Economic costs of war • Hacker News Board

Re: Economic costs of war

#421

Post by epistasis » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #290

swader999 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to go there look at the acres of cultivation of opium under Taliban and then under US occupation. Ask where that exponential increase in production was spent.

What does opium have to do with oil?

I don't think opium has much to do with the initial invasion of Afghanistan, but I think that there's a pretty good argument that it has had a big effect on what has played out during the occupation. So I'm not fully sure of the relevance of the comment either.

Re: Economic costs of war

#422

Post by aiisjustanif » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #274

nightski wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. That's what is lacking, the political power/will to pass such legislation. It's unfortunate but it has nothing to do with this war or its cost.

> It's never been a matter of money. We've seen the government can pass multi trillion dollar bills on demand and increase the budget at will. Not without consequences. Contrary to the headlines, we can’t simply print as much money into existence as we want. For example, the actual cost of the war was closer to $2T. The $6.4T number quoted in this headline is the theoretical sum total including interest payments on t…

> Simply passing bills to spend money that we don’t have may get things done, but our children have to pay for it eventually.

Government debt is not that simple at all. A governments debts and budgets are no the same as a household.

This also completely ignores economic growth and how types of inflation (cost-push vs demand-pull) affect if inflation or debt is “good” or “bad”.

> So no, it’s not simply a matter of political will to spend all the money we want. There are limits.

Please explain the limits if it’s a dollar amount. Most economists agree that we actually do not know what the “limit” is and mostly we noticed very little if anything troubling caused directly by the stimulus packages. They overwhelmingly helped keep economic growth stable.

Re: Economic costs of war

#423

Post by dragontamer » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #214

neither_color wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with covid though? Im not here to justify the war on terror Im just wondering what the basis of comparison is. Covid has affected nearly 100% of the population in almost every country either directly and indirectly, either by getting sick or not being allowed to work or shop or show their face in public. The reach of covid response has gone far beyond having to take our shoes off in airports…

> What does that have to do with covid though? The argument is that the effort we spent in the war on terror, per motivating death, was massively greater than the effort we've spent fighting covid. > far beyond having to take our shoes off in airports That would be a valid comparison in TSA vs. covid response. This is about much more than the TSA!

> The argument is that the effort we spent in the war on terror, per motivating death, was massively greater than the effort we've spent fighting covid.

We can't even get people to take the vaccine willingly after we made every vaccine free.

When will we learn that money doesn't solve everything? It is only a sufficiently motivating factor to greedy people. Religiously motivated people are explicitly raised to be weary of money (you cannot serve two masters: choose God or mammon, where mammon is roughly translated as money, greed, or material wealth)

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We can't spend money to grow the Afghan army, because they weren't motivated by money. We can't spend more money to fight COVID19, because the anti-vaxxers aren't motivated by money either. Our vaccines are sitting in storage and expiring.

We designed and built the vaccines in record time. I'm not entirely sure how else we could add money to this system and expect any benefits with regards to COVID19. Student nurses are regularly helping out in hospitals before they're even graduated, we're pulling retired doctors/nurses out of retirement to help fill hospitals. Etc. etc.

Money isn't the solution anymore. We've spent as much as we're able. The remaining problems that face us are entirely independent of money.

----------

The only consistent thing between Afghanistan and COVID19 is that Americans have overspent money hoping that overspending will fix everything.

Re: Economic costs of war

#424

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #67

runawaybottle wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some related numbers for just Afghanistan: American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448. U.S. contractors: 3,846. Afghan national military and police: 66,000. Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144. Afghan civilians: 47,245. Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191. Aid workers: 444. Journalists: 72. https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afgh…

I think a lot of those trained had allegiances to the Taliban. Many reports of this but was ignored by higher ups.

I think what we have here is a failure to understand population motivations. I do not want to overstate this, but it seems to be lost over the fact that it was two decades now. US was the invader here. You can train all you want, but those people are not idiots or easily swayed. They survived multiple regime changes, coups, upheavals and this is just another one of them.

As insane as it sounds, in that frame of mind, Taliban is a lesser evil here compared to a foreign adversary that walks around like they own the place.

Once you understand this, and by this I mean "the population does not want you here and sees you as the invader", none of this is a surprise.

Next up, just wait till you hear what population of Iraq wants ( but we all know US simply cannot leave Iraq -- ever ).

Re: Economic costs of war

#425

Post by epistasis » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

User23 wrote: post #185

epistasis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US prints two kinds of money: 1) dollars, which are subject to inflation and decrease in value over time, and 2) bonds, which accumulate in dollar value over time, usually in front of inflation. So because we spent bonds instead of spending dollars, we can not take their dollar value as the cost, because that's most definitely not what we printed for these.

Not exactly. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury do a dance where the Treasury tells the Fed how many dollars it needs and then creates notes, bills, and bonds in the desired amount. It then performs a simple asset swap with the Fed to receive reserves in exchange for those bonds. This is slightly obfuscated by the primary dealer auction process, but in extremis the Fed can and will just buy the bonds itself. Thi…

You say "not exactly," but I don't see anything that conflicts with what's described in my comment.

I do appreciate the details though, as it does help people understand the way that we have set up these institutions, which in turn points to what we might want to change to make the process better.

Re: Economic costs of war

#426

Post by asdff » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #40

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #5

Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.

It’s not the what, but the how. A terrorist attack on home turf is a slap in the face of every American. Outrage is to be expected.

It wasn't the first terrorist attack on home turf and it wasn't the last. The outrage was drummed up by the media to build support for the war. Remember the Dixie Chicks getting ostracised for speaking out against the war? They were one of the most popular artists at the time and their careers were over after that in an instant due to how gung ho everyone was. I think part of the initial support was that people were envisioning another Desert Storm, less than 50 days and done thanks to superior American training technology firepower etc. When it came to not be the case that support seemed to evaporate fast and many awoke from the collective stupor enraged at the outsized response with ill defined goals, some of the more clearly defined ones being entirely false (Saddam's WMDs).

Re: Economic costs of war

#427

Post by edot » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #252

Mizza wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this a lot but don't understand why. China has every motivation to prop up the Taliban. A sister comment already noted the mineral resources, but don't forget the main function of Afghanistan as a nation: production of heroin. Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media, but this is the name of the game. Chinese fentanyl has taken over the global opiate…

> Narcopolitics are so fantastically more significant than ever gets any attention from "surface" media Indeed! The speculation is that there are people very high up in Chinese system who are cashing up on industrial scale fentanyl production. Syrian Assad family now makes more money on captagon than they were doing before the war from all their businesses. Putin Vladimir, the Russian president, made his early fortun…

Any book recommendations on this topic? Particularly the last point - always crazy to learn how the rich of today made their fortunes from now-illegal means (drug trafficking, slavery, arms dealing, etc.).

Re: Economic costs of war

#428

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #255

WaxProlix wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may or may not be true right now. Was it true 10 years ago? 20? 30? There exists a point at which it was not true, and we're talking about taking that investment over a 20+ year historical period, not as a lump sum right now. Lots of fossil fuel aligned people have pivoted from "everything is fine" to "there's nothing we can do now", and echoing the latter might be factually correct, but in the context it smacks…

I think nuclear is not a perfect solution but probably the fastest option we have.

Wind and solar are cheaper and can be brought online as fast as we can build it... Nuclear has massive startup costs and takes a hella long time to build out. Solar efficiency had been undergoing a an exponential (!!!) drop in price per kilowatt hour. Think of it as Moore's law, but for energy. Comparing solar to nuclear at this point is sorta like saying you don't need one of these gosh darned desktop computers when you've got a perfectly good giant room full of multi million dollar IBM mainframe that you bought just twenty years ago... Exponential price curves should cause one to stay flexible on assumptions.

DOE: Solar hits 6 cents per kWh in 2017, three years ahead of an ambitious goal, down from 28 cents per kWh in 2011. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030

Solar costs per kWh are unambiguously less than nuclear:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...

Re: Economic costs of war

#429

Post by mc32 » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

aiisjustanif wrote: post #407

mc32 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We weren't occupying or administering Iraq, but we didn't leave, either. I mean, we never left Germany or S. Korea, so... Playing big brother to Q8? I'm not mad. Like other countries, we can pick sides and aid whatever side we think has our interest. I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle…

> I'm not interested in intervening with infantry and all the necessary materiel unless it's to defend ourselves from grave danger. Especially avoid stupid the boondoggle of "nation-building". Not everyone wants democracy right now. It may come later. This short sightedness might cost more in lives globally and money loss from trade and resources being restricted.

While it seems crude, the way we used to do it, the way the Soviets used to do it, the way China does it now, seems to work best for this kind of interest. You invest in a despot let them have their little fiefdom and you let them run what's theirs and you get to take what you think is yours.

Nation-building is hubris. Work with someone local who fits hand-in-glove.

Is the unstable "stability" worth 6T and thousands of soldiers' lives and many tens of thousands traumatized? Not to mention the losses from the locals. What was the human cost of Saddam in power vs the cost after toppling him?

Re: Economic costs of war

#430

Post by jonnydubowsky » Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

slacktide wrote: post #71

OJFord wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a house with a mortgage, I think it's reasonable to say you 'spent' the booked value.

It's really not. If you buy a house with a mortgage, and later sell the house before the note is due, you will not owe the full amount of the accrued interest. Unfortunately the resale value of a secondhand war is very low.

"The resale value of a second-hand war" is a fantastic phrase! It sounds like a Neil Young lyric. Nicely done.