India To Build Neutrino Observatory

TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"

Comments

Sorta

[Moraelin]

Sorta, but not exactly. Sure, it eventually trickles and creates that Keynesian multiplier.

But, and here's the important part, so would spending that money on something more useful like schools or water pumps. The money spent on those would create just as many jobs, you know, and you'd also have some schools or clean water instead of a national penis size symbol.

Think of it this way. If you spend X dollars, a Keynesian multiplier of Y says effectively you've put X*Y dollars into the economy. But if you invested that original X into something pointless, effectively you now only have X*(Y-1) that actually goes into anything the country actually needs. Unless Y is at least in the hundreds, you'll still see a difference.

And actually a more reasonable multiplier to expect is somewhere around 1.25 to 1.5. The highest ever multiplier recorded for a government investment was 1.73.

So basically even if you're uber-lucky, a million invested in useless crap will also bring 730,000 that trickles into more useful stuff. Whereas if you invested that million into something useful, well, now you'd have 1.73 million worth of useful stuff.

Basically that multiplier isn't a blank check to do any stupidity whatsoever with the public money. It doesn't mean you can just blow it on any crap and let the multiplier distribute it for you. At the end of the day, a million wasted is still a million wasted.

But it gets even better, actually. The multiplier itself is different for different things you do with the money. A million invested in something could have a multiplier as low as 0.23 (actual historical case too: yes, it's possible for such an investment to actually be a loss) or as high as 1.73. Like any investment, basically, you get a different ROI. It doesn't mean just blow the money or anything and expect it to trickle just the same.

Or in less complicated terms, think of it like this: a country has a certain amount of resources, including manpower. Tying up X thousand people into one project (including making those bricks and supplying the factory and whatnot) means X thousand you won't have for something else. Even if it creates Y thousand other jobs somewhere else too, that original X thousand is still tied up in activity A instead of activity B. If A is less needed than B, that's not a good use of manpower.

Also, I'd say that one should look at the actual conditions in a country before cheering for a waste. The exact multiplier and number of jobs created depend a lot on the local conditions. The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, where really at worst you just diverted some people from marketing jobs and services and other ultimately just ways to do something when you don't need them in actual production, may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.

Re:Sorta

[dkaimal]

What you are not seeing here is that this is probably a better investment than direct investment in schools. Projects like these open up more employment opportunities for those involved in fundamental science and research, which in turn motivates more people to choose that line of study and work. It also retains people who are genuinely skilled in these fields from migrating over to higher paid fields like applied engineering and IT.

Overall, in a country of contradictions like India, it is highly neccessary to sustain and encourage research and development efforts. The people are directly motivated to identify offshoots of their research which can better the lives of people they identify with. I think it is a big folly to focus all your resources on primary education without providing a direction for those benefitting from it. You need the ability to build aspirations within people and out of such efforts come stories that are a lot more valuable than the investment itself.

This is not a first time for India. For over fifty years, India has made large investments in building research instutions which has in turn spurred its populace to acquire the skills to staff these positions. For a country that in 1948 had not a single heavy industry or any technonology or manufacturing ability, it has done rather well to have churned out the huge engineering force from the 80s onwards building a domestic industrial and technological base which is quite enviable when compared to other countries of India's age and background.

Enrollment in education cannot be increased by direct investment or force, it has to be voluntary. And for that, people have to be able to see gainful employment and social status at the end of the road and efforts like this provide that.

Re:Just what India needs

[mlush]

I could be wrong, but I feel that progress needs to happen on all fronts. Research, industry, infrastructure, quality of life, etc.

Ideed $270 million could be used to give everyone in the country 24 cents or provide an incentive for the best and brightest to stay in the country and for bonus points inject money into the Indian high tech industrys.