In one of my business classes we had an assignment of balancing the budget as the team. Know what the attitudes are? Don't cut ANY part of the defense budget (even though most of it goes to contractors). However, they were willing to cut ALL of the tiny bit of money that was spent on NASA because that's just "shooting rockets into space."

It's quite clear that people are not invested in creativity and discovery. Someone else pointed out because you can make more as a CEO than discover something like the cure for a disease, or how things work, more people go into business-related fields instead of humanities or science. There's more of an incentive in accounting than biology, you know? But we still need things like biologists or engineers to innovate. We NEED imagination but we don't reward it :/