It also happens to be wrong.
If more projects that require nuclear physicists get funded, more people can become nuclear physicists. We're nowhere near the point that we're going to run out of potential nuclear physicists who could be trained if there was more demand for them.
At some kind of abstract level there are a finite number of people in the world so anybody who does something can't be doing something else, but there are more than enough people for whom the "something else" is either unemployment or some net-annihilating occupation like divorce attorneys or advertising that we shouldn't have to worry about people spending their time doing something actually beneficial.
>> It also happens to be wrong.
Wow. The startup guy gave an actual example of the tradeoff. Am I correct that you see that not as a tradeoff but as a loss?
So the trade off wasn't between physics and software. We could've had both of those at the "cost" of fewer divorce lawyers or lower unemployment, neither of which are actually costs.
There is a theoretical point where having people do physics is less productive than having them do anything else they might've done, but we're nowhere near it. We still have people working in advertising only to cancel out the work of other people working in advertising.
The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... The comment you to which you are responding even asserted that basic research does have value - and does not assert that the trade offs go one way or another.
The implication of the comment as I read it was that we should at least critically think about those trade offs rather than just writing a blank check to whatever basic science scientists are requesting to pursue.
Your comment, in contrast, claims that the tradeoff always is worth it - that 'whenever' money is not diverted to basic research, then we are all poorer. You have no evidence for this claim.
In fact - no one really understands much about how best to evaluate this tradeoff. A helpful contribution to the discourse would provide us with tools to think about how to evaluate it, rather than just the endless tribalistic drum beating for one side or the other.