Any reader of this blog will realize that I advocate strongly for science to be applied to the reduction of poverty and more generally to development, especially in poor nations. Science is key to understanding their natural resources and their management, to improving agricultural productivity, to the understanding and combating the diseases of poverty, and (the social sciences) to managing their economic, political and social institutions.
Not only do poor nations have less money to spend on science than do rich countries, they tend to spend a smaller portion of their GDPs on science than do more affluent countries. On the other hands, the scientifically powerful countries of the North don't devote much of their scientific effort to the problems of poor people in poor nations. As a result, there is a major need to develop the scientific capacity of poor nations, in order that they can tackle the problems that are of their own national priority and that are also inadequately supported by the global scientific enterprise. Indeed, science should not be considered only for its instrumental value for the solution of immediate problems, but for the more fundamental value a scientific establishment has for the knowledge systems of the society.
I suggest that the economic crisis will have serious negative impact on the development of the science needed in and for poor nations.
- politicians in most countries find expenditures on science easy targets in times of financial retrenchment. Investments in science are long term, and pay off only slowly, the scientific community has itself little political power, and popular support for science is weak. So poor countries themselves will probably cut funding for science.
- politicians in the North are likely to target international scientific expenditures, foreign aid, and research on problems of less direct impact to their home countries especially as they cut overall support for science.
- Corporations will also probably cut funding for research and development as a short term response to worsening business conditions, and will be especially likely to cut funding for R&D for applications targeted for developing nations, since the market demand for such applications will be seen to be diminishing.
- Funding for foreign travel, graduate education of developing country scientists in the North, for foreign journals, etc. will probably all go down.
2 comments:
Good posts on the global economic crisis. I wonder what it is going to look like. I have images of the Great Depression. People in soup lines. It will surely be worse in the developing countries. I fear lots of people going hungry. Hard times in the past have led to the rise of autocrats. We need a Marshall Plan for the world...
Thanks for the comment.
I agree that we need to respond very forcefully to the current economic conditions.
The Great Depression was terrible in the United States, but it was also terrible in many developing countries.
Today there are still countries, the Congo for example, where they still hope that things will get as good as they were in the United States during the Great Depression.
I hope that in our fear for threatened domestic poverty we don't abandon our concern for the (even worse) actual poverty abroad,
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