Right now, launching satellites in the US is a pain in the ass, thanks to the combination of ITER[1] and the lack of a replacement for the shuttle.
If India can become a launch destination for US companies looking to throw birds into orbit, that's big. Doubly so because it's not like they don't have plenty of engineers. Hell, this might be the case already, and I just don't know.
[1] okay, now EAR, but still.
The Atlas V is the current standard for putting satellites into space.
Sierra Nevada Corporation puts a satellite into orbit almost once a week.
The pain you speak of is non existent.
That's simply untrue. Access to launchers is the bottleneck to satellite development. Large institutional customers have access to space, but almost nobody else does. The commercial satellite industry has been shaped by the shortage of launchers, with satellites designed to be launched infrequently with long design lives. As a result everything is tremendously expensive.
This is changing slowly with the advent of SpaceX and the develoment of launchers by other countries. There's no reason launches can't be an order of magnitude cheaper. The fuel cost is actually a minimal part of the cost of a rocket system.
I work in the space business. Getting access to a suitable launcher for smaller lower priority projects is hard.
PS: In the end there is a fairly small list of things satilites can do, they can measure things, relay information, or act as a beacon. Useful, but we don't exactly need 10 independent world wide GPS platforms.
That's good and let's hope it doesn't change soon. We're already risking Kessler syndrome[0], and allowing any poor schmuck to launch throwaway satellites as a way to earn money is a huge, global tragedy of commons waiting to happen.
A point I believe Antonio Elias made a couple years ago (I quite him a lot...) was that the satellite market is currently quite inelastic. Both when Russian launchers became available to the west, and with cheap Chinese launchers hit the market, global launch rates didn't really increase. Clients just moved around, and pocketed the difference.
Wow, I'm interested. Let's hear them!
> they help to push money around the economy (worker salaries and equipment invoices)
But that already happens with any new enterprise. Any new company created helps push money around through employee salaries and equipment invoices. What's special about a space mission in this regard?
> but also in terms of the skills gained by everybody that works on the project
But that already happens naturally in the free market. We have an explosion of tech jobs now that are increasing everyone's skills. It's almost a given now that an employee must be computer literate. Advances in technology have required that people have more skills. What's special about a space mission in this regard?
> as well as the international capital of being a spacefaring country
A.k.a. bragging rights. Do you really think international investors care if a country is throwing rockets when deciding to invest in that country? That they are that frivolous?
ISRO's expertise is also helpful to advance India's defense capabilities which could have otherwise remained hostage to USA's Military Industrial Complex.
> Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India
This does not take into account what the money would have done otherwise. Since we can not know what the money otherwise would have been spent on its hard or impossilble to say it it is better for india.
> A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India.
The money would alternativly also have been spent on thing bought in india, also gone into the pockets of shops and other things. This money would also have been taxed, just the same as it is now.
You are completly ignoring the counterfactual, you only look at the things that did happen, and not at the things that did not happen because of this.
So its not a win win win. It might be a win win lost. Or maybe a win lost lost. Again, im not against spending on space programmes, but your economic analysis is completly flawed. People who want taxes to build sport statums make much the same case and also ignore the counterfactual.
The spending of taxes should be done on the merits of the direct effects you want to achive and not some nebulus things that money will do later.
Maybe, or maybe it wouldn't have been. They could have spent the same money on imports.
"Important", unqualified by a specific concrete, objectively measurable goal that thing are judged by importance to, is inherently subjective.
I don't mean to be rude, but so what that you think this or that is more important? The discussion should be based on the merits of each investment, not eric_cc's list of most important things on an objective level.
Get off your high horse.
I wonder this as well.
I would like to share one story and one HN comment that I think are both eloquent and highly relevant to the discussion:
Why Explore Space?
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Who Saves Lives?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025495
* * *
I commented in an earlier story today, but I think this mission will serve to kindle a fire in young people, stoking their interests in technology, science, orbital mechanics, etc... particularly in India, but will hopefully resonate throughout the world. In the broader picture, this mission represents the seeds of inspiration being planted for a future generation. Imagine the scientists and engineers that this event will bring forth and blossom.
Secondly, as it has been said several times Indian space program gets just small fraction of total Indian budget.
Guess what, people would not use them because going to the bathroom in town was taboo. They would walk past the new toilet facility and use the woods.
a. The primary target market found the cost to high
b. The primary market who had always used the woods were embarrassed of not knowing how to "use" the facilities and embarrassed to ask anyone about it.
c. There were some free locations, that were filthy.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21607837-fixing-dreadful-...
> Evidence is growing that India must urgently correct its cultural practices, though it is sensitive to say so. Studies of India’s population show how since at least the 1960s child mortality rates have consistently been higher in Hindu families than Muslim ones—though Muslims typically are poorer, less educated and have less access to clean water
Step by step:
- Government charges people taxes.
- Government uses tax money to pay scientists and equipment.
- Government makes tax-over-tax profits by charging taxes again on scientists salaries (which were already paid with tax money, but now will be charged tax again) and on equipment purchases (sales tax will be charged on equipment that is already being bought with tax money). Everything the scientists spend their income on will also be taxed again.
This is just a ruse so government makes more money. It fools people every time.
- Is the Mars mission the best allocation of those resources right now?
- Could this money generate more wealth, or the same wealth faster, if it were allocated elsewhere? (for instance, savings generating higher interest rates and more small business loans)
I can't understand how people think these programs are a good idea. I'm not against exploring Mars, mind you, and I think it's a good idea. But what we have to do is create incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to come up with ideas.
This is stupid and definitely not true by definition. Free market is full of zero-sum games (like advertising) that waste resources and government can be significantly cheaper by the sole virtue of not having to compete with anyone. Even if free market is often better in practice, that observation is far from allowing for a general declarative statement like yours.
> I can't understand how people think these programs are a good idea. (...) But what we have to do is create incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to come up with ideas.
Because they provide hard to quantify mid-to-long-term benefits, and little profits short-term, which is the exact blind spot of entrepreneurs. Look, capitalistic economy is a greedy optimization algorithm (with the computer-science connotations of the word greedy); if something isn't immediately profitable, it won't be done, period, no matter the long-term benefits.
People like Elon Musk do space in spite of free market, not thanks to it - he had a dream and enough money to push cheap rockets down the market's throat whether it wanted them or not.
However,
> if something isn't immediately profitable, it won't be done, period, no matter the long-term benefits.
This is not true. Many companys make huge amount of long term investments that will not be profitable for a while. Companys that fail to to do these kind of things will have long term problems when the market changes and they have nothing new to offer.
> People like Elon Musk do space in spite of free market, not thanks to it - he had a dream and enough money to push cheap rockets down the market's throat whether it wanted them or not.
This is also a strange phrasing. Musk could not do what he does without market demand for his product, he has lots of money but not enougth to fully devlop everything he wants without profit. He might not have started the project to make space flight cheaper, but thats the effect the market cares about and thats why its a substainable project.
Space flight is also very special because regulation are way beyond what you normally face. Goverments around the world are not to friendly to people building these kinds of rockets. SpaceX for example only has americans working there because of these regulations.
I guess it depends both on how long is the long term, and on the quantifiability of the returns of investment. There was a nice thread about it yesterday, with a wonderful quote:
"My former boss (CTO of Panasonic) once told me that the only way to do real R&D is to have a monopoly that allows you to hide the margins in cutting edge R&D. Everyone else was doing just product development."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357318
Entrepreneurs avoid doing "blue-sky" research because the return is unpredictable. It might be zero, it might be a little bit, it might be an entire new industry - but you can't predict your profit. That's why we have governments that fund basic research with no expectation of getting anything from it immediately.
> This is also a strange phrasing. Musk could not do what he does without market demand for his product, he has lots of money but not enougth to fully devlop everything he wants without profit.
True. What I meant is that both here and with Tesla, he used his money to force this demand. They had to do a lot of work to get electric cars to the point people actually started to want them. Ditto for rockets; he needs them for his goals, so he made them profitable where previously they were not. But toilet-paper businesses [0] (which are the majority of the market) went elsewhere, there are plenty of lower-hanging fruits that you can monetize if you don't care what you're selling.
> Look, capitalistic economy is a greedy optimization algorithm [...] if something isn't immediately profitable, it won't be done, period
Your "Look" and "period" intimidation tactics aside, what you are saying contradicts the way capitalism works. An enterprise only comes to be through savings, that are then invested. This in itself is inherently a long-term process that aims towards what will be profitable in the future. Capitalism only works through sacrificing short-term gains for long-term bigger gains. I have no idea where you got the skewed view that capitalism is myopic as you put it. Apple invests R&D on new products all the time and it funds it with its own money. If it had to pay taxes in the US it might not have been able to fund its own research, and then you'd see companies lobbying for R&D tax cuts, which then generate more waste through increased red tape.
> Tesla, he used his money to force this demand.
You're playing words games. Tesla bought rockets, that's it. He didn't "force the demand" for rockets, he increased it by 1 through wanting them. The essential difference is that Musk did not steal money from anyone in order to buy rockets. The government, on the other hand, steals from its constituents so that someone that did not earn the right to build a rocket can now build one. And obviously Tesla's rockets or whatever he's doing (I don't really care) will be better because he has an incentive to optimize his resources' allocation as it is his money on the line. A governmental agency has no such incentive to be wise with its funds since it never earned it and it can always request more.
To respond to a particular point,
> Not having to compete with anyone does not make a product cheaper, it makes it more expensive. Competition drives prices down. So the government having a monopoly over a service makes that service more expensive.
True in many cases, especially if you only care about end-buyer price, but false in others. Some things fail spectacularly when you make them competitive. Things like basic research, things like exploiting a limited pool of shared resources, things like schools and prisons - they all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules. Some would say medicare is another similar thing. The market price is not the only important metric; some others are: quality, accessibility, efficiency, externalities.
> Advertising is not a waste of resources, it is investment of resources - literally, money spent buying leads in order to try and convert them into customers.
Who, were you not to convert them, would go to the competitor. It's a total waste of resources - you spend money (and more importantly, fuel and man-hours) trying to one-up your competitor, he does the same; on average, you still get the same amount of clients, only both of you wasted resources on a stupid zero-sum game. You'd both be better off if you agreed to not run any more ads that it take for people to discover you exist; yet since you can't agree on that, you're stuck in a zero-sum game.
> Things like basic research, things like exploiting a limited pool of shared resources, things like schools and prisons - they all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules.
Research is done with money from profits; if companies weren't taxed so much they'd have more profits left to invest in R&D.
Public schools are a vehicle for government propaganda and the brainwashing of children. There, they are conditioned to obey, not to question, and not to trust their own thinking. Public education as it is is as much child abuse as growing up religious is; it teaches kids the truth is in others, and that they couldn't have arrived at true conclusions by themselves.
There are better ways to deal with crime than prisons. It's a strawman to counter anarchist views with "but what of the roads? and prisons?" as if those are the only ways to travel and to curb crime. Go back in history, there are several alternatives to these that do not necessitate the government. Of particular interest is Iceland in the 10th century, but that's really just one example. I wonder how much research you've done to conclude with so much certainty that those things "all go to hell when you try to run them on free-market rules".
Advertising is not money spent trying to one-up competitors (though it can be). It is broadcasting the existence of a service or product. It's not about converting others to drop their favorite brands (though it can be), but about letting others know you exist. How do you get people to know you exist without advertisement?
I'd also like to point out that although I usually enjoy your comments here, you're being extremely condescending to me in your tone. Examples: "pretty much [...] debunks your points", "a lot of dogmas that sound nice", "trivially easy to be shown false", etc. The reason I point this out is because I'm routinely downvoted for defending my side of the argument, when in fact we should be using downvotes for people like you that address others with contempt and trivialize their points.
Are downvotes votes of disagreement? If so, everyone should be able to downvote.
Your fallacy is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Most of the wealth of developed nations comes from the belief that holding an asset will be worth more later - for example a house in your neighborhood will be increasingly valuable because people will continue to want buy it for the local schools, jobs, etc. How the rate at which assets are projected to increase in value is THE central lever on economic performance. What space tech does is says: the assets in this economy have the potential to increase in value at a greater rate. This makes everyone in the economy better off due to investment speculation "wealth from belief".
However, I do think its valid to critique India if it were to over-invest in space-tech: they are not a modern economy with a large middle class yet, and thus could see more lucrative gains from New-Deal / GI-Bill -esque promotion of middle class. That being said, any (safe) investment portfolio should have a mix of all possible good policies, which includes tech programs along with social-welfare.
Developed countries are wealthier because it takes a tiny fraction of human effort to produce e.g. a car or a loaf of bread compared to in a developed country, because through investing in technology/capital we're much more productive at making cars and bread.
The salaries are not merely money being cycled around in the economy if the labor being paid for results in the scientists not having time or inclination to produce other labor. Furthermore, it is likely that the resources launched off of the planet could have been used for something else.
Whether or not it is equivalent to the broken window fallacy really does depend on subjective assessments of the value produced by the missions. However, it is also worth noting that even the broken window fallacy is not some universal law, and relies on its own assumptions. In certain market failure conditions destroying something and fixing it as a mechanism for increasing the velocity of money could have a net benefit.
Although it is very useful to distinguish between the real economy and money transactions as though money is an abstraction for resources being traded around, the best policies also acknowledge the existence of money, as well as friction in the economy.
I have no idea why pravda is being downmodded, beyond silly mood affiliation.
The 'broken window Fallacy' is Bastiat's observation that while the income generated for glaziers from repairing rboken windows is indeed a form of economic activity, and that this is nice enough if you're in the window business, it's economically inefficient because the economic activity merely restores the status quo instead of going to finance new production - had the window remained unbroken, the shopkeeper might have bought a book or a suit of clothes. The glazier's gain is the shopowner's loss and so there's no net improvement.
But that's a wholly inappropriate analogy for this situation of expenditure going towards Indian scientists and technicians, because they were engaged in new and productive work rather than merely receiving a subsidy. The Indian government didn't have an existing interplanetary program that was scrapped and replaced with another; it built one from scratch. In terms of Bastiat's analogy, it would be as if the shopkeeper hired the glazier to install a new window in what had previously been a blank wall.
The direct economic value of measuring whether there is methane in Mars' atmosphere is intangible - just as it would be hard to measure the impact of a newly-added window on a shopkeeper's turnover at the time of its installation. It could also be argued that NASA or some other space agency could conduct the same measurement on some future Mars project, and so the ISRO effort is probably duplicative. But even if the direct economic output of the craft itself is assumed to be zero, the development of the satellite manufacturing and launch capability, which is a net economic gain too, whereas the replacement of a broken window does not have any innovative component (since the prior existence of the window means the capability to make it already existed).
It seems to me that you and the other two posters who are arguing this position are making the implicit assumption that that NASA et al. have a comparative advantage in the development of space technology and that therefore Indian efforts are economically superfluous, in addition to your general distaste for the notion of government as client.
You've completely ignored what Zizee said and substituted a different argument. Zizee said this:
Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created...
Zizee is claiming that even if the mars mission were useless (kind of like breaking/fixing windows) the project would be justified simply because salaries are being paid.
Situation 1: There is a window. It gets broken. The shopkeeper pays for it to be replaced, instead of buying a book.
Situation 2: There is no window, and there is no need for a window. But the shopkeeper pays for a window anyway, instead of buying a book.
Situation 1 is restoring the status quo, situation 2 is financing new production - but they seem equally bad, because in both cases you're paying someone to do something that doesn't (at the beginning of the situation) need to be done.
I'm not saying that we're in situation 2 here, because windows are in fact useful. But zizee's original argument was roughly, "let's forget all the benefits that we get from windows, this project is paying the wages of glaziers, this money will get taxed and etc." And I think that that particular argument in favour of this project fails, and I think pravda was correct to point it out.
There's no need for any voluntary purchase, by definition. You're arguing that we should only spend so as to maximize utility, but utility is subjective and that's why we value markets over individuals. After all, what is the utility of the foregone book? It may merely afford pleasure to the reader, or be hurled across the room. It doesn't matter; the book's significance lies not in its content but in the fact of its production, for which the demand would not otherwise exist if the same money had been spent on the repair of a broken window.
Um. I'm probably misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that we should force people to buy things they don't want or need in order to make the market healthy?
If you are saying that, I strongly disagree. Both causally (I don't think that will make the market healthy) and normatively (even if it did, I would need a lot of convincing to advocate that).
If you're not, could you clarify?
> for which the demand would not otherwise exist if the same money had been spent on the repair of a broken window.
Or if the money had been spent on any window.
By "there is no need for a window", I meant "nobody cares if there's a window there". In both situations, money transfers from the shopkeeper to the glazier, the glazier does some glazing, and the shopkeeper ends up no better off than before.
pravda did not point that out. pravda claimed zizee was using the Broken Window Fallacy. zizee's argument and your summarization of it are not examples of the fallacy. Nor is situation 2 in your post above. The fallacy has nothing to do with something being useful or necessary.
The broken window just doesn't strike me as a central part of the broken window fallacy. To me, the important part is that people see the glazier getting money in exchange for a service, and think that economics is happening and this is a good thing; but they don't see that if the glazier didn't get that money, the bookseller would.
So I'd say that yeah, zizee is committing the broken window fallacy, even if the broken window itself has no analogous component in vis reasoning.
(But I'm not going to argue about it if you continue to disagree. That would be a profoundly boring argument.)
Well, new and productive work is not equivalent to valuable work, for possibly a pretty big number of definitions of "valuable". Of course, "valuable" is subjective.
I mean, of course, in the global future context, this endeavor may contribute a lot of value, but what if I am starving and I probably wont be there to take advantage of that value? With sufficient people in this situation, the value of this project is pretty low.
This is a completely nonsensical line of reasoning, that's why. They're still paying folks to do ostensibly wasteful activities, and you're not going to successfully counter that with your perpetual motion economics.
This is the logic of "useless" expenditures on space programs, and it is not some theoretical claim, but one that has been borne out many times in the US and elsewhere. This ground has been covered so many times in the past fifty years it isn't clear why anyone still believes that investment in space exploration is not a wise way to spend a modest fraction of taxpayer's money.
Moreover, 'zizee is talking about something even more powerful. Space programs can act as huge multipliers on an economy. A country's economy is sort of a closed system, but that doesn't mean it can't undergo a multitude of phase changes that free up resources after spending money (even waste fully). Astonishing amounts of infrastructure is needed to support a space program, and a lot of it translates to other industries well. Just as a plant opening in a town may only directly employ a few hundred people, the support infrastructure - from welding shops to hardware suppliers to diners - is huge. Many thousands will be affected by those few hundred workers.
A US example: a plant engineer goes out to lunch. Their salary has already been taxed through withheld federal payroll taxes. At the diner, a 10 buck blue plate special is ordered, and a tip left. The town has a tax on prepared dishes, which is added, and the wait staff will have their wages (and possibly tips) taxed - a wage which some portion of which is was from the lunch. That lunch also goes to support a local farmers group and a national cattle company. And so on; the piece gets smaller and smaller as it splits and redistributes through the local and national economy (and these days likely global). At some point, that money is spent.
But there's no zero sum here. Hopefully, at every step of the redistribution, at every split, some wealth was generated. A service was performed where it wouldn't have without some money. Some taxes were collected and put back into infrastructure which added a new light to the two-lane Main Street making it safer and faster for trucks to go through, a state grant to the local colleges, and a federal appropriation bill that supports local green farmer groups. The light makes more business possible on the far end of town, and drives down the plant's shipping costs a little, leading to a buck fifty more on the quarterly bonus the laborer a got later that year. And I'm leaving the other two alone, as this gets out of hand fast. At some positive, non-zero rate, the economy very slightly accelerated.
A decade later, two more plants from other industries are opening. The town is small, but has been friendly to industry. The first plant has some skilled labor that is sorely needed for these plants, and a few leave for slightly higher wages. The old plant has an established reputation in the town, and eagerly hires some replacement twenty-something's, both for their cheaper cost to stay competitive and to train fresh minds (to correct what they learned from the first ten years of mistakes).
Those skilled workers who got hired for a little more money, just for their exposure to the industry and a few skills picked up applicable to the new plants? They are going to get a blue plate special, but this time with pie. That could yield an extra buck or two to the diner - a buck or two that would never have been bought if the workers didn't get the raise from the minor skills gained from the plant that hired a couple hundred people ten years ago.
Space is like that, but with the accelerator to the floor. Technology from space programs infuse industry across the board, and require skilled labor from every level: from rocket scientist engineers to the guy painstakingly polishing the special steel alloys in a clean room. And they're all becoming slowly more valuable as a result, and they'll earn higher wages, eventually. And that money, gained from that wealth in knowledge and skill, generates more wealth - and eventually money.
Keep that up for long enough, and you've got enough skilled people to keep an economy running indefinitely. Which I suppose detracts from my initial statement: it sorta is a perpetual motion machine. Bootstrap it well, and the system will, in fact, continue to grow. Economies are big, governments are big, and they're only closed systems if you insist on zooming in and putting dotted lines around only money flow.
Amendment: contrast this perhaps with the Superconducting Super Collider. A boondoggle of there ever was one, many thousands were hired for no appreciable result, many hundreds of millions of dollars were literally sunk into a super high tech [partial] ring in the ground, and millions in equipment was manufactured and purchased. And yet, foolish as it turned out to be, it still payed many thousands a wage for a few years, fueling nearby industries with displaced highly skilled laborers now without a job, and apparently local wineries can make use of the stupefyingly expensive tunnels. All the while, the boondoggle pumped money into the hands of people who spent it, who then went on to spend what they received, all of which is getting taxed over and over. Some of that money absolutely had to end back up with the government, just as some of the air you breath was likely also breathed by any arbitrary other human. Even wasteful, such an endeavor was at least useful for it's multiplier effect. (Personally I would have loved to work on the SSC and think it was a shame to kill it, but holy geez it cost a lot - but at least can learn from a cool tech who tested components in an EM anechoic chamber, which inspired a trick I've used to help make windows slightly more reliably energy efficient. Side effects.)
Government spending via redistribution is absolutely zero sum.
Every dollar spent by the government into the economy is one dollar taxed out of the economy. Money that is given to some has to necessarily come from others. Just because the benefits are concentrated and the harm is spread out doesn't change the fact that you've only taken money from A and given to B. No additional wealth or prosperity is being created in that transaction.
Now, it may be the case that once B has the money, he spends or invests it more efficiently (in new skills, new assets or what have you) than A would have. But such a multiplier effect, if it happens, is happening in spite of, not because of, government redistribution.
> Hopefully, at every step of the redistribution, at every split, some wealth was generated
The key word is "Hopefully." It is highly unlikely that a government bureaucracy will distribute money such that it is spent more efficiently and productively than an individual taxpayer would if he still had the money to spend himself.
Yes, the economy creates wealth, but only when productivity increases. Redistribution does not create any wealth, only "spreads it around," except for the rare cases when someone in the bureaucracy makes a better decision with the money than the people who paid it in taxes. But I can't really think of a time that has been the case...
This talking point does not hold up to scrutiny.
There are plenty of examples where individuals fail to build infrastructure that, if built, would help everyone much more than the cumulative cost to build the infrastructure. The same goes for research and technology development.
Basically, the talking point assumes that individuals are rational economic actors in a rational market, and this is just not true. Additionally, even if the individuals were rational and fully informed, there will be highly suboptimal Nash equilibria.
But you are mistakenly assuming that all government spending is redistributive, as if the only thing the government did was transfer payments. Government also provides services (sometimes by contracting out to the private sector) and invests in physical capital (likewise).
Yes, a dollar taken from someone and given to another is a net null. But when we consider scale and efficacy of large organizational actors, perhaps we notice the potential of these tax dollars. It's not just the individual line A to B that must be considered. It's A to Gov to B.
I can't fund high-capacity battery research the same way the government can. I'd need to find, say, 10,000 other folks to throw $100 into a pool that we could give to a researcher to fund her experiments. She hires help, does work, maybe something comes from it. But,
How do we know she's using our money as intended? How do we know she's producing results, and the quality of those? How do we select her from all the other applicants?
Well, let's hire an auditor to check that the money is being used appropriately. Then, we need other folks in her field to confirm for us that her research is productive. We'd also need those experts (or others) to help in the technical review of her proposal against other proposals to select the most beneficial one.
Interestingly, it all starts to look like a bureaucracy. Because that's ultimately what a government, in all its spite, ends up providing -- a shared set of resources through which a society can effect greater change as a whole on itself than it could individually.
I'm sorry that your experiences and epistemology lead you toward contempt for such an apparatus, but please recognize the benefits and net-positive effect, particularly to science and engineering, such an organization has demonstrably provided.
To a country with little established science, this can be a gigantic booster shot to their domestic science abilities both through funding and in the case of space programs, inspiring youth.
As we awknowledge that a healthy scientific community is an economic boon, one could say that money is taken from A, redistributed to B by the government, and in the process creating industry C which will hugely benefit the country in the future.
A modest, very simple example is the US National Park Service. It runs a profit! Government dollars create the Parks, and obviously they are a good that is worth more to the public than the taxes it cost to make them. But that generally would not happen without Government intervention.
Not at all, most governments print their country's currency.
Well, at the level of the currency issuer (of which India is one), Government spending is money creation, and not redistribution.
Sounds like you want an effective political system to oversee that distribution. Me too.
Government spending must be essentially zero sum, since it almost exclusively must spend within a closed system (it'd be a bit silly for it to primarily spend on some other country's, after all). But to say that government spending can't be as productive as individual taxpayer spending is sort of misunderstanding scope. The typical person can't be bothered to deal with the coordination of funding all the things they'd like; the number of services that gently affect our lives is staggering. To suggest the individual administrate such spending is like suggesting we generate a line item for everything the government provides and be able to select what we personally want from it; there's a utopia to be had there, but holy mackerel the logistical coordination and administrative overhead for such a system would be mind-bogglingly complex and large, or the life simple, dull, and risky. I bet there's a Murphy's Law corollary somewhere that suggests such a fair replacement is at least as dysfunctional as the current system (heck, I'll just invoke the central theorem of Systemantics [1]).
Anyhow, the win here is that governments can concentrate money to generate a kind of critical mass, It can create opportunities that otherwise couldn't germinate (and, well, often don't). Some accomplishments require ridiculous amounts of money - more than a person could ever hope to have. Until very recently (say last ten years?), it hasn't been possible for extremely large groups of people to coordinate resources for extremely large technologically and logistically complex projects without also having a very direct, obvious, and positive feedback mechanism (read: short-term profit); crowd sourcing may actually be a fantastic replacement economically for government's deep pockets, but we're absolutely not there yet. And without that insane access to enormous capital, we simply can't bootstrap many of these industries. There are notable exceptions, but they're notable because of how uncommon and unlikely they are; legends arise from powerful individuals building massive industry sectors, but rarely without extensive help from the government (obligatory references to Standard Oil and SpaceX).
So we rely on the government to do such things as bootstrap super-capital intensive stuff. The sort of things that require billions to begin and decades to mature. And 50 years later, it's clearly paying off! What once required tens of billions to do once now can be done for tens of millions! And it's gotten so mature, the private sector is finally starting to compete with the government... here.
I'm not going to argue the value of a space program. It's so deeply integral to the magic of modern life it's dizzyingly complex to even contemplate listing. Like trying to figure out if it was worth Bell Labs allowing the transistor to be invented.
India's got a helluva scrappy space program. It manages to do a lot of things right, and as noted elsewhere by 'tn13 [2], it may even be profitable! (I have no idea how to figure out if that's actually true - it's tricky to figure out if individual sections of a plant are stand-alone profitable, let alone a complex government entity!)
[0] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/104873-there-are-10-11-stars... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics#Premise [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8364632
Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India in this process and look at where the money is going.
A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. This money will in turn get taxed and spent by the recipients and pumped back into the local economy.
As far as I can see it is a win win win.