The insanity of defense spending, and a lesson about policy illiteracy | Hacker News Reader

The insanity of defense spending, and a lesson about policy illiteracy

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14 pointsivankirigin8 comments

Humans are terrible with big numbers. Once they become so big we don't have real-world comparisons things start to break down. 12 is a number you can relate to because you can picture 12 apples. And you can compare it with 100 apples. Or oranges ;-)

Once you get into the territory of millions, billions and trillions we don't have any meaningful comparisons to guide us. The result is that we don't really grok the difference between a million and a trillion.

The remedy is charts. If you make a barchart showing the difference between a million and a trillion it becomes obvious that there's a huge difference.

I think you make a good point.

I'd liken this also to Mike Caro's poker concept of the "Threshold of Misery"...Suppose you considered $1,000 a lot of money. Then, mentally, losing $400 is bad, but not as bad as losing $800, but losing $4,000 is roughly just as bad as losing $5,000 despite the fact that the difference is "a lot of money".

The government pretty consistently throws good money after bad.

The order difference between iRobot's revenue (10^8), and the defense budget (10^11) is smaller than difference between a Starbucks coffee (10^0) and a car (10^4) or a house (10^5). I would hope people could handle that math.

I suppose the mortgage crisis is evidence that people can't handle even that every day math.

I agree visualization is a great solution.

Nice comparisons. The problem is not that people can't handle it, the problem is that people don't think about it.

I'm pretty good at math (in comparison to most people here I'm probably terrible but anyway) and I don't really think much about it. It's easy to do the math and come up with comparisons like you did, but you're exposed to so many numbers and so much information that you don't really bother.

Thus "Government overruns budget by $10 billion" becomes the same headline as "Government overruns budget by $10 trillion" in my mind whereas the headline "teen has three daughters" is distinctly and instantly different than "teen has fifty daughters"

  teen has 3000 daughters

Indeed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance

A lot of spending is corrupt like that: One F-22 part in every Congressional district? That's hugely wasteful.

I remember reading a few years back about some kind of troop transport that cost a cool billion to make - and the armed forces didn't want it any more! They had enough, they didn't want more, but it was built in an important senator's district, so they kept making this useless transport that they military didn't want.

Way too much corruption and pork in American politics. The government should be ruthless about getting the best prices. Whenever you do business, you assume a risk you can't collect - with the government, it's the most stable game in town, and they have economies of scale. They should be getting between a 10% and 70% discount over market rates on everything they buy, instead of paying 20% to 4000% premiums like they do.

I like how all the articles about the F-22 say it's a relic of the cold war; a case of fighting the last war. Right now "the last war" is asymmetric bombing of poor brown people. The next war very well might be a conventional war against a nation with a serious air force.

I have no real opinions on the F-22, but all these dismissals of it as some obvious waste are odd to me. Specific merits of the F-22 aside, pursuit of air supremacy over technologically advanced nations is not so obviously a waste, I don't think. It merits discussion.

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