On May 11, 7:22 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:

One is left wondering what the Soviet military effort would look like
using the same 'fair' criteria for measuring it. Pretty small, I
would bet...

Man-hours.
Total man-hours used on the whole thing; right from mining up the
materials used to make the metals that build the rockets and payloads,
through man-hours spent in designing them, manufacturing them, launching
them, and supporting their missions.
A fairly Marxist concept of labor, when you come right down to it, and
entirely independent of costs in a monetary sense.
You could bias this by total population potential man-hours of work for
the two countries.
In that case, it might have come out fairly even.

I've got a friend who went to work on a water treatment plant project
in Africa a few years ago. His company had a contract for engineering
and supervision, but they were not to do any construction work, that
was to be done completely by locals. One day they told the Africans
that they had to dig a trench about 1km long and 2m deep where a
pipe was to be laid. The Africans had two mechanical diggers (I don't
know if that is the proper term in English, could someone please
tell me how those tractors with big shovels are called) so my friend
thought they would need a week or two to do the job. But the next
day the two mechanical diggers did not move an inch. On the other
hand a few hundred men came each with a spade and did the job
in two days. My friend was told that it was better to be a little less
efficient and have more men receiving a salary than to use the
mechanical diggers and have a few hundred extra men on the
unemployment roll.

Do you think that counting the man-hours of work on that water
trearment
plant would be a fair way to evaluate the cost?


Alain Fournier