Comment by GMoromisato

Comment by GMoromisato 2 months ago

In my opinion, simple inflation adjustment is not that accurate. In particular, notice that certain costs, like higher education, have increased significantly faster than inflation since the 60s. And since rocket science requires a highly educated workforce, you end up with higher salaries relative to the median. I'd actually like to see an analysis of the number of people working on the program. I bet Apollo had 2x or 3x more people working on it than Artemis.

But I haven't done the math/research, so I could be very wrong.

bryanlarsen 2 months ago

I think it's more like 10x. There were 400,000 working on Apollo and I doubt there's more than 40,000 working on Artemis.

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killingtime74 2 months ago

It's not just your opinion. It's widely known in economics. It's so widely known in fact that statistics agencies state exactly how they come up with inflation figures, which basket of goods they base it on and adjustments.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-...

There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs

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wakaru44 2 months ago

> There are other indices if you want to compare historical prices relevant to moon programs
Could you please expand or give a few pointers on those indices? Or where could I learn more about this.

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- killingtime74 2 months ago
  
  If there's a budget available analysing that and what the biggest costs would yield the most accurate estimates.
  Could be more but the biggest cost is probably labour and there are 2 indexes for that:
  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm
  https://www.bls.gov/productivity/
  Wages can be drilled down to the employee groups that would be predominant, such as machinists or engineers.
  Productivity can approximate how much more efficient people are now due to technology.
  Then major component costs can be compared from other current rockets vs historical costs.
  
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MrDrMcCoy 2 months ago

The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.

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Suppafly 2 months ago

>The quality of our education has fallen in addition to the rising costs.
Maybe as an average because more people are being educated, but I find it hard to believe that our top students now are any less educated than the top students in the past.

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- osnium123 2 months ago
  
  Our top students today may very well be less educated than their counterparts from the 1960s be because grade inflation has increased significantly and therefore our top students are not challenged as much.
  
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  edmundsauto 2 months ago
  
  Similarly, it’s possible that grade inflation increased competition and has forced top students to challenge themselves more.
  Both perspectives reveal more about the speaker than the reality.
  
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