The other day Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, resurrected the old bromide of the aerodynamic impossibility of bumblebee flight, comparing it to the €. "The euro is like a bumblebee. It's a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but it does. So the euro was a bumblebee that flew very well for several years." And he went on to state now it must be engineered "to graduate to a real bee".

Of course in the case of the bumblebee as legend has it, it was the miscalculation by the aerodynamic engineer doing a calculation

 on the back of a napkin at dinner that got it wrong when he assumed that bumblebees should be equated to fixed winged aircraft. And while the wide-bodied bumblebee is not considered to be a high performance flier of the insect world, it lumbers quite satisfactorily on wings oscillating  at some 200 beats per second by twanging its muscles.

In the case of the euro it was the belief by the 17 members of the Eurozone that it would be economically viable through lean times as well as times of plenty to allow their economies to be inflexibly yoked to a common currency even though their nations were not joined by federated governance.

In the view of the Nobel Laureate economist, Paul Krugman: "What could turn this dangerous situation around? The answer is fairly clear: policy makers would have to (a) do something to bring southern Europe’s borrowing costs down and (b) give Europe’s debtors the same kind of opportunity to export their way out of trouble that Germany received during the good years — that is, create a boom in Germany that mirrors the boom in southern Europe between 1999 and 2007. (And yes, that would mean a temporary rise in German inflation.) The trouble is that Europe’s policy makers seem reluctant to do (a) and completely unwilling to do (b)." And the nation being the most demanding of austerity is Germany.

What has this got to do with fostering Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)?

Beginning in the mid-2000s the federal government of Germany together with the German states set up the German Universities Excellence Initiative which up to now has been responsible for creating some 17,000 jobs in science with particular emphasis on the creation of a postdoctoral "society" where virtually none had previously existed.

BUT currently the Excellence Initiative is to terminate in 2017, and there is considerable angst engendered by the current economic environment as to the perpetuation of the structure that has been created. And all the while the United States is agonising, particularly in the biomedical fields, about the overabundance of postdoctoral fellows in academia with the ever decreasing likelihood of the cohort finding at least quasi permanent employment.

And is it probable that the continuing pressure for austerity will have a drastic affect on employment in research, both in academia and industry, which is the equivalent of eating the seed corn?

Meanwhile, Australian parliamentarians do contortions in making promises to balance the federal budget within the next financial year whereas the nation could become an academic powerhouse within a decade and begin to reap the rewards culturally as well as materially, had it an eye to the main chance and work as hard to entice promising researchers within and outside academia as is done to snare full-fee-paying overseas undergraduates.

Would it be sufficient to improve the commonweal?  No, but it is a necessity.

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web