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"Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent that money on a rocket." This kind of argument always gets to me. There's

• tajen 10y ago
  The financial system is a proxy for the resources. Replace the $ numbers with the merchandise and you'll understand it: "Sorry, your unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped by feeding a thousand researchers for 3 years with bread, meat and iPhones, but we spent that bread, meet, iron and quarry extracts on researchers who built a rocket to send all that material to Mars". Money is here to prevent us from spending more resources than we have, e.g. if a farmer extracts melons from earth to feed a SpaceX researcher, he should receive enough from society to build a house for his children.
  • cygx 10y ago
    But it adds artificial resource limits to the mix. There are enough smart people and enough food end even enough iPhones around to have both smart rocket engineers and smart medecial doctors. The problem is that our system of resource allocation in not effective at putting them to work.
    • tajen 10y ago
      The limits "added by the financial system" come from the limits of real-life resources we have. They are just transferred from the provider of the goods to the person who needs them. The world wouldn't work if e.g. USA consumed all the world's resources and didn't feed the world back with awesome inventions. Should you remove money, third-world producers wouldn't ship their goods to USA because they'd be better off eating them locally; What they're doing is an exchange of food-against-iPhones. I think you get my point anyway. We don't have additional resources to feed more researchers (and it takes a lot of iPhones and trinkets to motivate an engineer to give up 60 years of his social life for science). We're currently altogether: - creating iPhones (30,000 employees at Apple), - have smart rocket engineers (5000 employees for SpaceX, 18,000 for NASA), - smart medical doctors (800k doctors in USA) - medical research (if you want to fund future research, you need to give a few dollars for every drug that you consume – We could think about another scheme of retribution, but sooner or later we need to pay researchers and their management for the work they do), - and trying to create new social spying tools (I'm joking, but seriously innovation keeps 4 million people in the Silicon Valley busy with pitching their start-up or supporting people who pitch their start-up or cleaning the clothes of people who pitch their start-up). You could reallocate people from Facebook to NASA, but it takes a few more skills, training and hardware to do rocket science than PHP. The assumption that "we have enough smart people and food" to make a leap in space exploration is an understandable concept of "Look at all those numbers! We sure could mix them up and dedicate ourselves to colonizing Mars without caring about finances!" But every resource is currently allocated, and if you want to get more people onto space exploration, you'll have to remove people from other sectors which may be equally important for our future. Finance is just a medium that acts as a proxy of the actual constraints of nature. Removing finances doesn't remove the constraints of nature.
• boznz 10y ago
  "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent that money on a rocket." "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that in wars over oil". "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that propping up dodgy financial institutions". "Sorry, you're unborn child was killed by a virus we could have stopped but we spent thousands of times that making Hollywood movies". .. yawn
  • oliv__ 10y ago
    Your