the “future looking,” Cosmopolitan, wise thing to do is as the reflex of the average European would do. To wait for the handout instead of crowding out industry’s opportunity to do the innovating.