http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013 ... uk-economy

Haven't read all that myself yet, but see what you make of it...

As someone directly involved in it, it makes me tear my bloody hair out, believe me. We did it with the jet engine and we're going to do it again with Graphene. Technical and engineering genius wasted by incompetent politicians and 'wealth generators' who can only generate wealth by making everyone else poor.

It is not helped when the city has too short an attention span to allow companies to actually take long term risks. The government are exactly the same. In fact it is so much easier for them to rely on a bank leveraged credit bubble to get the economy moving than actually do things that will build the country's ability to earn its way in the world.

We have 5 of the top 20 research universities on the planet, which for a country of our size and population is massively over-achieving. We should be chucking money at them to give us a rolling start against bigger, more powerful economies. But instead we'd rather sink all our national wealth (and then some) into financial service businesses that could be off-shored at virtually a moment's notice, shift the majority of their profits into tax havens and have a record of periodically trashing the economy into the bargain.

[LIFTED] Einsteins, all of them.

Jon

Neither of those letters make substantive points. Yes, we're building a £60m research centre (about 100 yards from my office in fact) but one Korean company (not the whole nation, just one company) is putting £600m into grapheme research, let alone what the Chinese are spending. We're spending chicken feed on science at the global scale while pitching trillions at the finance sector, who take most of it abroad and have a periodic habit of crashing the entire economy, something growth based on scientific innovation has pretty much never done.

The second letter seems to be based entirely on speculation that the government will do things they've shown absolutely no sign of doing at any point so far. So I'm afraid I'm going to dismiss that entirely.

Make no mistake we are being left behind in this kind of materials research. The fact we're in the race at all is down to a handful of extremely capable individual scientists who are doing unrivalled work on shoestring budgets, while other economies make science the point of the economic spear. What we - and by 'we' I mean 'they' - are doing is utterly wrong, utterly shortsighted and utterly self-serving. I'm kind of glad I don't have children, because everybody else's are going to pay the price of the incompetence of our 'leaders', both in business and government.

The article is shapeless. It vaguely complains that we don't capitalise on advances, which is fine but hardly news, and then whinges a little about some other countries tat do, but do so in dissimilar ways. There's a world of difference between how the Americans, South Koreans and Chinese ended up with economies that soak up all those graphene patents. Which model is it that you actually wish to emulate?

If none of the above, does anybody have a plan that extends beyond pointing at the City of London and saying that's something they don't like?