I've seen the following cartoon shared more than once, but this time I got annoyed enough by the obvious misinformation to formally fact check it:
"This comic is over 80 years old and
yet you don't have to change a thing
about it. It's every bit as relevant today
as the day it was drawn.
*People at tables*
Education: *nothing*
Sciences: *nothing*
Arts: *nothing*
Healthcare: *nothing*
War: *4 waiters bringing lots of 'food' (money) to table*"
If we look at the actual numbers, a very different story emerges. I couldn't find a single data source for more than one of these figures, but the numbers are so different in magnitude that slight calculation variations are not going to change the end result.
Firstly, military spending (i.e. war).
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2023 global military expenditure was $2443 billion (or $2.4 trillion).
This may sound like a lot, but according to the World Bank, in 2021 total global spending education was $5.4 trillion, and in 2023 it was doubtless higher (given the trend of year-on-year increases).
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization tells us that in 2021, global spending on health was $9.8 trillion. Perhaps one thinks might object that this was due to covid, yet in 2017 it was $7.8 trillion.
Spending on science is harder to quantify, but according to UNESCO, global research & development (R&D) spending is almost $1.7 trillion (no year is given). Meanwhile I was unable to find numbers for global arts spending.
So spending on education and healthcare are each significantly higher than that on war. When you add education, healthcare and R&D up, the total of the 3 far exceeds that for war.
Of course, one might claim that the cartoon really means that the war industry is "overfed" and the other sectors are starved, based on some wishy-washy benchmark that will never be quantified, because the people making this argument just hate spending on defence, but that is not an argument that can be addressed logically.
