Comment by littlekey
9 hours ago
>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
9 hours ago
>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
I was raised in a working-class family in Greece in the 1980s. We lived in what the average US person would describe as "squalor". Cockroaches crawling on our faces style.
My parents made only a few luxury expenses: encyclopedias for us children, and especially books about space and the cosmos. So please speak for yourself when talking about the interests of struggling people.
What a sleight of hand to suggest that science funding gathered from taxes is impacting the ability for poorer Americans to afford their food. No wonder politicization of science funding is so successful on the right: it’s so rhetorically intoxicating.
It's especially interesting because prior to the time of the election, the administration approved food funding to states that GOP run states rejected.
Meanwhile a substantial fraction of science research goes into improving the efficiency of farming, which pushes down food prices.
I just watched a video about how inept politicians caused a food crisis in Sri Lanka because they thought they knew better than scientists, chemists, and farmers: https://youtu.be/1S2wwbX_p_E
Sure, and it's a huge indictment of our K-12 educational system. Investments in science, as a whole, pay off many, many, many times in returns. Same with universities and other knowledge-building institutions. If you want to raise everyone's standard of living, the most certain way is to increase investment in those things.
But alas, after many years of convincing people that going to college makes you dumber, enough people have started believing it that they willing vote against their own self-interest.
This implies that the money saved by cutting research was fungible and not part of a still increasing deficit, that the government doesn't debt spend, and that there aren't positive externalities (including jobs, education, and supporting services in addition to outcomes from the research.
Indeed, not only did research programs get cut, but so did USDA funding which both balanced farming and put food on table. And this was a year after the previous administration reduced the deficit, sent food funding to states, of which ~13 rejected the funding.
Food funding, which, has been studied to increase economic output beyond it's costs, similar to research funding.
I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.
Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.
And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.
Well it’s not like the budget cuts to science are being redirected to those people. It’s going to the already rich.
Plenty of poor people across the world have scientific curiosity