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I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y? How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who

by alex_c 17y ago

I've never liked this argument. Why does it have to be X or Y? How do you propose to make Detroit livable by spending a few billion? Give it to everyone who lives in Detroit? Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? Nation building turns out to be hard (who knew). If the US has trouble maintaining its own standard of living, how will throwing money at the rest of the world really help? Yes, there is low hanging fruit, but there's also money for it (see: Gates foundation, etc.) We have the resources to do both. It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of political will, of collective will, and of both problems just being HARD - and let's face it, I suspect space flight is the easier of the two.

patio11 17y ago
Why does it have to be X or Y? Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money. Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.) Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)
- catzaa 17y ago
  Money spend on Aid in Africa probably dwarfs money spend on space research. Sub-Sahara Africa has swallowed more than 15 Marshall Plans with no signs of development. Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable. It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+. In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed. > I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system. As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.
  - eru 17y ago
    So if you have money to throw around you'd rather throw it at lobbying for free trade in the rich world, so that e.g. African agriculture can compete better.
    - catzaa 17y ago
      That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive. But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers). I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).

by alex_c 17y ago

patio11 17y ago

Why does it have to be X or Y? Spending a billion to send a probe to Mars to take a few happy snaps leaves us with one less billion to spend. At some point, there has to be a trade off -- a billion here, a billion there, it eventually adds up to real money. Subsidize unsustainable businesses based in and around Detroit? I'm not the biggest fan of one-gang-dig-hole, another-gang-fill-it government make-work projects, but I never thought I would have to explain that to someone defending NASA. (I suppose if you wanted to try something, you could try small business development grants. One million is 100 chunks of $10,000, which is seed funding for a hundred startups, right? Well, there's one million -- I wonder what you'd do with the other 279 million the Pathfinder mission cost. Decisions, decisions.) Same question in Africa, really - once you've given out all the clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets you can, then what? I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. (Well, OK, I'd settle for DDT because I have no tolerance for killing little kids to have environmentalists feel good about themselves.) Heck, I'd settle for feeding one kid and tossing the rest of NASA's copious budget into a volcano. That would be a net improvement of one life. (More than one, if you count the people who won't die studying the responses of spiders to microgravity and other useless trivialities we cook up to pretend that the Space Shuttle, et al, are anything other than slush funds for defense contractors.)

catzaa 17y ago
Money spend on Aid in Africa probably dwarfs money spend on space research. Sub-Sahara Africa has swallowed more than 15 Marshall Plans with no signs of development. Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable. It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+. In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed. > I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo. HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system. As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.
- eru 17y ago
  So if you have money to throw around you'd rather throw it at lobbying for free trade in the rich world, so that e.g. African agriculture can compete better.
  - catzaa 17y ago
    That is exactly one of my main problems. The biggest disadvantage in Africa is that rich countries subsidise their agriculture production. Agriculture is one of the few areas where Africa can be competitive. But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers). I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).