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RE: The CERN Large Hadron Collider and its economical impact on the society
This kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. The only way to know if costs < benefit is for private individuals to make decisions. If you are spending other people's money you have not factored in the opportunity costs.
What could 13.5G EUR have been spent on instead if tax money was not spent.
What is the impact of the loss of freedom, the centralization of knowledge, and the politics of deciding which experiments to run?
Governments are using cost-benefit analyses all the time to decide whether they should invest tax-payer money in this and that project. Private individuals are never making any decision at that level. I agree that this money could have been spent otherwise, but this holds for any single project funded by a government, doesn't it?
Coming back to the LHC money, it consists at the end only of a small fraction of the money of a state. I recall that this number is integrated over more than 30 years. Fundamental science experiments are hence cheap (compared to a state budget) and could bring a lot in decades. And even if they are not bringing anything, some benefits (even if they are small) are there. This is the point I wanted to show.
Concerning the second point of your post, I am not sure to follow.
Which loss of freedom? This I do not understand at all.
Then, knowledge is not centralized: all CERN's results are publicly available and data is stored world-wide and will be made publicly available in the future (some pieces of data is already there on the web). IMO, this is not really what one could call a centralized knowledge.
Finally, to comment on the third point, at the political level, they are many discussions within the community about experiments that should be run, in particular from the scientific standpoint (we are now discussing the next generation of collider experiments). At the end, the community will decide what is good for it (and this does not mean one single experiment).
Easy to write of the masses. You should review mises on socialisms in ability to do real economic calculation.
I am sorry but I do not understand. I have only shown that one gets benefits from the LHC. I have not said that this was the way to optimize the benefits.
Should we stop funding at all any research that does not bring immediate benefits? Do you really think this is the right way to do for the future?
Well if the 13.5 billion would have been invested in Steem instead, we could have furthered the cause of free-speech, and a decentralized social media. Now that would have been a worthwile cause for humanity to pursue, instead of searching for a needle in the haystack of physics, that doesn't have immediate financial utility.
Not to mention research is always a gamble, you might end up with good results, or you might burn a lot of money that could have been much better utilized. Of course the wasted money is never talked about.
There are indeed many other ways to spend that money, and many of them are good ways as well. One could decide to build new hospitals, new schools, maybe invest in steem. Why not? One could also simply say goodbye to fundamental research on the basis that it is not the best way to optimize the benefits. Fine. That's correct (my post was only there to show that there are benefits; nothing more nothing less).
I would like however to recall that in the case of a large research infrastructure such as the LHC, the most important fraction of the benefits are stemming from the transfer of knowledge to the industry and the society for free. Think about that (the web and the GPS are two examples). No new fundamental scientific developments may close the door to awesome future applications on the long term.
I personally do not think this is the right way to do. One should not only focus on present time and close future, but also offer options to the next generations. And as I said, at the end, it is a small amount of money compared to the budget of the states.
So why closing those doors? Knowledge per se has a value and the investment to get it is not that large.
I think you misunderstood me, I am not against science or knowledge, they are important things.
But we need to do it efficiently, and we need to have a measurement system to show if the money was allocated efficiently. To my knowledge the free market is the way, with the price signals.
Think of cancer research, we have spent billions on that from taxpayer money, and we are no close to the magical cure than we were when we started, in fact new forms of cancer are popping up every single year.
If that money would have been spent in cancer prevention , instead of a magical cure, we would be far better off for example : Reducing pollution, reducing arsenic and cesium from drinking water, reducing the led from the wallpaint, etc.. all of them known cancer causes.
Thanks for the clarifications! Indeed I misunderstood you.
I am not sure the free market as such is a good way to check whether the money was spent efficiently. That is actually a discussion we already had on steemit (see for instance on this post).
Personally, I like the idea. I am fighting a lot for having everything public, freely accessible, etc (I should write more about what I did in the past few years I think; this may interest some).
However, my worry is that anyone, even people without any scientific background, could vote for or against any scientific project. The coolest project may not be the most relevant one, may even be wrong on scientific grounds, and very important projects may sound boring and thus never get funded.
Concerning your health example (quoting @lamouthe who is in the medical system), the problem in our western countries is really prevention in general. The reason is that the benefits cannot really be casted under a monetary form so that most do not care.
Note that is entirely the opposite in Asian countries where prevention plays the largest role.
Now moving on with the cancer, several forms of cancer can now be cured due to the fact that cancers can be identified very precisely and very early (thanks to research). For instance, leukaemias that were killing children 20 years ago can now be cured with an 80% success rate.