There's more to life than gross domestic product  The claim by
Iain Morgan (Letters, 29 March) that "only by science and
technology generating inventions and wealth can we afford the
luxury of art" is staggering in its narrow perspective and in
its blindness to empirical evidence.  The Large Hadron Collider
will contribute nothing to "wealth creation" – though it might
help us to understand the nature of the universe. Still, one
might wonder which is of greater utility: the possibility that
we might learn, at enormous cost to the taxpayer, something
about the hypothetical Higgs boson; or encourage, at a fraction
of the cost, the enrichment of the actual lives of millions of
people through the real experience provided by the arts. Prof
Morgan is a specialist in "molecular oncology". Beyond the
basics of keeping the labour force alive, there is little wealth
creation to be had in expending vast sums of money on finding
complex cures for terminal conditions. But then perhaps values
other than the balance sheet o