It keeps getting worse

France, evening

Italy is famous again in the scientific world. On the last issue of Nature, there is a wonderful editorial on how to save the economy of the country and the best solution seems to be to cut funding for research. We are already one of the European countries (as EU) that invests less in research, especially basic research (as my uncle would say, why bother? it doesn't improve the human quality of life at all...of course, he is wrong...). Now instead of giving less money to the politicians, to have less and better politicians in Government and maybe start from there, no we look for a quick and dirty solution. What is the most useless category of workers that we have in Italy? researchers (postdoc of course in primis). Ok, let's cut their funding to save some money.

Well done Italy! why can't we learn something useful from other countries??? A few months ago I got a job posted with more than 200 opened permanent positions in Spain. In this moment of general economic crisis, how can Spain manage to hire more than 200 researchers giving them a permanent job while only Italy manages to cut their funding?
I guess we will have to wait a long long time before to have another Nobel prize in Italy....

PS This is not a political post. Of course I am angry at the current proposal, but if the Italian economy is so bad is not the fault of the current government but of years and years of bad governments.