As someone who worked in HPC Projects in the EU, I'd say the vast majority of the grants is wasted. E.g. on
- obscure software and programming paradigms/libraries
- one-off's
- projects that create only reports, papers and recommendations
- endless recreations of the same software over the years and decades
- plain dumb projects
- attempts at recreating other people's software (e.g. U.S.)
There is also a large amount of overlap in work/content between projects, and lots of time is appropriated for unrelated work e.g. employees working on their PhDs.
On the other hand the industry takes a lot more money and plays similar games.
Project partners do not take the right path, because it's not conducive to fulfilling a grant, getting the next grant or increasing your citation count. The incentives are wrong.
EU’s decreasing GDP share in the world shows that EU is wasting lots of money by trying to pick winners. Just having low tax for small tech companies like in Shanghai would incentivize people to work on new great ideas, but I don’t see it happening.
The EU spends less time picking winners than countries did back in the pre-EU days. If you take that evidence at face value, it suggests that the EU isn't trying to pick enough winners.
Technology is always pushed by states, not small companies. Small companies can figure out how to market and reduce costs, but have never successfully created new, advanced technology.
No, that's a great example of what I'm saying. The vaccine is payed for by states - they had a 100% guaranteed worldwide market. Whether they invested their own money (like BioNTech) or were explicitly financed by a state (like Moderna and Pfizer), the money for that research will ultimately be payed almost entirely by the state.
Guaranteed wealthy clients are equivalent to investors. They're actually better, because you don't have to pay them back.
One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free market, no one would have been crazy enough to invest in it.
Guaranteed wealthy clients and investors exist in free markets too. That doesn’t make them Tech creators, that merit is still reserved to the startup itself.
Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.
If you have guaranteed clients, you're not selling on a free market. This is one of the reasons why you can't have have (healthy) free markets in medicine in general.
And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
States are making monopolies with their militaries. I don't need a state to buy the vaccine, actually I signed up for a private vaccination, and I would pay significantly more than the states, but states are given priority because of their power.
That's irrelevant, because whoever you are, you have much less money than the US and the EU and the UK and [...].
Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine without specialized medical care, so even if people could buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which most people in most of the world get from the state anyway.
As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and processor push is very real now.