This is what participants in the Rehovot Conference on Science and Technology said * Finance Minister Netanyahu promised to return the scientist's budget to its level before the cuts in a year and a half, but only if the growth he predicts is achieved
"During the next year and a half we will return the R&D budgets to their level before the cuts, maybe distribute them a little differently." This is what Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu promised in his speech at the Rehovot Conference for Science and Technology organized by the Ministry of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Weizmann Institute, but the condition for this was the success of the other economic reforms.
Netanyahu also said that the most prominent proof that technology is a more important factor than resources is that in the last twenty years, Bill Gates has been the richest man in the world and he has overtaken the Sultan of Brunei, who sits on a huge oil reservoir, but technological power is not enough to make a country rich. It is a fact that countries like Ireland, Spain, Singapore and even Cyprus, which do not have an equivalent to the Weizmann Institute, have overtaken Israel in terms of GDP per capita. This is the proof that a free economy is also needed.
Another senior official who lectured at the conference was the governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fisher, who spoke in fluent Hebrew and almost without errors about the contribution of technology to the economic growth of countries since the early XNUMXs. "Despite the costs and declines in growth in the economic cycles - we are now at the end of a recession and at the beginning of growth, the average growth rate of the world economy has accelerated over time. This implies that the growth rate of the level of technology used in the world's economies has increased over time. Another finding: education plays an important role in explaining the differences in income per worker and growth rates between countries over time. Another important result brought by Fisher: the return to the company from investment in research and development is much higher than the return to the investor.
Today's generation is no longer learning
The CEO of the Economic Models Company, Dr. Jacob Sheinin says that in order to go from 22nd place in the world in the relative size of the economy to 15th place, how many graduates of exact sciences will we need to grow by 11% per year. In 2025, a rate of 17.5 thousand university graduates in the relevant fields is required every year, compared to nine thousand today. In the short term we have enough people aged 30-50 to provide all the technological innovations. The next generation is no longer learning.
Prof. Baruch (Buki) Raz, a consultant in the field of technology and biotechnology, was a partner in the development of the Rehovot index together with Dr. Doron Gal. "We eat and do not plant. Enjoying and not investing." Prof. Raz also warned that Israel's economy is based too much on the ICT sector. "For about two decades talented young people in the field of science and mathematics could find a profitable use of their talents if they were engaged in the field of computing. Much less so in the fields of physics and chemistry. A situation has now been created in which there is a clear attribution of young scientists to the promising field - ICT, both in terms of the absolute numbers and in terms of the age distribution. In the area of age distribution, there is a situation where 74% of all physicists and chemists in Israel are over 51. Not only that in less than 15 years the vast majority of those engaged in these professions will retire, but about three quarters of them are already today beyond the age accepted as the age of maximum creativity.
Don't focus only on computing
Prof. Raz calls for more funds to be directed to the areas where future economic growth lies: "Superconductivity at high temperatures (transferring information at a speed 1,000 times faster than is currently accepted and transmitting electricity over huge distances without loss). Nanotechnology (huge display screens, applications of dedicated drugs, sophisticated catalysis, micro-computing) or energies from non-hydrocarbon sources all depend on the existence of a strong and efficient sector in the physical and chemical sciences. In the current state of affairs, a powerful and well-planned action must come from the government. This activity must ensure an appropriate size for the fields of physics and chemistry in Israel both in terms of the number of scientists but also in terms of the quality of those enrolled in studies in these fields, as well as the research budgets."
