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Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements t

by derg 7y ago

Can you even imagine how a Total War economy/society based on transitioning to greener energies, cutting emissions and pollutants, and working on improvements to housing and urban planning would end up looking? Like ignoring the whole climate change thing for a moment (though we absolutely should not do that), just the quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing.

HenryKissinger 7y ago
That would not be possible today. The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors: 1) A massive surge in federal government spending, financed by borrowing from public markets (incl. war bonds), to buy the materiel needed to fight a war on two fronts (in Europe against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan). Such spending caused the public debt as a share of GDP to surge to its highest historical level ever, from about 40% at the start of the war to 100% at its peak, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_Held_by_Public.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_... . Today, without such a total war effort, we are running trillion dollar deficits. To put it as shortly and bluntly as I could, trying the same thing today would bankrupt the government. Our debt levels are far higher than they were then, in relative terms, and increasing by over a trillion every year. We would be looking at 2 or 3 trillion dollar deficits. Deficits of that magnitude might shake investors' confidence in the U.S.'s ability to service its debt. 2) The United States was coming out of the Great Depression, and the unemployed labor pool was in the double digits, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png/450px-United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Un... . In other words, there were a lot of unemployed people with nothing to do who could quickly be put to work to produce stuff for the war economy. This is not the case today. The economy is running at full employment. The large spare labor pool that existed then doesn't exist today.
- QuantumGood 7y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/business/economy/fed-full-employment.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/business/econ... America has a large shadow labor force. People who do not regularly apply to work are not counted as officially “unemployed.” Have to take this into account.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Udik 7y ago
Total wars are not known to increase the quality of life. If a transition to a green economy guaranteed such massive economic gains (and no pains) don't you think that politicians of all colours would scramble to implement it? The first step to solving issues is to acknowledge all the difficulties that lie ahead: otherwise you end up in a delusional state in which solutions are obvious and easy and the only reason they're not adopted is that everyone else is evil.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  The other sad conclusion to derive from this is that the "improvements to urban planning" bit is largely not happening, despite generally broad bipartisan support. It signals to me that people like complaining about things, but do not participate in politics in any productive fashion. Right now it's just team sports, and most people can not name the candidate they are voting for, outside of the presidential election, until they read it off the ballot.
  - KevinEldon 7y ago
    It may also be that people like the idea of 'improvements in urban planning' when they are intangible, but if those changes involved limiting their land use or bulldozing their inefficient homes and neighborhoods they balk; they may also not like moving those planning decisions from their local communities to some bureaucracy outside of their direct engagement.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      Don't need to bulldoze much of anything to do something though. The inefficiency of buildings is a tiny part of the problem, especially in temperate climates; more mixed use zoning, and the relaxing of single family dwelling zoning, will have a dramatic impact on excess travel. Transport accounts for basically a third of U.S. energy use, though it has been hardly growing over the last few years, which is a good start. The most efficient car, bus, or train, is the one that you didn't ride.
rayiner 7y ago
> Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing. The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions of people died of starvation as a result. It turns out that governments are bad at running economies. I don't know why so many people think that the same mechanism (a command-and-control economy) will lead to a different result just because you change the goal from food or industrial production to climate change mitigation.
- nesyt 7y ago
  Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something. Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    At least it didn't kill ten million people unintentionally.
  - harryh 7y ago
    American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people Um, sure it did? Killing a lot of people was, in a sense, the goal.
  - nate_meurer 7y ago
    It's not a straw man, and your examples are no more apt than Rayiner's. America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2]. It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come. The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation. In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate. 1 - https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl... 2 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-polli...
KevinEldon 7y ago
Germany had a Total War economy in WW2. North Korea has one today. The Russian Revolution might not be considered 'Total War', but was single-minded in its focus similar to what you're suggesting. None of these economies worked out well for their citizens. Even the US economy/society during WW2 was more than victory gardens and war bonds; personal freedoms were limited, there were interment camps, forced enlistment, war profiteering, and propaganda (along with the hundreds of thousands of deaths).
- adrianN 7y ago
  My point is that Americans were willing to pay that price even though the actual threat of Nazi Germany was not even in the same ballpark as the threat posed by climate change. I'm also reasonably sure that the switch away from fossil fuels can be done without hundreds of thousands dead.
lacker 7y ago
That's not how I imagine a total war. The point of "Total War" is that you start making every decision necessary to achieve your goal, that you weren't willing to make under a democratic process. If we go to total war to prevent climate change, that means things like: * Shutting down power and fuel supplies to poor countries that can't afford current solar or wind power * Military conquest of uncooperative countries * Bombing coal mines to shut them down * Bombing oil fields so nobody can get the oil * Slaughtering foreign civilians to reduce their carbon emissions When I think of a "total war" caused by an emergency response to global warming, those are the sort of consequences I imagine. Let's hope we don't get to "total war".

by derg 7y ago

HenryKissinger 7y ago

That would not be possible today. The wartime World War Two economy we learn about in school was only made possible because of two factors: 1) A massive surge in federal government spending, financed by borrowing from public markets (incl. war bonds), to buy the materiel needed to fight a war on two fronts (in Europe against Germany and in the Pacific against Japan). Such spending caused the public debt as a share of GDP to surge to its highest historical level ever, from about 40% at the start of the war to 100% at its peak, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_Held_by_Public.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/US_Debt_... . Today, without such a total war effort, we are running trillion dollar deficits. To put it as shortly and bluntly as I could, trying the same thing today would bankrupt the government. Our debt levels are far higher than they were then, in relative terms, and increasing by over a trillion every year. We would be looking at 2 or 3 trillion dollar deficits. Deficits of that magnitude might shake investors' confidence in the U.S.'s ability to service its debt. 2) The United States was coming out of the Great Depression, and the unemployed labor pool was in the double digits, as you can see on this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png/450px-United_States_unemployment_with_incarceration_1892-2016.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Un... . In other words, there were a lot of unemployed people with nothing to do who could quickly be put to work to produce stuff for the war economy. This is not the case today. The economy is running at full employment. The large spare labor pool that existed then doesn't exist today.

QuantumGood 7y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/business/economy/fed-full-employment.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/business/econ... America has a large shadow labor force. People who do not regularly apply to work are not counted as officially “unemployed.” Have to take this into account.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Udik 7y ago

Total wars are not known to increase the quality of life. If a transition to a green economy guaranteed such massive economic gains (and no pains) don't you think that politicians of all colours would scramble to implement it? The first step to solving issues is to acknowledge all the difficulties that lie ahead: otherwise you end up in a delusional state in which solutions are obvious and easy and the only reason they're not adopted is that everyone else is evil.

microcolonel 7y ago
The other sad conclusion to derive from this is that the "improvements to urban planning" bit is largely not happening, despite generally broad bipartisan support. It signals to me that people like complaining about things, but do not participate in politics in any productive fashion. Right now it's just team sports, and most people can not name the candidate they are voting for, outside of the presidential election, until they read it off the ballot.
- KevinEldon 7y ago
  It may also be that people like the idea of 'improvements in urban planning' when they are intangible, but if those changes involved limiting their land use or bulldozing their inefficient homes and neighborhoods they balk; they may also not like moving those planning decisions from their local communities to some bureaucracy outside of their direct engagement.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Don't need to bulldoze much of anything to do something though. The inefficiency of buildings is a tiny part of the problem, especially in temperate climates; more mixed use zoning, and the relaxing of single family dwelling zoning, will have a dramatic impact on excess travel. Transport accounts for basically a third of U.S. energy use, though it has been hardly growing over the last few years, which is a good start. The most efficient car, bus, or train, is the one that you didn't ride.

rayiner 7y ago

> Total War economy/society > quality of life improvements to our health and well being this kind of mobilization would bring would be astonishing. The impact on quality of life and society would be "astonishing," but they won't be improvements. The Soviets and Chinese tried similar "mobilization[s]" for food production. The idea was to direct society's efforts to producing enough food for everybody. Tens of millions of people died of starvation as a result. It turns out that governments are bad at running economies. I don't know why so many people think that the same mechanism (a command-and-control economy) will lead to a different result just because you change the goal from food or industrial production to climate change mitigation.

nesyt 7y ago
Thanks for the straw man. American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people - that's not an intrinsic attribute of a country focusing on something. Think also new deal / public works projects like the Hoover Dam (many died working on the Dam but not because it was a government mobilization project). Just the government spending a bunch of money on environmentally focused projects could happen and could be good.
- adrianN 7y ago
  At least it didn't kill ten million people unintentionally.
- harryh 7y ago
  American WW2 mobilization didn't kill ten million people Um, sure it did? Killing a lot of people was, in a sense, the goal.
- nate_meurer 7y ago
  It's not a straw man, and your examples are no more apt than Rayiner's. America's WWII mobilization is really nothing like the Green New Deal. The total cost of the U.S. war effort is estimated at around $300 B (adjusted for 2009 dollars) [1]. The lowest realistic estimates for the cost of an effective Green New Deal are around double that amount every year, and lasting for decades [2]. It's true that WWII cost far more relative to GDP (over a third, versus 2% for the New Green Deal estimate above), but expressing the cost relative to GDP is not very useful in this context; in 1945 the U.S. was poised to enter a period of ten percent annual GDP growth at a time that military spending was plunging. The situation now is completely opposite; the U.S. will possibly never sustain greater than 2% GDP growth, and the Green New Deal proposes to pull money out of that for decades to come. The character of WWII spending was also completely different. That money was largely spent on things that were pretty much guaranteed to help the war effort; materiel, industrial infrastructure, and troops. There was little risk of misallocation. In contrast, the Green New Deal is fraught with misallocation risk. In that way, I suppose that a comparison to modern military spending is actually quite appropriate. 1 - https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl... 2 - https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal https://newleftreview.org/issues/II112/articles/robert-polli...

KevinEldon 7y ago

Germany had a Total War economy in WW2. North Korea has one today. The Russian Revolution might not be considered 'Total War', but was single-minded in its focus similar to what you're suggesting. None of these economies worked out well for their citizens. Even the US economy/society during WW2 was more than victory gardens and war bonds; personal freedoms were limited, there were interment camps, forced enlistment, war profiteering, and propaganda (along with the hundreds of thousands of deaths).

adrianN 7y ago
My point is that Americans were willing to pay that price even though the actual threat of Nazi Germany was not even in the same ballpark as the threat posed by climate change. I'm also reasonably sure that the switch away from fossil fuels can be done without hundreds of thousands dead.

lacker 7y ago

That's not how I imagine a total war. The point of "Total War" is that you start making every decision necessary to achieve your goal, that you weren't willing to make under a democratic process. If we go to total war to prevent climate change, that means things like: * Shutting down power and fuel supplies to poor countries that can't afford current solar or wind power * Military conquest of uncooperative countries * Bombing coal mines to shut them down * Bombing oil fields so nobody can get the oil * Slaughtering foreign civilians to reduce their carbon emissions When I think of a "total war" caused by an emergency response to global warming, those are the sort of consequences I imagine. Let's hope we don't get to "total war".