In any event, Poland's entire science spending is less than the budget of a single middle-sized American university.
So the question may well be not so much whether we prioritise our science spending to suit our economic and social priorities - but rather - to what degree do we do this.
And it has treated science well, spending on both high-quality facilities and the research that is done in them.
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In their fascinating book "Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, " Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton say there are two ways to get more happiness out of our money.
Forty computer programmers from Facebook, Google and Amazon and Citizen Science Alliance are spending the next three days brainstorming in London trying to devise a game that we can all download as an app that will mean whilst we "play" we are also analysing the vast quantity of gene data that is out there.
Spending on science and technology is expected to increase under South Korea's incoming President Park Geun-hye, who takes office next month.
Everything we think of as being pretty important -- from education to basic science and research to transportation spending to national parks to environmental protection -- we'd essentially have to eliminate.
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In education, the evidence is less clear: international studies of teenagers' prowess in mathematics and science show no clear link to spending levels.
Working with an annual spending plan is where art meets science.
As it has with new markets ranging from biotechnology to the Internet, government would help to create the underlying policy infrastructure and science that leads to new markets, without spending big money to subsidize the industry itself.
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And while advertisers are getting better at quantifying the payback for their investments, advertising remains as much art as science: About 75% of Internet advertising spending can be reliably tracked, while the figure for television is closer to 25%.
Advocacy of spending does not equate with promotion of science and technology.
Collapsing public investment in science could be followed by a reduction in private sector spending, and those two combined would mean that our finest researchers will begin new careers abroad.
While many of us just hope that by the time we get a disease science has come up with a cure, Brin is spending with the goal of speeding up the process.
There seems to be an emerging consensus that funding basic research should remain a government priority, and the steep cuts to discretionary spending pushed through this past Spring largely spared the science budget.
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The rising national debt and federal spending are major factors behind the anger, added Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia.
No amount of health care spending will suffice to contain the impact of these diseases on society except sustained investment in science.
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But for now, and the next couple of decades, spending the billions required to explore Mars, search for life on Europa and develop cutting age science hardware like the Webb Telescope is exactly where our government (and others) must be focusing.
Spending a quarter of a century building something and then scuttling it looks bad, even if the useful science that has been done on board could be written up on the back of a postage stamp.
So if our kids are spending all their time playing video games, and somebody else's kids are getting the math and science skills to invent video games -- (laughter) -- we're not going to be number one.
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