> Without coming off as too obtuse, is your argument that the best return we can expect is from investing in basic needs?

If the ROI is not letting mentally ill people die in the street is that enough?

>Or that for any investment to be moral we must have satisfied more primal basic needs?

Yes. Why not? Why not make this a metric?

>What if it were the case that investment in basic research today alleviates a greater amount of suffering over a longer time horizon? What would the moral investment be?

We can fix these issues now by redirecting this $11B to the $2.5B HUD budget for homeless grants. What research is needed to end homelessness and hunger? It is not a hard problem, only hard because of the greed endemic in the culture. All these people who think this is a good idea to spend money on are only interested in themselves and they use these grand notion of it somehow helping people in the future to make themselves feel better.