We discuss the role of basic research in economic development, and how it is intertwined with technological innovation. While fundamental research investigates issues that common sense believes to be distant from any possible practical application, throughout history it has repeatedly ushered in revolutionary breakthroughs that we use in our everyday lives and which have been triggers of economic development. The crucial factor for this development is diversification in both innovation technologies and scientific disciplines: greater diversity in science increases the likelihood of discovery and innovation, just as greater genetic diversity preserves the variety of different types of life. This is why scientific excellence should be interpreted as a natural side effect of a complex, heterogeneous, diversified, and therefore healthy research system. Scientific research must therefore be guided and supported by State intervention, as it is lies at the heart of the forces driving economic development. Unfortunately, it appears that they still prevail even in this day and age, casting dire shadows on Europe’s future.

The debate on the sustainability of the European single currency seems to have focused exclusively on the requirement that EU member states comply with the macro-economic financial parameters established by the dictates of austerity policies. The absence of a collective reflection on how to boost structural economic development is astonishing at a time in which many European countries—particularly around the Mediterranean—are dismantling the physical and human infrastructure of basic research and academia. On the other hand, it reflects the belief, grounded in neoclassical economic theory, whereby markets should govern economic development.#ScienceEconomicCrisis 

Chapter 3 of Science and the Economic Crisis 

Neo-liberal policies have the same general effect in the universities as they do in society as a whole. In society, their tendency has been to form large inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth. Similarly, in the case of higher education and scientific research, more and more funding is going to a few privileged universities and their researchers at the expense of the others. This is justified on the grounds that these universities and researchers are better than the others, so that it more efficient to concentrate funding on them. To find out how to distribute funding regular research assessments are conducted. But how accurate are these research assessments in picking out the researchers who are better from those who are not so good? It is argued that research evaluation as well as the pressure to reward the top-excellence is enhancing conformism and thus it is stifling the diversification of research, the essential element to develop innovations and new technologies. Is competition increasing researchers productivity and differentiation of research projects? How to test that a method of organization and evaluation of science is more efficient than another? Historical examples of discoveries in physics and mathematics in the past thirty years, as the super-high-temperature conductivity, the scanning tunneling microscope, graphene, and others, allow us to clarify how scientific research proceeds and how the findings of basic research are transformed into technological innovations. #ScienceEconomicCrisis

Chapter 2 of Science and the Economic Crisis 

Why most economists did not foresee the economic crisis? Do liberalized and deregulated markets tend to equilibrium? What is markets equilibrium? After having reviewed the discussion about the value of predictions in economics we focus on the neoclassical theory. This describes the economic system as a mechanical one that spontaneously finds an equilibrium state. The underlying concepts are those of the nineteenth century physics: the balance between opposing forces and the thermodynamical equilibrium. These ideas are reconsidered through the perspective of modern physics, in which the systems composed of many parts interacting with each other hardly finds a situation of simple stable equilibrium. Rather they develop surprising collective, complex and emerging global behaviours that are not simply deduced from the knowledge of the microscopic dynamics.   However, since the outbreak of the crisis the leading economic ideas have not changed and continue to be inspired by the same economic theory that has spectacularly failed in its prediction of the crisis and that has created the conditions for its systemic occurrence. The origin of this resistance to a change is played by research assessment: only economists considered “excellent” in the academy play a public and political role. However, is it really that easy to determine who is excellent in a field that avoids the confrontation with reality?  #ScienceEconomicCrisis