Fictitious Science

Abstract

Science and Technology (S&T), like Research and Development (R&D), has become a case of capital investment like any other economic sector. This has distanced R&D from social needs, to the extent that part of R&D ends up actually being fictitious, in the sense that it acquires a price on the market but never becomes part of material production processes. The concept referred to here as fictitious science is parallel to the fictitious capital used to account for financial assets that have no material counterpart. R&D and S&T have gone from being a service to the community to being sectors for capital investment, driven to producing profits by cost-benefit criteria. At the same time that scientific production is being productively exploited, a form of science has evolved that is not evaluated for its content but for its price. This is fictitious science that is not used for production and ends up being superfluous and with no relationship at all with social needs. However, the paradox is that although their products have a price, they end up in many cases not being used as part of material production processes.