Science and economic development

DRAFT - WORK IN PROGRES …

_Why do we have to pay a scientist when we make the best shoes in the world? Silvio Berlusconi,

Our wealth and our well-being come from scientific research and the technological development, in their complex interaction with political institutions, legal, cultural and financial.

Wealth and prosperity, however, do not come from the world of work and business, who instead exploit the accumulated scientific and technological knowledge from society and humanity in general, and parasitize the resources of the environment, of nature, the commons, they spin money from finance and state institutions without creating it, redistributing it often unfairly, according to the power of the social bloc of affiliation, and the distortions of markets, which determine the price of everything but the value of nothing. Studying, reading, traveling, thinking are the things that give a man dignity, and make him a good citizen of the world, not hard work or the accumulation of money. A great philosopher, Bertrand Russell, taught us that “the work ethic is the ethics of slaves in a modern world that does not need slaves.” (“In Praise of Idleness.”) I would like to see the first article of the Constitution was reworded as, “Italy is a republic based on scientific research and technological progress.”

1. Vannevar Bush - Manifesto for the rebirth of a nation. Science, the endless frontier
2. David Wootton - The spark of creation
3. Joel Mokyr - The Leverage of Wealth
4. Mariana Mazzucato - Lo Stato Innovatore
5. Marco Pivato - The miracle snatched away. The four wasted opportunities of Italian science in the 1960s