WARD@USC-ISIF.ARPA (03/26/84)
From: Craig E. Ward <WARD@USC-ISIF.ARPA> Talk about flawed arguments! Do you think that new plastics, materials, glues, etc. come out of thin air? No! Have you ever heard the saying "Necessity is the mother of invention", i.e., things do not get done until somebody wants them. By way of illustration we could say that we want to do X. After we have decided this we must ask ourselves what is needed to do X. The answer is Y. It is not at all clear that we could come up with Y without first having X. An example of this in the space program is: "We want to go to the moon. What do we need to do this? Well, new rockets, fuels, plastics, materials, glues, etc." I repeat, there is no reason to believe that without the space program the spin-offs would have occurred anyway. You are also quite wrong in comparing giving money to winos to spending money on the space program. Surely you do not suggest that giving money to winos will generate as much economic activity as the space program? That is stupid. The tractions between wino and liquor store are not going to have the same effect as the interactions between an engineer and a technical problem. The wino/store interaction is not likely to generate anything new, it merely supports current economic activity; however, the engineer/problem can, in addition to supporting current forms, produce new areas of economic growth. I submit that the 7 to 14x return is underestimated because the new technologies will be around as long as there are people. Perhaps it is a good figure for the short term, but for the long haul, it is very low.