The frugal planet

All figures are in US dollars!

I recently discussed one of the two main objections to the LHC experiment at CERN in Switzerland, namely that of the usefulness of pure research. The objection that I did not talk about is one that money spent on the research should instead be spent on more useful things. Now that the world is in the midst of an economic crisis, scientific funding is bound to suffer. The claim is that money spent on LHC research ($9 billion over 15 years or $600 million/year) is a waste and should be spent on more important things (feeding the hungry in Africa is always the most popular one). However, with the global GDP at about $70 trillion ( 2008 ) there is a lot of money going around and it’s difficult to look at all of the spending in detail. I thought to look at some spending which apparently is more important than financing scientific research.