5 ms·

If you really want to blow your mind/weep uncontrollably a little bit of math is just the ticket. The F-22 costs $150,000,000 per plane [1]. The price of a bus

by jgon 12y ago

If you really want to blow your mind/weep uncontrollably a little bit of math is just the ticket. The F-22 costs $150,000,000 per plane [1]. The price of a bushel of wheat is $6.52 [2]. This means that a single F-22 costs ~23,006,134 bushels of wheat. A bushel of wheat can produce ~100 loaves of bread weighing 1.5lbs each [3], meaning that each F-22 costs ~2,300,613,496 loaves of bread. The US military has built 187 F-22 planes [1], meaning that it has exchanged the ability to create 430,214,723,926 loaves of bread for a warp speed death machine. Put another way, the US military could provide a loaf of bread to every man, woman, and child on this planet(!) once per week for 62 weeks for the same price as its fleet of F-22s. The next time someone talks about world hunger as some sort of intractable problem, just remember that we are actively choosing to allow people to starve and die in order to build ever more efficient death machines. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor [2] - http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=wheat [3] - http://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_bread_can_be_made_from_a_bushel_of_wheat http://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_bread_can_be_made_from_a_b...

Evolved 12y ago
I understand the point you're trying to make but unfortunately it isn't an accurate comparison. However, I do think you've got something here because I question whether building F-22s at $150mil per plane plus the costs of armament exceeds the cost of feeding and arming the populaces as well as training them to defend themselves against groups like the Taliban and ISIS. I would also add in the nominal (it isn't expensive to educate people) cost of education on religions and basic human rights to help prevent the spread of radicalization. I'd wager that it is far less expensive to do this than to build planes to attack an enemy where the costs of these planes is not conducive at all to the value of destroying this enemy and obliterating any progress towards paying off our debt.
- jgon 12y ago
  Thank you for the reply. Although my last sentence was probably unnecessarily combative, I hope that people reading this don't get hung up on that, how exact the math is, or how much nutrition a loaf of bread can truly provide. I mean I just looked at the cost of building the active fleet. Wikipedia estimates the total costs of the program as being roughly 4x that cost, so even taking into account the costs of a loaf of bread beyond wheat I bet that feeding the planet (with bread) for a year is still pretty close to the cost of the program. You got what I was hoping people would take away, which is that we look at groups around the world being radicalized, turning to oppressive religion and wonder "why? what makes them do that?", and maybe one piece of the puzzle would be asking what sort of reaction these people would have if we gave everyone in their nation food for a year instead of taking a large portion of the world's total resources and expending it on war machines which we then use in their homeland.
  - ethbro 12y ago
    I get your intent, but there's also the political problem in a democracy. How hard is it to convince a majority of people that buying more death machines is a good use of their money? Now how hard to convince a majority that feeding the world is a good use? Now how hard to convince them that building schools is a good use? I'll just remark that the answer to that last is why Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban in the first place (after the warlords the US supported bickered amongst each other for a while).
Domenic_S 12y ago
Some weird assumptions in your math: -The cost to produce a loaf of bread is $0 above the raw wheat cost -The cost to distribute a loaf of bread to all of humanity is $0 -A loaf of bread is sufficient to healthily sustain a starving person I mean yeah, even if the final number was 20% of your "math", it would be a lot of bread. But the answer to world hunger isn't "let's take all the F-22 money and use it to make bread!"
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
wosos 12y ago
I wonder why are you being downvoted. This is pretty interesting, and a great way to look at it.
- eveningcoffee 12y ago
  Apollo program did cost 110 billion when adjusted to the inflation. With this amount of money, and math above, you could feed every person on Earth about 3 and half years.
  - sanoli 12y ago
    You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
    - qrendel 12y ago
      If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically. On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access. And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political. From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people. There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place. In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).
dredmorbius 12y ago
That does require that F-22 fighters are fungible with wheat production. It's possible that at the margin wheat productivity will be far less than the average price of wheat -- that is, that you'll have less productivity. But yes, it's a tremendous expenditure of treasury.
eveningcoffee 12y ago
63 weeks is a little over a year. Considering the exponential population growth in the developing world, this number would be already smaller next year. I am not particularly huge fan of military development, but it would at least advance mankind, just giving away free bread will only move it closer to the doom. If you want to make youself really weep, have a look at this graph http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/world-population-growth-graph-small.jpg http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/world-p... If it really did not do the job, have a look at this fine comic http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island
graycat 12y ago
The F-22 is likely one amazing airplane. If we in the US don't need the F-22, then it's way too expensive. If we do need it, then it's maybe quite cheap. In a sense, we can suspect that, if the F-22 is never used, then maybe it has, thus, done its best possible work -- would be enemies were afraid to attack us where the F-22 could ruin their attack. Could a plane far ahead of its candidate opponents do that well at avoiding a war? Under some fairly realistic circumstances, yes. Suppose for the sake of the argument, we assume that the US should have fought Gulf War I (I tend to think so, e.g., Kuwait was invaded and Saudi Arabia was next on Saddam's hit list; Gulf War II, hmm ...? YMMV). So, with this assumption, in Baghdad Saddam had spent a huge bundle on anti-aircraft means -- radars, guns, and missiles. Okay. Sorry, Saddam, for all those millions, you didn't get 10 cents worth. Why? Because Lockheed had developed the F-117, and it flew into the Baghdad anti-aircraft means and supposedly never got even a single scratch. Lesson: Given the assumption that Gulf War I was to be fought, we really, really like the F-117. The F-22? No doubt there are scenarios where its superiority would be similar. Broadly it appears that the US has military planners sitting around evaluating what potential enemies might be able to do and, then, coming up with military R&D programs to keep the US ahead. Then, if the stuff the US develops is sufficiently superior, say, like the F-117 or the SR-71, then the chances of actual shooting go way down and the superior US weapons in effect did the best we could hope for. Now, for the cost of an F-22, likely that is heavily for just its crucial attribute -- being way ahead as technology. So, pay super big bucks for the F-22 #1 and much less for #2, #3, .... Or, what's crucial about the F-22 is not that we have built some airplanes but that we have created some highly superior technology, that gets used in some real airplanes. Or the F-22 is part of a technology race where, like for the F-117, the US wants to win, against any and all competition. I hope we do. Uh, in Gulf War I, Saddam's planes? Soon enough they saw that getting off the ground and heading to the Americans was a fast way to a smoking hole and, thus, just took the back way to Iran and parked. Not a chance. Saddam's planes didn't have a chance. In Gulf War I, supposedly the US had more injuries from rest and recreation than from enemy action. Now if we have to fight a war, then that's how we want to fight it. Or, once General Schwarzkopf was asked what happened to those many thousands of Iraqi soldiers out in the Iraqi desert defending against an attack from Saudi Arabia? The answer: "They are still there.". Uh, there was one more: Saddam had a lot of Russian tanks. Maybe they were really good tanks, maybe tough and rugged. Their gun could shoot a mile. Ah, but then there was the US tank: Also tough and rugged, likely more so than for the Russian tanks. With a gas turbine engine to permit especially fast speed for a tank. Then we get to the really good stuff: (a) The US tank could see through dust, fog, and in the dark (infrared, etc.). (b) The gun on the US tank could shoot 2 miles. (c) The US tank could shoot while moving while the Russian tank had to stop to shoot. Hmm (a)-(c) -- guess what happened in the US-Iraqi tank battles? Remember that the Iraqi tank could shoot only 1 mile, and the US tank could shoot twice that far. So, by the time an Iraqi tank was in range to shoot, it was already dead. So, how'd the US tanks be so much better? Sure: Technology. Much of the cost of the US tanks? Technology R&D and not just metal work.

by jgon 12y ago

Evolved 12y ago

I understand the point you're trying to make but unfortunately it isn't an accurate comparison. However, I do think you've got something here because I question whether building F-22s at $150mil per plane plus the costs of armament exceeds the cost of feeding and arming the populaces as well as training them to defend themselves against groups like the Taliban and ISIS. I would also add in the nominal (it isn't expensive to educate people) cost of education on religions and basic human rights to help prevent the spread of radicalization. I'd wager that it is far less expensive to do this than to build planes to attack an enemy where the costs of these planes is not conducive at all to the value of destroying this enemy and obliterating any progress towards paying off our debt.

jgon 12y ago
Thank you for the reply. Although my last sentence was probably unnecessarily combative, I hope that people reading this don't get hung up on that, how exact the math is, or how much nutrition a loaf of bread can truly provide. I mean I just looked at the cost of building the active fleet. Wikipedia estimates the total costs of the program as being roughly 4x that cost, so even taking into account the costs of a loaf of bread beyond wheat I bet that feeding the planet (with bread) for a year is still pretty close to the cost of the program. You got what I was hoping people would take away, which is that we look at groups around the world being radicalized, turning to oppressive religion and wonder "why? what makes them do that?", and maybe one piece of the puzzle would be asking what sort of reaction these people would have if we gave everyone in their nation food for a year instead of taking a large portion of the world's total resources and expending it on war machines which we then use in their homeland.
- ethbro 12y ago
  I get your intent, but there's also the political problem in a democracy. How hard is it to convince a majority of people that buying more death machines is a good use of their money? Now how hard to convince a majority that feeding the world is a good use? Now how hard to convince them that building schools is a good use? I'll just remark that the answer to that last is why Afghanistan was controlled by the Taliban in the first place (after the warlords the US supported bickered amongst each other for a while).

Domenic_S 12y ago

Some weird assumptions in your math: -The cost to produce a loaf of bread is $0 above the raw wheat cost -The cost to distribute a loaf of bread to all of humanity is $0 -A loaf of bread is sufficient to healthily sustain a starving person I mean yeah, even if the final number was 20% of your "math", it would be a lot of bread. But the answer to world hunger isn't "let's take all the F-22 money and use it to make bread!"

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

wosos 12y ago

I wonder why are you being downvoted. This is pretty interesting, and a great way to look at it.

eveningcoffee 12y ago
Apollo program did cost 110 billion when adjusted to the inflation. With this amount of money, and math above, you could feed every person on Earth about 3 and half years.
- sanoli 12y ago
  You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.
  - qrendel 12y ago
    If you want some possibly-far-fetched but very high-ROI space investment strategies, have you seen the Phil Metzger et al proposal for rapid bootstrapping of space industry[1][2]? Even if off by orders of magnitude it would still dwarf the industrial output of the world within a few decades. [1] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-space-industry-solar-system-civilization/ http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/affordable-rapid-bootstrap... [2] http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Preprint_Affordable-bootstrapping-of-space-industry-and-solar-system-civilization.pdf http://www.philipmetzger.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09...
- ptaipale 12y ago
  Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically. On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access. And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political. From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people. There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place. In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).

dredmorbius 12y ago

That does require that F-22 fighters are fungible with wheat production. It's possible that at the margin wheat productivity will be far less than the average price of wheat -- that is, that you'll have less productivity. But yes, it's a tremendous expenditure of treasury.

eveningcoffee 12y ago

63 weeks is a little over a year. Considering the exponential population growth in the developing world, this number would be already smaller next year. I am not particularly huge fan of military development, but it would at least advance mankind, just giving away free bread will only move it closer to the doom. If you want to make youself really weep, have a look at this graph http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/world-population-growth-graph-small.jpg http://www.china-mike.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/world-p... If it really did not do the job, have a look at this fine comic http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/st-matthew-island

graycat 12y ago

The F-22 is likely one amazing airplane. If we in the US don't need the F-22, then it's way too expensive. If we do need it, then it's maybe quite cheap. In a sense, we can suspect that, if the F-22 is never used, then maybe it has, thus, done its best possible work -- would be enemies were afraid to attack us where the F-22 could ruin their attack. Could a plane far ahead of its candidate opponents do that well at avoiding a war? Under some fairly realistic circumstances, yes. Suppose for the sake of the argument, we assume that the US should have fought Gulf War I (I tend to think so, e.g., Kuwait was invaded and Saudi Arabia was next on Saddam's hit list; Gulf War II, hmm ...? YMMV). So, with this assumption, in Baghdad Saddam had spent a huge bundle on anti-aircraft means -- radars, guns, and missiles. Okay. Sorry, Saddam, for all those millions, you didn't get 10 cents worth. Why? Because Lockheed had developed the F-117, and it flew into the Baghdad anti-aircraft means and supposedly never got even a single scratch. Lesson: Given the assumption that Gulf War I was to be fought, we really, really like the F-117. The F-22? No doubt there are scenarios where its superiority would be similar. Broadly it appears that the US has military planners sitting around evaluating what potential enemies might be able to do and, then, coming up with military R&D programs to keep the US ahead. Then, if the stuff the US develops is sufficiently superior, say, like the F-117 or the SR-71, then the chances of actual shooting go way down and the superior US weapons in effect did the best we could hope for. Now, for the cost of an F-22, likely that is heavily for just its crucial attribute -- being way ahead as technology. So, pay super big bucks for the F-22 #1 and much less for #2, #3, .... Or, what's crucial about the F-22 is not that we have built some airplanes but that we have created some highly superior technology, that gets used in some real airplanes. Or the F-22 is part of a technology race where, like for the F-117, the US wants to win, against any and all competition. I hope we do. Uh, in Gulf War I, Saddam's planes? Soon enough they saw that getting off the ground and heading to the Americans was a fast way to a smoking hole and, thus, just took the back way to Iran and parked. Not a chance. Saddam's planes didn't have a chance. In Gulf War I, supposedly the US had more injuries from rest and recreation than from enemy action. Now if we have to fight a war, then that's how we want to fight it. Or, once General Schwarzkopf was asked what happened to those many thousands of Iraqi soldiers out in the Iraqi desert defending against an attack from Saudi Arabia? The answer: "They are still there.". Uh, there was one more: Saddam had a lot of Russian tanks. Maybe they were really good tanks, maybe tough and rugged. Their gun could shoot a mile. Ah, but then there was the US tank: Also tough and rugged, likely more so than for the Russian tanks. With a gas turbine engine to permit especially fast speed for a tank. Then we get to the really good stuff: (a) The US tank could see through dust, fog, and in the dark (infrared, etc.). (b) The gun on the US tank could shoot 2 miles. (c) The US tank could shoot while moving while the Russian tank had to stop to shoot. Hmm (a)-(c) -- guess what happened in the US-Iraqi tank battles? Remember that the Iraqi tank could shoot only 1 mile, and the US tank could shoot twice that far. So, by the time an Iraqi tank was in range to shoot, it was already dead. So, how'd the US tanks be so much better? Sure: Technology. Much of the cost of the US tanks? Technology R&D and not just metal work.