Wednesday, May 21, 2014

The Cost of Adventure

After writing a bit of rant on Andrew Gelman's blog, I looked up some numbers.

The cost of the Vietnam war is estimated at 111 billion 1975 dollars. Over half a million American soldiers served in the war and almost sixty-thousand were killed. The war was lost.

In 1973, the cost of the Apollo program was estimated at 25.4 billion. NASA employed about 35,000 people at the time. All told, as far as I can make out, eight Americans died in the successful attempt to get to the moon.

Now, imagine that, instead of going to Vietnam, America had committed another four times the money and ten times the people to the further exploration of space—and had considered, say, the loss of 3500 lives acceptable. Before you reject that last consideration, let me say that I would have much more willingly incurred a 1:100 risk of dying in an attempt to reach the moon than a 1:10 risk of dying in an attempt to … whatever Vietnam was about. You could have drafted me, I imagine, without much complaint.

4 comments:

Andrew Gelman said...

Thomas:

This is not to disagree with you on the substance, but I've heard it said (for example, by Noam Chomsky) that the Vietnam War was ultimately a win, not a loss, for the U.S. ruling class or whatever you want to call it. Short-term, of course, the U.S. ruling class took a hit from the war in that they lost a lot of the consent of the governed (as the saying goes), but if you think of it in terms of the struggle between communism and capitalism in Asia, it could be considered a win for the capitalists. Anyway, of course I agree with you that this wasn't the best use of 111 billion dollars, but maybe that's not how the people who were writing the checks thought about it!

Thomas said...

i agree with that assessment, actually. As I say in my comment on your blog, the reason space (inner and outer) has not been explored as much as it could these past five decades is that the people who were writing the checks couldn't see the profit in it.

Andrew Gelman said...

Thomas:

Maybe so but my guess is that the push to get into and stay in the Vietnam War was motivated more by fear (of communism internationally and of losing the confidence of the voters within the United States) than by greed.

I suppose I should talk with some of my colleagues in the history and poli sci depts to learn more about what was really going on back then.

Thomas said...

I guess I'm a bit cynical about war aims.