Frogs are good indicators of environmental damage.
June 10, 2017 11:56 AM   Subscribe

France's New president, Emmanuel Macron is inviting us to Make Our Planet Great Again. And he's doing it by offering to recruit Climate scientists, teachers, students, associations, and businesses to move to France, offering grants up to 1.5 million euros. This is in direct response to Donald Trump, and the website is also in English for ease of use.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit (20 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
You know that .gif of Chris Pratt making the middle finger gesture from Guardians of the Galaxy. France is Chris Pratt in this example.
posted by Fizz at 1:14 PM on June 10, 2017 [6 favorites]


Give us your scientists, your academics, your researchers yearning to study! We'll take that statue back too, you're not really using it, right?

There's an obvious typo in the post. Humble request for the mods to change a single letter out of respect for a head of state :)
posted by adept256 at 2:05 PM on June 10, 2017 [10 favorites]


This isn't exactly news.

The EU's been moving to build analogues of the American land grant universities (complete with funding and oversight from multiple levels of government, just like in the US) and take over as the world's main host for scientific research, ever since the US gave up on the supercollider and CERN picked up where we left off.

Now it's just happening more openly.

What's significant is that Macron issued this call in English.
posted by ocschwar at 2:58 PM on June 10, 2017 [18 favorites]


What's significant is that Macron issued this call in English.

This is the first time in my lifetime that I can remember another country making an open play for America's science talent (as compared to individual approaches, which has always happened). At the very least this is a symbolically important move and potentially the harbinger of more to come.

It's interesting because the wording on the front end of it is very broad, but when you dig through each section's details it sounds more like there is a very narrow set of people France is hoping to bring in -- basically, prominent and rising climate change researchers, tech entrepreneurs, and certain NGO/non-profit leaders. They are presenting an attractive picture, and if I met their criteria I would certainly be very tempted, but really this isn't aimed at all that many people.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:04 PM on June 10, 2017 [12 favorites]


If I had any skills they want, I would go.
posted by greermahoney at 4:04 PM on June 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


Kermit likes bacon
like frogs liked by Macon
and madams are piggy
like bosons are higgy
one conCERN they all agree

it aint easy being green

it still says Macon.
posted by adept256 at 5:37 PM on June 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


We've considered it for a while. I'm not someone likely to be directly affected by any specific policy they're working on and I'd like to stay and try and help, but my partner is, and her career is in environmental research and that is already a hard enough field to break into as it is, and it's only going to get worse in the next few years.

I think the main issue is the language barrier (and a shared desire to stay near our homes for our families) for France. She kind of knows it, I don't at all. But if Canada were to have a similar thing and she qualified, we live in northern minnesota and it's only a day's drive back. I don't actually know if I'll be in a position where staying in the US is a good idea for my broader life, and I'd never ever expected that. Never thought I'd leave here.
posted by neonrev at 5:44 PM on June 10, 2017


Excellent, I have been looking to get back to Europe. There has been a quiet and slow migration of scientists out of the US over the past 5-10 years in my field any many others. It boils down to health care and quality of life- cost of living is much lower abroad and living from contract to contract becomes and attractive option and not a death march to poverty in a land with health care. You can be comfortable middle to upper middle class as a mid career researcher in Europe and can educate your children to follow in your footsteps and still die in the same tax bracket. Plus the expectations in terms of work life split are far more reasonable.
posted by fshgrl at 5:55 PM on June 10, 2017 [14 favorites]


I hope this works for France, the scientists and the world. A neighbor and her husband, both immigrants from India, are scientists at a well-known lab here.

They both vented to me recently about how many scientists they know who are quitting research because they're underpaid, in so much college loan debt and frustrated by working conditions.
posted by etaoin at 11:36 PM on June 10, 2017


Schemes to attract NGOs to other countries have long existed, but its smart to make the process for doing that part of a broader programme. As well as the US, this underscores (for me anyway) how out of step the UK is starting to look. If I worked more directly on climate issues this would be very attractive indeed post brexit. You could be pretty fluent in French in a year, if you needed to be.
posted by wingless_angel at 1:02 AM on June 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Typo fixed.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:03 AM on June 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's part of the H2020 programme which is like nothing the US has at all. It's so easy to do an engineering type start up in Europe compared to the US and to keep it small and still be profitable. In the US It's Tesla or bust, which is not ideal as most people don't want to work that hard or build a business on that trajectory, the small business that you work at your whole life with a few well paid long term employees, then sell or pass on to the kids is gone in the US but healthy in Europe. Engineering is very healthy there. This is why a lot of cutting edge engineering is coming out of other countries now.

"Tech" start ups in the US are all software and all about VC. Meanwhile, in France they build new train services on time and under budget that make money. CA could learn a lot from France, Ireland and the other pro-small innovative business countries in the EU.
posted by fshgrl at 11:31 AM on June 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


"The EU's been moving to build analogues of the American land grant universities (complete with funding and oversight from multiple levels of government, just like in the US) and take over as the world's main host for scientific research, ever since the US gave up on the supercollider and CERN picked up where we left off."
Seriously this.

In my field somewhere around two thirds of the good fundamental work is now done in Europe where thirty years ago it would have been less than a tenth with America leading the way. Where I work in Flanders, investments in basic research a generation ago have paid off in a big way, creating a pharmaceutical and chemicals industry that now pays for all the nice things we have.

As a PhD student, and now post-doc, I get paid much more in Euro than I would be paid in dollars in the US for equivalent positions, while also getting some of the finest healthcare in the world for basically nothing out of pocket and a reasonable cost of living. In general I'm amazed that the coming cascade of American PhD students and researchers, whose degrees still mean something significant, moving to Europe for a better life hasn't started sooner.
posted by Blasdelb at 11:39 AM on June 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


Macron plans to pay for this by selling off national infrastructure:
The government of new French President Emmanuel Macron looks likely to start a planned privatization program with airports operator ADP (ADP.PA), according to three financial industry sources with knowledge of the matter.

Macron said before he won the presidency on May 7 that he wanted privatizations to help fund a 10 billion euro ($11.2 billion) government drive to boost industry and innovation.
posted by indubitable at 12:28 PM on June 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


Resisting the Macron Surge
On Sunday, June 11, French voters go to the polls in the first round of elections for the National Assembly. After pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron’s victory over Marine Le Pen in the May 7 presidential contest, his En Marche! formation and allies now look set to win a large majority of seats.

[...]

"We are about to vote on Sunday, but only on Wednesday, four days before the election, did we find out about the content of the decrees Macron is going to issue to dismantle the Labor Code. And just three days before the vote, we found out that the government’s intention is to put the terms of the State of Emergency — with the exceptional security measures allowing people to be put under house arrest — into common law."

"This means removing a judge’s role in the implementation of exceptional measures. So we have this incredible situation where just four days before the vote we found out about the decree to dismantle the Labor Code, and just three days before we found out that the State of Emergency is going to become normality. So in the final days, we want the cards to be laid out on the table, and to make sure that people know what they are voting for."
posted by indubitable at 3:17 PM on June 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


From Macron Quickly Assumes a Presidential Attitude:
But it is also a function of Mr. Macron’s deeply held belief that France in some sense has been missing its king since the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793, and that his job is to fill the gap.

In an interview two years ago, Mr. Macron made a statement about France’s absent king that is still the subject of shocked commentary. “In the process and function of democracy there is something missing, the figure of the king, whose death, I believe, fundamentally, the people did not want,” Mr. Macron told the weekly newspaper Le 1, saying it “created an emotional void.”

In France, no politician outside the circle of fringe far-right royalists is supposed to talk about missing the king. That form of nostalgia is taboo for anybody who professes attachment to Republican values.
posted by indubitable at 5:29 PM on June 11, 2017


Macron is not going to be able to dismantle France. People voted against Le Pen, not for him. He's out of his mind if he thinks he'll push all that through, and he probably won't last tbh. But still, he is smart to grab the brain drain while he can, France isn't high on most people's lists as you need French. You can go to Spain or Netherlands and teach and work in English.
posted by fshgrl at 8:19 PM on June 11, 2017


Can't tell how well thought out this program is and whether it works out in the end.

It was only a few years ago when China made a big bid for foreign scientists (again, mostly for prominent and rising stars) and the program was flawed by corruption and lack of sustainability. The corruption was mostly mid-level; lying and making false promises (hiding behind plausible deniability of "lost in translation/culture") and petty embezzlement.

The research environment in France has always felt progressive, if "how long can this good thing last," already; a fellow (molecular neuroscience) PhD candidate of mine got a post-doc position in France about 5 years ago (from Canada) who went in eyes-open at gaming their very generous system; she had 2 kids (and attendant maternity leave) during her post-doc in France.

She's fluent in French and her husband was passable, before the move.

She's back in Canada now at a "well, at least I have a job" tenure track position these days (which is a lot better than a lot of us, some who had spent time at Ivy schools for their post-docs and 1st author Science/Nature papers).
posted by porpoise at 12:32 AM on June 13, 2017


From Macron Quickly Assumes a Presidential Attitude:

It rules that the French election turns out to have been between a slightly rose-tinted fascist and a dude who seems to think he's on the verge of becoming Dr. Manhattan (or whatever the hell he thinks he's onto with this Jupiterian nonsense).
posted by Copronymus at 12:01 PM on July 5, 2017 [2 favorites]


In a surprise twist, Macron is not simply neoliberal but also a neoreactionary neo-monarchist of the Moldbuggian neocameral variety (people need a CEO-king because it's good for business and it's Just Rational, as opposed to nostalgia for Throne and Altar). He probably also thinks he's Neo.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:34 AM on July 6, 2017


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