"Berlin’s legislature took a radical step to address the precarious employment situation that plagues many early-career researchers. It passed a law requiring universities to offer new postdoc hires a pathway to a permanent position"
It is true that the law recently approved by the City-State of Berlin, see link above, is not perfect and will bring challenges in terms of budget compliance, but it is advisable to look at those challenges in a different way, in a less fossilized way. And that way requires us to ask ourselves what areas of activity it is necessary to stimulate in a knowledge economy and even more in a context of a climate apocalypse, which led the Executive Vice President of the European Union, Frans Timmermans, to recently express concern about his grandson, born in 2020, that may have to fight with other human beings for water and food in a not-too-distant future
In what concerns who´s gone pay the aforementioned controversial but virtuous rain of post-doc positions let´s not forget that every year, Europe loses tens of billions of euros in tax evasion (and that is why the relentless German obsession with chasing big tax evaders even acting within the limits of legality and buying lists with information that was stolen from banks is in my view absolutely understandable) which means that only 10% of this amount would allow for the permanent hiring of almost 300,000 permanent post-doc positions in Europe.
This extraordinary research funding exercise is also crucial for Europe's economic recovery and the person who said it was not anyone passionate about science, but the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde in a statement produced at the World Economic Forum.
PS - And I don't even need to waste any time mentioning the obvious, that today's society needs substantial measures to tackle the growing cult of ignorance that I commented on November 1st https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/attenborough-versus-ronaldo-or.html
