I'll Not Do It My Way -- Targets, Schmaret's -- Who Needs 'em. (August 13, 2004)

    The Group of Eight in its August 11 Newsletter published this item of Prime Ministerial logic issued by Australia's John Howard:

The UK government’s adoption of a Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) target contrasts starkly with the approach of the Australian Government. On 6 May, when questioned on the issue of policy targets the Prime Minister replied, "we don’t go into target figures, we prefer to decide what provision we’re making. We don’t set ourselves targets in any of these areas, including of course unemployment. Sometimes therefore you end up getting closer to targets other people would like you to set than you imagined."

With reasoning of that calibre who needs science?

Oh yes, the UK

 According to Professor Robert May, President of the Royal Society, the term "science base" describes all research and postgraduate training undertaken in universities, government-funded laboratories, and private non-profit organizations (charities or foundations) funded both from public and non-public sources. For more information on the science base and difficulties in its estimation [it is not a conventional OECD statistic, and the usual R&D spending by institutions of Higher Education (HERD) is not always a good measure of it], see reference (9) in R. M. May, Science 281, 48 (1998)