The main benefits of CERN go well beyond the actual science that is done and building such a collider trains thousands of people in all kinds of skills that are

The main benefits of CERN go well beyond the actual science that is done and building such a collider trains thousands of people in all kinds of skills that are very valuable in the real economy. It generates truly big data as well, so analyzing and handling that data trains yet another set of thousands of people. Most of them eventually quit particle physics and are then hired at SAP, Google, BMW (real examples I know of).