[whatroot8]

Money is a completely abstract thing and at this point says nothing about the material economics. It’s used to manage agency.

Essentially we allowed people $11 billion in human agency to occur for scientific reasons.

Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games, but your economy surely benefited from people doing the real economic exchange this required.

Personally I’d love to put it into designer drugs we can use to let me hallucinate a reality where miserly bean countering control freaks don’t exist, since we’re all going to die anyway and entropy will erode the universe.

Excepting rules against violence and careless end of the species, why all the rules?

[credit_guy]

> Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games

But that's not the alternative here. Cars and video games are created via private investments, by for-profit corporations (and sometimes by volunteering developers). JWST was funded by NASA with public funding. The alternative to JWST was not cars, but rather the other projects that NASA could have funded, but didn't. When NASA made the initial decision to build the JWST, it excluded other projects on the premise that the JWST will cost about $0.5 BN. When later on NASA had to revise upward the cost, it had to either forgo other projects, or ask the Congress for additional funding. Well, the Congress did not provide additional funding [1]. Those with an internal view of NASA know what other projects were dismissed, or canceled because of the perpetual JWST cost revisions. We (the outsiders) will not be privy of these projects, but they certainly existed.

Make no mistake, I consider JWST to be a phenomenal scientific instrument. But when people applaud the launch of JWST, they don't see the non-launch of the multitude of projects that had to be canceled because of the JWST cost overruns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA