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"We haven’t had a really capital-intensive war in a long time, and while that’s obviously great, I am always astonished when I read about how much real innovati
by tarr11 13y ago
"We haven’t had a really capital-intensive war in a long time, and while that’s obviously great, I am always astonished when I read about how much real innovation has involved the military or national security—it’s hard to get effectively unlimited budgets and focus any other way."
This "fact" bothers me. War causes such huge devastation, and yet the focus of this article is on innovation for its own sake. If you are going to write about the benefits of war, you should at least mention its cost.
- sama 13y agoI'd obviously choose no war over war, as would anyone sane. Just trying to point out a potential cause for the apparent slowdown.
- loganfrederick 13y agoI don't disagree with your point, but I think it's worth adding that journalist Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine"[1], a book which outlines numerous examples in the past 100 years where government officials worldwide have chosen military actions specifically with economic goals in mind. The book misrepresents capitalism somewhat, but the journalistic research and examples presented provide a compelling case that there are people who have a "sane" or "rational" (from their perspective) view that they (and maybe some others) could gain economically from war. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
- freehunter 13y agoWhat's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account. In those games, military action almost exclusively leads to major losses that are only made up for if 1) you won and 2) you gain a huge advantage from taking the territory you fought over. Even then it takes significant time. Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement?
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Looking back at the technological innovations that came about at the early part of the last century simply due to the war effort, I have to wonder why it seems like no simulation games allow you to take advantage of that fact. Why couldn't declaring war with the right amount of propaganda lead to a massive spike in productivity and technical advancement? Largely, becaues those acheivements are a result of prioritizing R&D in wartime (devoting more resources to it), and those simulators don't give you much incentive to deprioritize R&D outside of war. If you downplayed the direct "war weariness" effect and instead required devoting output to otherwise nonproductive ends (entertainment, consumable consumer goods, etc.) to maintain morale, and had long-term sortages of those produce unhappiness, then you could model that effect better.
- jerf 13y ago"What's interesting is that civilization simulators (like Civilization, Europa Universalis, etc) don't take this into account." That's an AI problem moreso than an economic problem. Modern warfare has elements of both chess and poker (and others of course, but roll with me here). The chess elements come from accumulating threats and counterthreats and so on which are all important, even if they never manifest. For a clear real-world example, look at the North Korea standoff, which has frozen the same basic threat/counter-threat model in place for decades; North Korea can not win a war, but they can cause more damage then its worth before we can destroy their ability to damage South Korea. It's a very "chess" situation, only there's no clear endgame. The problem is that in the context of those games, the computer players aren't smart enough to engage at that level of strategy; at most, if you build up a large force you'll make them "nervous" and they unconditionally attack, and that only for game balance reasons, not realism. The computer players are not able to take in a complicated situation and understand it deeply enough to participate in truly modern power struggles. Your last suggestion is game unbalancing; in that case, everyone will simply be in a perpetual state of open total warfare, from the instant you start that bonus. That might be a viable game but it certainly would be a different game.
- angersock 13y agoSomewhat cynically, one could observe that the costs of war are transient while the benefits of the spin-off technology are not. The lives saved by the development of airfoils and communications and medicine far outweigh the piles of bodies. Then again, it is interesting to note that the more absolute the war, it seems, the better the long-term payoff.
- hack_edu 13y agoCosts of war: Death. Costs of spin-off technology: Cash and the Cult of the Founder
- Tycho 13y agoEspecially since the innovations usually revolve around devastating weaponry (not to mention all the potential innovators who just get killed in war)
- jacoblyles 13y agoIt seems unnecessary to belabor a common point while trying to make a counter-intuitive one.
- patrickk 13y agoI've just started reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. He defines 3 states: fragile, robust and antifragile. Fragile things weaken during times of volatility or uncertainty (such as a central government's power during a coup), robust things are indifferent (like the Pyramids) and antifragile things actually strengthen from uncertainty or upheaval (e.g. Syrian rebel's power during the current civil war). It would seem innovation thrives in the antifragile state. The chaos and uncertainty of war certainly drives innovation.