If your economic model requires that we murder a bunch of people and blow a bunch of shit up in order to be "better off", I think it might be time to reconsider your economic model.
Yes, I think that's the subtext.
The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
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Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody claims war creates wealth. People do claim that war creates wealth locally even as it destroys wealth globally.
"Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth" wrote John Maynard Keynes in "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money " (1936, chapter 10).
Again,locally,not globally
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#13Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#14Once again, WWII did not get us out of the depression, it was the changes in government spending and tax policy between 1946 to 1948. Roosevelt was a disaster just as much as Wilson and Hoover. Truman was overruled by Congress who cut spending and taxes when Truman wanted to keep it. Reconcile the war lovers with rationing that occurred.
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#15War is destruction. People who claim that war somehow creates wealth are profoundly idiotic, to say the least. Reference: "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen", by Frédéric Bastiat, in English [1] and the original in French [2] (Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas) [1] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html [2] http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html
Much of the wealth of the first world came through war (and pestilence and slavery and famine), starting no later than 1492.
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#16It's madness no matter how you look at it: Ten years of war on the far side of the planet isn't major? Trillions in all-up costs isn't major? Risking comprehensive economic collapse by incurring the heaviest costs just as the ibankers went bonkers with derivatives isn't major? The wars and the derivatives bomb are why our growth prospects suck, not the lack of war. The authors starts with "The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards." What rock has he been living under?
On top of the economy-breaking expense, there hasn't been the usual technology upside from military spending: more surveillance, militarized policing, and ex-PMC cops aren't nearly as much fun as SDI spin-offs.
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#17So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract.
BEGIN TRANSMISSION----
From the Paratime Economics and Sociology Department, University of New Earth, 2332
Dept of War Studies, University of Mars
Investigation of countries at peace and at war: A trans-worldline study.
Status: Failure
Recommendation: Further study of evolution requested
There has been significant debate over the past n centuries as to whether war or peace is more successful at driving innovation and progress (however measured). Given the recent cataloging of trillions of new worldlines with the advent of our new transworldline sensing technology, we set out to search for the ideal ‘natural’ experiment: two world lines, one where a country was at war, and one where it was not. We initially found practically countless potential pairings, so with high hopes we entered the second phase of our research program. To our great dismay, as we began to filter through potential world lines for a situation where a single country was at war and not at war, we stumbled upon a serious problem--we could find no perfect control! Whenever one country switched from a state of war to another, so did some second country as well!
To make a long story short, despite having direct access to countless possible worldlines, we have been unsuccessful in answering our fundamental question. The state of war and the state of peace, while often considered duals, are in reality ahistorical names we give to the states of societies that come about by long, path dependent processes. We would attempt to account for the interaction effects between society and environment, however our colleagues working in Evolution and Transtemporal studies inform us that they remain decades, if not centuries away from having tools to answer such questions, and they have had a four century head start developing their tools.
We believe that these results would be of interest to researchers and policy makers across the multiverse.
END TRANSMISSION----
tl;dr You can’t possibly measure this.
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#18The unspoken assumption in this theory is that growth is good. What about peace and love? Isn't that good too? I wonder what Orwell would have thought about this.
Branching from the original topic a bit, given the human propensity to consume, growth is required in order to rise quality of living globally. You can't eat peace and love.
It's too far a bridge to ask 7 billion people to simultaneously stop desiring things as well - so again the only thing left is growth.
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#19So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract. BEGIN TRANSMISSION---- From the Paratime Economics and Sociology Department, University of New Earth, 2332 Dept of War Studies, University of Mars Investigation of countries at peace and at war: A trans-worldline study. Status: Failure Recommendation: Further study of evolution requested There has been signif…
How about Civil Wars?
Re: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
#20So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract. BEGIN TRANSMISSION---- From the Paratime Economics and Sociology Department, University of New Earth, 2332 Dept of War Studies, University of Mars Investigation of countries at peace and at war: A trans-worldline study. Status: Failure Recommendation: Further study of evolution requested There has been signif…
How about Civil Wars?
An interesting proposition, however I would argue that it is actually even harder in the case of civil wars because you don't know what to compare to. Let's pretend that we compare the set of all worldlines where country A goes to war with itself to the set of all worldlines where it does not. The variance within each of those sets is going to be enormous with regard to the relative rates of progress.
Another thing to consider is that in the case of a civil war we could simply treat the two parties as distinct states for the purpose of analysis. Yes, there will be some peculiarities such as supposedly being governed by the same set of laws, however if we take only the United States and France as examples, the factions that ultimately developed basically lived under two (or more) distinct sets of laws. I say this because in the US federalism was much weaker before 1865 and in France the class system divided the population and the difference in the treatment of different classes under the law has been argued to be one of the key factors contributing to 1789 (see Tocqueville).