My colleague sent me Manu Fernández the other day a chart where it was criticized that the money that built the Internet, the American public money for R&D, is declining. The United States, in fact, sees how its position of technological leadership is being increasingly threatened by the Asian giant par excellence, which is following strongly in R&D spending.
The author, Nicholas Carlson, uses an extraordinarily revealing phrase:private money built Facebook and Garmin; but public money created the Internet and GPS.
I have a business friend who measures the value of all jobs in euros: how many euros do you generate? This is intended to make fun of other of my friends who work in the investigation. The previous sentence makes me think about how undervalued the research career is sometimes. Perhaps some executive asked him one day, back in the 70s, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, that how much money he generated mocking… “Internet? And what is that worth?”, the executive may have blurted out.