Private and public

Dear editors!

Our authorities are making a lot of efforts to force Russia to get off the raw materials furnace and move it onto the rails of innovative development and modernization. Beautiful speeches are made, innovative development strategies are written, outdated legislation is improved, and in general all sorts of fateful decisions are made. Why then are we so slow to move in the right direction?

This is the thought that has been haunting me in recent days. And, after thinking, I found the answer, my dear colleagues: the fact is that our people are lazy and immature, and therefore they hang like a stone on the feet of a brilliant administrative genius, even now ready to soar to the heights of innovation and modernization. Actually, you shouldn’t even hide behind the word “people”: it’s you and me, our laziness, inertia and lack of initiative - that’s where all the best intentions of our authorities get stuck. We have the right decision from above, but we turn our faces away from it, we try to be free and let everything go on the brakes. What do you and I, fellow scientists, need? So that they would give me more money and not interfere with my work - breeding fruit flies and writing equations. But whether the people need these equations, whether these flies will give an impetus to the innovative development of the country tomorrow - this does not bother us in the least.

This, colleagues, is the bitter but obvious truth. And it is visible not only to us, but also to those bright minds who are called upon to control us. Recently, the Chairman of the Committee on Economic Policy and Entrepreneurship of our Duma, Evgeniy Fedorov, spoke very well about this. He noticed long ago that investing in science is like pouring water into a leaky bucket, because most of what is poured into the Russian budget automatically goes to feed other countries.

Indeed, we write our articles, and then the Americans, Chinese and Koreans extract useful ideas from them and bring them to life. This situation, of course, is not acceptable for government officials, who must take care of the rational spending of every government ruble. And therefore Evgeniy Alekseevich continues to look for a way out of the intolerable situation.

More recently, he again emphasized: financing R&D in its current form is simply throwing money away, meaningless financial transactions from the point of view of a market economy. R&D purchases amount to about 250 billion rubles, but they are not produced to order, which is needed by industry and the market. Very, very correct idea! Why does the market need quasars and the hadron collider, why does it need fruit flies and black holes? This may be interesting to us, but not to Deripaska and Abramovich, not to the market and production.

This situation can and should be corrected; the main thing is to change the procedure for financing R&D, Deputy Fedorov believes: “In the future, all R&D should become capital investments. And in accordance with our strategic plan for the formation of a regulatory legal framework, we propose to extend the principles of control over the mechanism of public capital investments to public funding of R&D. From the point of view of the innovation economy, it does not matter whether you order the construction of a road, a school, or the development of technology. As a result, you should receive intellectual property. The problems of our R&D are precisely that intellectual property is not formed as a result of this activity. They gave you money, you wrote some papers, submitted reports - and everyone is happy.”

Yes, dear colleagues, this is how we live thoughtlessly: we received money, wrote something, and are happy with life, and an innovative electric kettle and a graphene condom are made in China. But the state, striving to embark on the path of modernization, cannot afford to act like this; it must be sure that if it has invested something somewhere, it will have been capital.

Therefore, colleagues, I urge you to think about the balance of private and public in our lives and make the right decision. Grants-shmants are all self-indulgence, an unforgivable waste of budget funds. Let's put our private and selfish interests aside and together we will thoroughly work on building an innovative economy. Then there will be no complaints that all the steam of the innovative steam locomotive goes to the whistle.

Yours Ivan Ekonomov