Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not an answer to the specific question asked. Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost.
> Not all types of fundamental research have the same potential for material benefits, or the same cost. It is hard to gauge this is in advance though. If you were sure what you were gonna find, it wouldn't be much of a discovery. Historically it has sometimes been decades before manufacturing and practical applications caught up to frontier research. For an extreme example, mankind knew of electricity in some form f…
Virtually all previous particle discoveries were predicted, and then we built devices to find them, eg. the Higgs was predicted in the 1960s. There is no such motivation here. There is no theoretical or significant practical benefit for the FCC, it's basically a jobs program.
There is better frontier research that could use those funds for much better payoffs. For instance, just sticking with particle physics, Wakefield accelerators would be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper than the LHC while achieving the same energies. We've also never built a muon collider, and so that's largely unexplored territory.
We just don't need another radio frequency particle collider, we've reached the limits of what they can do within a reasonable research budget.