Nostalgia does not bring prosperity
In 2013, what does a physicist do in Turkey, other than go abroad or tutor high school students studying for the university exam?
Who deliberates on the future only can design its future. Those who waste their time on an obsession with the past eventually will realize that the ship has passed. I believe that Turkey’s main problem lately is that is it oriented toward the past rather than the future. A recent article in Nature journal has reignited the issue in my mind. According to the article, there are two types of countries: past-oriented and future-oriented. The study defines a future-orientation index. Turkey is still in the first group, which is yet another reason to be worried about the future. Anyway, the study, using the Google Trends dataset, defines two categories of countries and identifies that future-oriented countries have higher GDP per capita. It is a completely scientific study. There is nothing else to say.
The Google Trends dataset shows which search-terms are entered in any given country. The researchers excluded countries that have less than 5 million Internet users. There were 45 countries that had more than 5 million Internet users. Then the researchers investigated for each country what proportion of Internet users searched for information about years in the past and years in the future. Based on the results, they generated an index of future orientation. The study revealed that Germans had the highest future orientation, followed by the Swiss and the Japanese. The Americans seem to have stopped whining and started looking to the future in 2012. The top 10 countries are on the positive list; the rest are past-oriented. Turkey not only is on the list of past-oriented, but has lost 3 places, dropping from 24th to 27th between 2011 and 2012. It’s bad. It appears that I had a point when I said Turkey shows signs of illness. Others also have reached the same conclusion from a small study.
Recently, nostalgia has been showing itself in the form of reckoning with the past, rising as another type of the same disease. “We definitely do not need the European Union. They need Turkey, indeed.” And there is this one: “The glorious days for have ended for the US. The world order has been reset.” Occasionally, I find myself in a debate on a “world vision centered on Turkey.” If you ask me, we are unable to see things straight as we are preoccupied with overestimating ourselves. Let’s make a quick reality check: the USA constitutes hardly 5 percent of the world’s population, but it hosts one-third of the researchers in the high-technology field and is home to 40 percent of all R&D activities. And there is no reason to expect a radical change with this respect in the period ahead. The share of private R&D expenditures in Turkey has been in a standstill over the last five years. Children are unable to surpass their parents in terms of education.
Turkey’s economic success story belongs to the past rather than the present. Yes, the stability measures introduced in response to the 2001 crisis prevented a possible banking crisis today. This sure was a success, but we have to keep in mind that twelve years have passed since then. It’s all history now. We have different issues today: as of 2013, what does a physicist do in Turkey other than go abroad or tutor high school students studying for the university exam? The answer is nothing. But the solution lies in our tradition: “The past has vanished, everything that was uttered belongs there. Now is the time to speak of new things.” This is our tradition. What a short memory we have!
This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 12.02.2013
