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Kind of seems to me, the heart of the critique is that 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead. 2. Thus, with such wealth you would expect at least a couple of discoveries.

Not my post, but I think point 1 is stronger than 2.

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> 1. unthinkable amounts of financial and social and political credit have been thrown at this which necessarily has deducted it from other fields we could have invested in, instead.

That's not necessarily true. If our only counterfactual to investing resources in project A were to invest them in some other project B, then, yes, the conclusion above follows. But often people just consume the resources.

(In the end, the goal of all economic activity is consumption. We invest resources so that we can consume more later. If there's no good enough project around, might as well consume more now.)

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