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That employs and affects millions (directly and indirectly) of people across multiples countries in high deficit areas. Which is the ultimate goal of the projec

That employs and affects millions (directly and indirectly) of people across multiples countries in high deficit areas. Which is the ultimate goal of the project. A plane that may work is merely the bonus of the R&D spend. Countries that don't do regional-deficit spending in this manner (that seems economically inefficient) end up having severe problems, particularly after the GFC. Much of Europe is easily in this bucket. The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 7y ago
I don't disagree that do-nothing projects can be valuable to society - but defense contractors are an extremely inefficient way to inject money into the economy. Most of that money ends up going into the pockets of people who could find quite decent jobs elsewhere. Redirecting that money to small business grants would provide a much bigger boost to general societal well being.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Some of it is less about injecting money than it is about maintaining capacity and capability. It's not always about jobs in general, but sometimes about specific jobs. The US defense-industrial complex may not always have a high need for people who can design stealth fighters, but it definitely prefers to keep a few around in case it does suddenly need them. Small business grants may not be a good way of meeting the same need.
  - ska 7y ago
    I suspect there is some truth to this. But I wonder how much of that effort could be directed to more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills. The other issue is that some fraction of defense spending seemingly can be viewed as funneling public money into a get-your-friends-rich scheme. I don't think you can find much net upside to that aspect.
    - akiselev 7y ago
      Stealth airplanes are extremely complex engineering projects that stretch across many fields. Maintaining any individual skill set is easy, but they're all highly specialized and require the industry to be maintained or else the combination of cross disciplinary skills, including project management, disappears. Think back to Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner, where Boeing tried a new model of splitting out the design to a bunch of subcontractors and ended up with tons of problems with the integration ranging from missed design milestones due to problems with the composites to miscommunications leading to battery problems in production and so on. Those are a small taste of what happens when the engineering-management hierarchy is broken up and fractured across organizations. It becomes a lot worse when they are fractured across time. The US famously lost it's top launch capabilities with the Saturn V and we didn't have a domestic replacement until the Falcon Heavy in 2018! By their very nature, maintaining the capabilities needed for weapons of war that can be deployed anywhere in the world is even more expensive if you want to have any sort of certainty that they'll work when the shots are fired instead of once a few years when you want to launch a satellite.
      - ska 7y ago
        I don’t think we are disagreeing, but I wouldn’t rely on the industry to define how much is needed.
        akiselev 7y ago
        I'm saying that the resources cannot be redirect towards "more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills". The cross disciplinary skills in military aviation are unique. Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
        ska 7y ago
        sure, but it’s the more interesting discussion to have, and it’s what I was pointing out. Plausibly the majority of the resources spent on this program could in fact have gone to more useful programs without affecting baseline capability. Plausibly the could not ... but it’s not clear anyone who should be asking that question, is.
  - andrewflnr 7y ago
    I get maintaining the capability, but they clearly can't develop a stealth fighter, so that justification doesn't really work either anymore.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      I mean, maybe? That this program isn't working may not be the same as the US no longer having the capability. It's possible that the F-35 isn't really expected to produce a functional stealth fighter, all rhetoric aside. I honestly have no idea.
      - munk-a 7y ago
        That seems to stretch the argument pretty far - maybe if we just want to keep vaguely military folk in the country then we could employ them building military grade roads to replace the aging infrastructure. If the project they're actually working on isn't supposed to bear any real fruit then maybe just redirect them to something that isn't a complete waste of resources. Also, I disagree, I don't think anyone in that realm of government would knowingly sink that much money into a project they intended to fail - they might be overly optimistic about the success, they might be trying to funnel money into their retirement but it takes clout to secure a budget like that and people had to work hard to secure it initially and keep it going - so a failure is probably going to fall under one of these categories - un-achievable, poorly managed, or wholly corrupt.
- raisedbyninjas 7y ago
  In these times of low unemployment, a dearth of applicants may push Lockheed to literally burning money. Could this provide more economic benefit until spring when heating costs drop?
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > inject money into the economy The money "injected" into the economy must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the economy. I.e. it's zero-sum.
  - myhf 7y ago
    It's not zero-sum. It can change the velocity of circulation money, which impacts economic activity in predictable ways.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      This implies that the money extracted from the economy is dead money or poorly invested. I've seen no rationale nor evidence for why that might be true.
    - csb6 7y ago
      Circulating money doesn’t create economic value. We might as well had spent $1.5 trillion (the cost so far to develop the F-35) to make a fleet of large metal platypuses which we keep in hangars and occasionally launch into the air. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
      - sitkack 7y ago
        Could they please be chrome?
        csb6 7y ago
        I like the aesthetic, but we’re on a budget here. Rhinestone and we call it a compromise?
      - neximo64 7y ago
        Circulating money does create economic value in far multiples of the initial amount. It's well established military spending has an impact on GDP far more than the amount itself. Funds are never 'spent' as such, the money always circulates around even if you do buy metal platypuses - someone is going to get a salary and spend it somewhere or invest in their future by buying things that improve their productivity.
kjs3 7y ago
Having recently been in Ireland, France and Germany talking to financial industry peers, vetting a bunch of startups and meeting with regulators, how exactly did I miss out on this hellscape you're talking about?
csb6 7y ago
Or, to be more efficient, we could funnel the money going towards the F-35 to productive uses that would employ as many people and actually create value. Saying the F-35 is good because it creates jobs is an example of the Broken Window fallacy; [1] we’re expending economic effort for no purpose, much like you can’t create economic growth by going around breaking windows so the glazier industry can have a boom. As I said in another comment, we might as well had spent the $1.5 trillion to build a fleet of metal platypuses that we keep in large hangars around the world. The existence of an F-35 has no practical use to the U.S. economy other than as a money sink. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- neximo64 7y ago
  If you would like to use broken windows as an example the parable doesn't apply exactly. For it to apply the same way it would mean both providing a job (by giving funds to do so) to fix the broken window/damaged buildings as well as having a need to fix the damage, versus simply having a natural distaster/broken window and hoping that works as economic stimulation. The broken window fallacy/parable has no notion of outside money being inserted into the system and is a poor characterization of the F35 program/deficit fiscal spending. That is the critical difference. Also these forms of spending are already empirically proven as being net beneficial due to a financial multiplier/accelerator.
  - csb6 7y ago
    So if I’m understanding your argument correctly, you consider the F-35 to effectively be a wealth redistribution program. Taxes are gathered from taxpayers nationwide, and some of that money is funneled into the communities where the F-35 is designed and built. I’m 100% down with wealth redistribution as a way to reduce income inequality, but I think we could be way more efficient in the redistribution; we could employ these people and use this money to create actually useful things, like say construct affordable housing or construct anything other than a $1.5 trillion lemon. That was why I mentioned the parable; the idea is that value isn’t added when you introduce an artificial, costly phenomenon into an economy (i.e. a storm that creates demand for repairs or a worthless fighter jet that creates demand for defense workers). But if you instead use that money to build productive things, then you can get the redistribution and actually make something that someone wants. Thus, it is impossible for the F-35 to be as efficient at wealth distribution as say an equivalent costing program to create working civilian aircraft that could actually be used. The most efficient way of redistribution would be to use the money spent on the F-35 to directly fund social programs and jobs programs for the poor in these economically disadvantaged communities; this would redistribute all of the money to people who actually need it and will spend it, rather than send huge chunks of it into defense executives/shareholders’ pockets in the currently lossy transactions used in defense contracting.
kjaftaedi 7y ago
A manned base on Mars would be a much more practical way to spend money, create just as many jobs, and be cheaper. Using all of these resources to instead build a poorly functioning aircraft is not in society's best interest.
baddox 7y ago
You seem to imply that the program is distributing resources more equitably or fairly (according to some definition) than their initial distribution. Can you explain that? The money is taken from tax-payers, and most of the jobs created in the US are presumably tax-payers. But we also know that the companies with these defense contracts are making profit, which means it's not purely money being distributed to workers. There are presumably executives and investors making huge amounts of money from tax-payers. If the money is just being taken from tax-payers and then distributed to a much smaller group of tax-payers, including some of it making a very small number of people very rich, I would need to see a lot of evidence to convince me that it's beneficial to society in the way that the term "jobs program" makes it sound.
- csb6 7y ago
  You’re right. It’s the Broken Window fallacy [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
_visgean 7y ago
> "US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is" I am sorry, as EU citizen I have to ask, in what hell am I? Forgot to notice being in hell :/
dTal 7y ago
>The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is. Funny, I've never seen a trailer park in Europe. And oddly, the infrastructure is typically way better too. Bizzarely, fewer people seem to die of preventable disease as well. Clearly Europe is doing something terribly wrong, and needs to adopt the American model.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 7y ago

I don't disagree that do-nothing projects can be valuable to society - but defense contractors are an extremely inefficient way to inject money into the economy. Most of that money ends up going into the pockets of people who could find quite decent jobs elsewhere. Redirecting that money to small business grants would provide a much bigger boost to general societal well being.

Kalium 7y ago
Some of it is less about injecting money than it is about maintaining capacity and capability. It's not always about jobs in general, but sometimes about specific jobs. The US defense-industrial complex may not always have a high need for people who can design stealth fighters, but it definitely prefers to keep a few around in case it does suddenly need them. Small business grants may not be a good way of meeting the same need.
- ska 7y ago
  I suspect there is some truth to this. But I wonder how much of that effort could be directed to more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills. The other issue is that some fraction of defense spending seemingly can be viewed as funneling public money into a get-your-friends-rich scheme. I don't think you can find much net upside to that aspect.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    Stealth airplanes are extremely complex engineering projects that stretch across many fields. Maintaining any individual skill set is easy, but they're all highly specialized and require the industry to be maintained or else the combination of cross disciplinary skills, including project management, disappears. Think back to Boeing's problems with the Dreamliner, where Boeing tried a new model of splitting out the design to a bunch of subcontractors and ended up with tons of problems with the integration ranging from missed design milestones due to problems with the composites to miscommunications leading to battery problems in production and so on. Those are a small taste of what happens when the engineering-management hierarchy is broken up and fractured across organizations. It becomes a lot worse when they are fractured across time. The US famously lost it's top launch capabilities with the Saturn V and we didn't have a domestic replacement until the Falcon Heavy in 2018! By their very nature, maintaining the capabilities needed for weapons of war that can be deployed anywhere in the world is even more expensive if you want to have any sort of certainty that they'll work when the shots are fired instead of once a few years when you want to launch a satellite.
    - ska 7y ago
      I don’t think we are disagreeing, but I wouldn’t rely on the industry to define how much is needed.
      - akiselev 7y ago
        I'm saying that the resources cannot be redirect towards "more useful infrastructure projects and still maintain skills". The cross disciplinary skills in military aviation are unique. Whether or not the cost of the F35 program is an efficient way to maintain those skills is a different issue altogether that gets at the fundamental structure of our government and how money impacts politics. That's a much more difficult discussion than "can we reasonably defend ourselves in the future."
        ska 7y ago
        sure, but it’s the more interesting discussion to have, and it’s what I was pointing out. Plausibly the majority of the resources spent on this program could in fact have gone to more useful programs without affecting baseline capability. Plausibly the could not ... but it’s not clear anyone who should be asking that question, is.
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  I get maintaining the capability, but they clearly can't develop a stealth fighter, so that justification doesn't really work either anymore.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    I mean, maybe? That this program isn't working may not be the same as the US no longer having the capability. It's possible that the F-35 isn't really expected to produce a functional stealth fighter, all rhetoric aside. I honestly have no idea.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      That seems to stretch the argument pretty far - maybe if we just want to keep vaguely military folk in the country then we could employ them building military grade roads to replace the aging infrastructure. If the project they're actually working on isn't supposed to bear any real fruit then maybe just redirect them to something that isn't a complete waste of resources. Also, I disagree, I don't think anyone in that realm of government would knowingly sink that much money into a project they intended to fail - they might be overly optimistic about the success, they might be trying to funnel money into their retirement but it takes clout to secure a budget like that and people had to work hard to secure it initially and keep it going - so a failure is probably going to fall under one of these categories - un-achievable, poorly managed, or wholly corrupt.
raisedbyninjas 7y ago
In these times of low unemployment, a dearth of applicants may push Lockheed to literally burning money. Could this provide more economic benefit until spring when heating costs drop?
WalterBright 7y ago
> inject money into the economy The money "injected" into the economy must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the economy. I.e. it's zero-sum.
- myhf 7y ago
  It's not zero-sum. It can change the velocity of circulation money, which impacts economic activity in predictable ways.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    This implies that the money extracted from the economy is dead money or poorly invested. I've seen no rationale nor evidence for why that might be true.
  - csb6 7y ago
    Circulating money doesn’t create economic value. We might as well had spent $1.5 trillion (the cost so far to develop the F-35) to make a fleet of large metal platypuses which we keep in hangars and occasionally launch into the air. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
    - sitkack 7y ago
      Could they please be chrome?
      - csb6 7y ago
        I like the aesthetic, but we’re on a budget here. Rhinestone and we call it a compromise?
    - neximo64 7y ago
      Circulating money does create economic value in far multiples of the initial amount. It's well established military spending has an impact on GDP far more than the amount itself. Funds are never 'spent' as such, the money always circulates around even if you do buy metal platypuses - someone is going to get a salary and spend it somewhere or invest in their future by buying things that improve their productivity.

kjs3 7y ago

Having recently been in Ireland, France and Germany talking to financial industry peers, vetting a bunch of startups and meeting with regulators, how exactly did I miss out on this hellscape you're talking about?

csb6 7y ago

Or, to be more efficient, we could funnel the money going towards the F-35 to productive uses that would employ as many people and actually create value. Saying the F-35 is good because it creates jobs is an example of the Broken Window fallacy; [1] we’re expending economic effort for no purpose, much like you can’t create economic growth by going around breaking windows so the glazier industry can have a boom. As I said in another comment, we might as well had spent the $1.5 trillion to build a fleet of metal platypuses that we keep in large hangars around the world. The existence of an F-35 has no practical use to the U.S. economy other than as a money sink. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

neximo64 7y ago
If you would like to use broken windows as an example the parable doesn't apply exactly. For it to apply the same way it would mean both providing a job (by giving funds to do so) to fix the broken window/damaged buildings as well as having a need to fix the damage, versus simply having a natural distaster/broken window and hoping that works as economic stimulation. The broken window fallacy/parable has no notion of outside money being inserted into the system and is a poor characterization of the F35 program/deficit fiscal spending. That is the critical difference. Also these forms of spending are already empirically proven as being net beneficial due to a financial multiplier/accelerator.
- csb6 7y ago
  So if I’m understanding your argument correctly, you consider the F-35 to effectively be a wealth redistribution program. Taxes are gathered from taxpayers nationwide, and some of that money is funneled into the communities where the F-35 is designed and built. I’m 100% down with wealth redistribution as a way to reduce income inequality, but I think we could be way more efficient in the redistribution; we could employ these people and use this money to create actually useful things, like say construct affordable housing or construct anything other than a $1.5 trillion lemon. That was why I mentioned the parable; the idea is that value isn’t added when you introduce an artificial, costly phenomenon into an economy (i.e. a storm that creates demand for repairs or a worthless fighter jet that creates demand for defense workers). But if you instead use that money to build productive things, then you can get the redistribution and actually make something that someone wants. Thus, it is impossible for the F-35 to be as efficient at wealth distribution as say an equivalent costing program to create working civilian aircraft that could actually be used. The most efficient way of redistribution would be to use the money spent on the F-35 to directly fund social programs and jobs programs for the poor in these economically disadvantaged communities; this would redistribute all of the money to people who actually need it and will spend it, rather than send huge chunks of it into defense executives/shareholders’ pockets in the currently lossy transactions used in defense contracting.

kjaftaedi 7y ago

A manned base on Mars would be a much more practical way to spend money, create just as many jobs, and be cheaper. Using all of these resources to instead build a poorly functioning aircraft is not in society's best interest.

baddox 7y ago

You seem to imply that the program is distributing resources more equitably or fairly (according to some definition) than their initial distribution. Can you explain that? The money is taken from tax-payers, and most of the jobs created in the US are presumably tax-payers. But we also know that the companies with these defense contracts are making profit, which means it's not purely money being distributed to workers. There are presumably executives and investors making huge amounts of money from tax-payers. If the money is just being taken from tax-payers and then distributed to a much smaller group of tax-payers, including some of it making a very small number of people very rich, I would need to see a lot of evidence to convince me that it's beneficial to society in the way that the term "jobs program" makes it sound.

csb6 7y ago
You’re right. It’s the Broken Window fallacy [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

_visgean 7y ago

> "US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is" I am sorry, as EU citizen I have to ask, in what hell am I? Forgot to notice being in hell :/

dTal 7y ago

>The F35 is part of the reason the US isn't in as much hell economically speaking as Europe is. Funny, I've never seen a trailer park in Europe. And oddly, the infrastructure is typically way better too. Bizzarely, fewer people seem to die of preventable disease as well. Clearly Europe is doing something terribly wrong, and needs to adopt the American model.