Richard Abadie, PwC partner for infrastructure projects, said: "The £5bn [from the government] is an insignificant spend over three years, equal to less than 0.1% of GDP per annum.
In fact, what they found instead was a slight (but statistically insignificant) rise in spending relative to the trend.
Most Wall Street economists have said that the consequences of a temporary government shutdown would be relatively insignificant, particularly because spending on essential services — a large portion of the budget — would continue.
"It's hypocritical to ignore the fact that a not insignificant amount was spent on buying weapons systems from EU members Germany and France".
"I couldn't buy Chomsky's world view any longer," Everett told me, "and I began to feel that academics was a hollow and insignificant way to spend one's life".
But that was, in comparison to the corruption coming through the international donor contracts, and the way the money was spent, really insignificant.
"The idea is to take money being spent on insignificant things out and put it into significant things which are programming, journalism and digital translations of our products," Mr. Bewkes said.
Of course, none of this explains why people whose livelihoods do not depend on their results are willing to spend not insignificant sums of money on potentially dangerous drugs.
Although an increase of this size may seem insignificant, especially to those not spending eternity there, the reality of the situation is quite different when experienced in concrete terms.
The most concrete Republican promise was a one-year moratorium on earmarks, symbolic at best, and insignificant in comparison to federal spending and deficits.
