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?

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.

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.

Revenue from services rendered / Ingresos por prestación de servicios 8.293.375,25 €

The rest is public funding.

An you can make up to 200% a year trading stocks! “Up to” is doing a lot of work there.

> In _general_, science is a good investment.

Citation needed. Most calculations of ROI that I’ve seen show that publicly funded science has lousy returns. They need to fuzz the numbers a lot just to make it sellable to the public.

> I don't agree that there have been poor investments in Spain. Do you have numbers or reports about that?

I’ve even worked for them, the UPC, just besides the BSC, has had historically wasted buttloads of public money.

I know of a department that blows > 1M€ of public funding every year in a project that was old news when it started, 15 years ago. It’s still ongoing. They’re not outliers by any stretch.

> 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

The number one issue is that most projects being chased are terribly obsolete. Spanish science is not underfunded, it’s just very poorly managed. I’ve personally seen managers wasting 20k€ in buying useless parts, because they could not be bothered to do the numbers first (5 minutes of back of the envelope calculations would have sufficed).

Let’s not forget that Spain has a whole ecosystem of semi-public companies (like Eurecat) whose business model is to find partners to justify getting grants. The most honest people there will tell you straight (this is an actual conversation I’ve had) : “this project isn’t going anywhere, but your company will make an easy 50k€, we’ll help you with the paperwork, and you’ll get something nice to post on Linkedin”.

> The LHC and space exploration have had huge indirect returns from the technology designed around it.

That’s the most absurd cop out people always use. “If we spend 100MM€ building this thing that barely has any uses, maybe, we might find some stuff around the way”. We are living in the era of Luck-based development, You point to a random goal and hope to make returns by stumbling into something along the way.

Even if we took all tech “developed” at CERN as a return, I’d not value it even closely to the money spent there.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask other people who have worked there, the amount of wasted money is ludicrous. Just as an example, my team designed a custom ASIC for the LHCb. There were literally 4 identical ASICS being designed in different teams.

And let’s not get on the promises made to sell these projects. Just check the writings and videos of Sabine Hossenfelder, and you’ll start to get a grasp of the grift, and IMO, she is too diplomatic about it.