Why India's Mars mission is so cheap – and thrilling

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.

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

> 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.

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.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319102