I made a chart! This is the kind of thing you do when you return from a long trip and are jet-lagged.
These are the 2008 research budgets for physical sciences, in billions of dollars, for the main funding agencies in the U.S.: the Department of Energy, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. For helpful comparison purposes, I’ve also plotted the $14.9 billion that has been misplaced over the course of our reconstruction efforts in Iraq. Not the cost of the war itself, which has been over $500 billion so far and will be well over a trillion when all is said and done. Just the funds that were … lost. Embezzled, whatever. Labels are so confining.
Readers with interests outside science funding are welcome to suggest their own comparisons.
It is often pointed out that the U.S. spends about as much as the rest of the world combined for war department budgets.
As a young graduate student in the late 1960’s my thesis covered the impending collapse of the USSR due to excessive military spending, pollution and spiraling costs of surveillance.
Remember when the USSR disappeared from the news? It was quick.
Something that many of us forget is that a significant amount of basic research that is eventually used for military-related applications is paid for by DOE, NASA, and the NSF.
So while it doesn’t qualify as ‘lost’ in the Iraq misadventure, some of the money we spend on DOE, NASA, and NSF does seed some of the products we use to conduct our military misadventures.
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