| The same people might also dunk on public projects funded by their own governments. But I think they may not be quite aware of: 1. How many present-day things we take for granted have been enabled by basic research, sometimes on weird or unimportant-sounding topics. 2. How basic research can't necessarily quite go only for "important" and big results and skip the "unimportant" results and topics, or know in advance which ones are going to be useful and which ones aren't. 3. How investments in fundamental research are, proportionally speaking, actually quite small. The 100 billion euros for Horizon Europe sounds like a lot, but that spans over seven years (2021 to 2027), and if it's funding a crapton of all kinds of research, there are also almost certainly going to be lots of results that are going to be useful. And, granted, also lots of ones that won't be, at least not directly. But even the vast majority of the useful ones are going to fly under the radar for just about everyone outside of the particular field so it's easy to not be aware of them (see also points 1 and 2). The EU has a population of ~450 million. The 100B euros over 7 years means the costs are ~225 euros per EU resident in total, or ~32 euros per year. I'm almost certainly paying more than the average EU resident, so let's say I'm paying 70 euros per year for the whole deal. I don't really have a huge problem with that. If it were for some kind of a small or narrow range of projects, I might. But it's not. |