RE: Practical uses of big science projects
June 8, 2015 at 3:06 pm
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2015 at 3:12 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 8, 2015 at 3:01 pm)Alex K Wrote:(June 8, 2015 at 2:52 pm)Chuck Wrote: In fairness, this thing generates revenue.
Who cares whether it generates revenue? Revenue is just green pieces of paper changing places. Revenue does not magically compensate for the man hours and resources that were used for this thing.
With investments of this proportion, and in particular when the topic of the discussion is which endeavours we as a species should and can afford, this does not matter. What matters is only what the resources and manpower available to mankind are used for. The price in money paid for it is just a shorthand to estimate this cost.
That it generates revenue merely means that some people are willing to trade the work they do in order to ride on this boat, it has nothing to do with the resources sunk into building it.
Those who has the little green pieces of paper and wants more of them cares.
Unfortunately we don't live in a sufficiently strong command economy. The little green pieces of paper - short hand for the cost - when used to measure revenue, also become short hand in a non-command economy for a broad based comparison for quality and risk of investment.
That cruise ship is a reasonably low risk, high return investment, measured by little green pieces of paper moving here and there. A command economy might indeed make a better decision here. But unfortunately command economy has had a poor reputation for making an on average higher quality of decision on average.
