The gloomy science as gloom for science

In last month’s Buenos Aires City midterms, Peronist candidate Leandro Santoro took issue with both the local and national administrations, while making a distinction between them as being respectively “negligent” and “cruel.” Yet both tags could be applied to the Javier Milei administration – pet targets for the cruelty accusations can be found at both extremes of age, ranging from the confrontation with the Garrahan Children’s Hospital to the level of minimum pensions. But this editorial would prefer to focus on the negligence of sacrificing key areas to the “chainsaw” and fiscal surplus such as public works and science. The former does not lack strong advocates in the form of provincial governors and farm lobbies pinpointing bad roads as major bottlenecks for agricultural production so the focus here will be on science.

Argentina’s brain drain can only be accelerated when the budget for science and technology has been halved to 0.15 percent of Gross Domestic Product from 0.3 percent of GDP only two years ago, while the salaries of CONICET scientific researchers have been slashed by over a third in real terms since then with the salaries of 80 percent of university science lecturers below the poverty line, thus forcing young scientists to emigrate or seek another career.

All this does not mean that everything was perfect under previous administrations or that a CONICET scientific research council founded in mid-century (1958) could not do with some updating for the 21st century, not to mention cleansing those imperfections of previous administrations, or even that the entire model might not be entirely obsolete. Yet while superior alternatives might exist, there is little sign of the La Libertad Avanza administration taking any interest in moving them into the vacuum they are creating nor is there anybody on the horizon with the stature of CONICET creator Bernardo Houssay or Lino Barañao (the ministerial supremo of science and technology for 12 years and in two administrations) to offer new scientific visions.

The establishment of CONICET suited its technocratic times and the creation of the Science & Technology Ministry in the first week of the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner presidency (described by more than one foreign ambassador as the only good thing she ever did) was just recognition of the central importance of research and development for progress. Yet just as Kirchnerism corrupted that other key area now being neglected by the Milei administration, public works, it also gradually darkened the scientific beacon it had planted. There was too much of “jobs for the boys” (and girls of La Cámpora) while the term “social sciences” was abused to justify projects of zero value for hard science and technology, eventually accounting for around 30 percent of all research – critics of CONICET are fond of singling out in often scatological terms a couple of examples exploring an outlandish sexology, even if they often proceed to advocate throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In a world of “publish or perish,” productivity has fallen almost 20 percent in the last decade.

President Milei is a fervent admirer of the United States in general and he has every reason to extend this admiration to US science because nothing succeeds like success – US labs and universities are hubs sucking in global talent, the envy of the planet. Two keys to US success are massive investment in science and technology on the part of the private sector and contracts of two or three years (as against the lifelong tenures of CONICET) whose continuation depends on results. Yet Argentina’s private sector shows no comparable interest in investing in either research or universities (excessively dependent on the public purse) while the public sector is making no visible effort to steer science in any new direction nor has it installed any team for the transition. Nor should the problems of transition be underestimated – if starvation wages are expected to bridge the vacuum between the research structures of the 20th and 21st centuries, there will not be any scientists left for a brave new world.

Instead of working towards a new model, the Milei administration shows signs of deepening its contempt for universities and research. In the first year of his presidency, the focus was almost entirely fiscal but “cultural wars” seem to be leading libertarians into a qualitative dismissal of admittedly overpopulated universities as a dead end – a critique which could be positive if steering more students into choosing science and technology but there is always the temptation of seeing mass ignorance as the shortest cut to power.