Is Science As Important As Football?

http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=6721

by jlhamilton • 17 years ago

55 48 17 years ago

jleyank• 17 years ago

Important to whom? To the average person-in-the-street, the answer is no. Science isn't terribly entertaining, lacks an easily understood competitive aspect and isn't accessible. Football, on the other hand, is something people can and do play amongst themselves and can be watched/enjoyed at many levels of competition.

To society as a whole is a different question. But I'm not sure it leads to a different answer. Billions of people watched the World Cup over several weeks. I can't imagine science, short of things like positive-net-energy fusion or curing AIDS having anywhere near that much interest.

I've studied science and have been fortunate enough to be able to create scientific software. I'm also comfortable with allowing people to do what they want, and pay attention to what they want. I'm not able to do football professionally, but I can (and do) do this science stuff professionally. Different strokes for different folks, eh?

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

Its an aside, but it always frustrates me to hear about the cuts at NASA and how the budget simply won't allow this or that project when every city in America seems to think it needs an $800mm tax-payer funded arena to "stimulate the local economy."

No, you don't get moon bases, hover cars and cures for cancer. You spent your allowance on football, remember?

crescendo• 17 years ago

Football is a very important pastime to a lot of people. Just playing devil's advocate here: can you name one reason why those NASA programs are more important than the football arena, without making reference to your own subjective value system which would be at odds with that of the ardent football fan's?

Retric• 17 years ago

Football can and would exist without subsidies. Spending public funds to support private industry is a bad economic decision. Funding space travel on the other hand is something that would not exist without public funds. So it's outside of the effecency debate.

“debating gladiator reform while Rome burns…”

m0th87• 17 years ago

The Apollo program inspired a generation of engineers that got America on the fast track to victory in the Cold War. Furthermore, NASA has facilitated a great deal of technological and scientific innovation in the past few decades, both directly and indirectly.

It is understandably difficult for a politician to justify this value to an apathetic audience when NASA projects are so expensive and they rarely provide any directly observable positive economic impacts. But I don't think it's unfair for noonespecial to assert that the sciences should be prioritized above something whose sole purpose is entertainment. It's interesting to observe how something like NASA can shape a society, public discourse, and the economy in a positive direction. I wish it could be quantifiable to express this value to the voting base, but I doubt it can be done.

req2• 17 years ago

How about limiting health calamities caused by hypertension or congestive heart failure? http://ims.ivv.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/news/pressrel/2008/08-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Spinoff has a nice list.

alexgartrell2• 17 years ago

From the point of view of the average taxpayer, deliverables on space missions are too few and far between.

When you build an arena (even for non mainstream sport), you make money off of taxing the Franchise, but more substantially off of the local businesses that opened up to serve the fans of the team. Over priced beer, food, and jerseys can make a lot of money if there's a well-liked team behind it all.

Plus, people LIKE it. It's a regional pride thing.

If you're an average guy, do you want to see three astronauts orbit the earth for 6 months, or go down town with your buddies, get drunk, and watch a game?

That's why the average guy votes for the new stadium over NASA.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

There is an eternal tension between elite opinion's love for democracy and its distaste for the tastes of the common man. (We, on the right side of the education and income bell curves, qualify as "elites").

ckinnan• 17 years ago

This is wrong. A number of economic studies show that taxpayer-funded stadiums reallocate dollars, they don't help local business on net-- they just increase the value of the sports team.

https://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/302 http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv23n2/coates.pdf

Teams and regional pride would still exist without taxpayer-funded stadiums.

ajross• 17 years ago

I don't want to spoil your rant by throwing numbers on it, but unfortunately that doesn't add up. Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis is (I think) the newest stadium in the NFL. Wikipedia tells me that the cost to taxpayers was $620 million. Let's say that the average stadium lasts 20 years, and note that there are 4 major sports leagues in the US with about 30 teams each, so that an average of 6 such arenas that must be built every year, at a total taxpayer cost of $3.7 billion each year.

NASA's budget for 2009 is $17.6 billion. And obviously that's just a fraction of total federal science spending, much of which lives under DoD, DoE, NIH, etc...

philwelch3• 17 years ago

Your numbers are essentially right. Most hockey teams share the basketball stadium, though, and almost all soccer stadiums are shared. But stadium costs are rising: both the new Yankee Stadium and the new Cowboys Stadium cost over $1 billion.

However, what makes your numbers very conservative (in terms of overestimating public costs) is that few stadia are fully funded by the public. Most of them are partially funded by the team or the league.

(Amusing notes: Montreal's stadium, built for the Olympics and used by the Expos, cost 1.4 billion dollars, but .9 billion was in interest. The world's most expensive stadium, the new Wembley, cost 1.5 billion.)

aaronblohowiak2• 17 years ago

There is also added infrastructure cost, police cost and more. But you're right that the football budget is less than the Space budget. But why is ANY public money being spent on personal entertainment when it could be spent on progress? another 4 billion a year could pay for a lot of research and scholarships.

noonespecial2• 17 years ago

I needled the stadiums because they were an easy target. Its more of a philosophic rant stemming from a disappointment in overall resource allocation. We spend so many trillions on entertainment like football. We use our land, our human capital, our tv transmitters, our precious time... on giant zero-sum distractions. Our heroes play games.

Space flight is life. Will the last humans have to admit that we didn't make it off the planet in time to save our species because we were too busy watching football and getting drunk?

Even if we never "make it to the stars", there are countless worlds of resources just floating around in asteroid fields in our own solar system. We just have to go get them. I'm not advocating we go "all work and no play" here, I just can't help but think we should be trying a little bit harder.

si2• 17 years ago

Interesting analogy. I would say the danger isn't quite in students injuring themselves in the classroom as much as it is giving destructive chemicals to students. Sure some of them can handle it, but the deviant ones will create havoc given the opportunity. In football there is a certain physical discipline allowed, where as in science its just the principals office, which can be better than class. Good analogy, but I think far from raising the argument...

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

Let's all worry about the "deviants". Conformity for the win!

tybris• 17 years ago

I don't remember my science classes to be that exciting. Then again, my sports teacher didn't like football either.

sili• 17 years ago

Usually in US schools there are two parts to a science course: the lectures and the labs. The lectures and homework do get boring and tedious if you are really not into that particular field. However, labs are meant to not only show students science in practice but to show how cool it can be. By doing experiments themselves and seeing real-life demonstrations by teachers, some few students will become interested enough in the field to persue it seriously, and others will at least gain more perspective on the world around them.

However, with our misguided obsession with safety, science education has been neutered of this exiting part and all that's left is dry formulas and obscure vocabulary.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

His complaint is that science education is boring, but the same could be said for any number of subjects in school. The irony is that it's the same scientists who've created performance targets for educators to hit in the form of standardized testing. This has led to unimaginative teaching and a strictly check-box approach to learning by running down a long list of curriculum items in a very limited time frame.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

People creating performance targets for students to hit on standardized tests are not scientists.

wattersjames• 17 years ago

Let's not confuse science and NASA too much in the discussion here I'd say. Flying the existing shuttle back and forth to space for 3 decades is as much dog and pony as it is science.

I'd like to agree with part of this article though. The science olympiad would have been a LOT more fun if the contest was to create the biggest explosion instead of the strongest toothpick bridge.

bgutierrez• 17 years ago

My middle school was willing to make us play frisbee dodgeball (with the expected results), and then spent millions tearing apart a couple of classrooms after some kids dropped mercury on the floor and stomped on it.

I think Phys. Ed. would be a good target level for danger in the classroom.

bowman• 17 years ago

To contrast, at my school a teacher dropped a bottle of mercury while showing us how it ran away from heat. They cleaned it up with a mop while we played with it.

param• 17 years ago

I thought the title was flamebait. ARE YOU KIDDING! science is more important than football. But once I went through the article, he does make some valid points.

I just wish that he hadn't inserted so many pics from his new book - now the article smells of a sales job. His argument should stand independent of his book

hujgbi5• 17 years ago

football is only a sport if we didnt had sience we would be like chimps.

hujgbi5• 17 years ago

sience

hujgbi5• 17 years ago

sience

hujgbi5• 17 years ago

sience

hujgbi5• 17 years ago

is much more important

Is Science As Important As Football?

Related Stories