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The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
- galaxyLogic 12y agoThe 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.
- coldtea 12y agoNot just of that theory. Of the whole of modern economics. And without ever questioning "growth towards what" and "growth at what cost"...
- AndrewKemendo 12y agoBranching 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.
- hackuser 12y ago> The unspoken assumption in this theory is that growth is good. What about peace and love? Isn't that good too? Does one preclude the other? Generally, economic resources are necessary, but not sufficient, for happiness. We still need growth because we do not yet generate enough resources either worldwide or in the U.S., to meet people's needs. If you question whether that's true about the U.S., consider health care; we can't afford to provide all that people need. > I wonder what Orwell would have thought about this. I'm not sure what Orwell has to do with it. Have I been trolled?
- pjmorris 12y ago> 'consider health care; we can't afford to provide all that people need.' I beg to differ. I argue that the US can afford to provide all that is needed, but chooses not to do so. As a fraction of GDP, no one spends more than the US on healthcare; many developed nations spend half. [1] For this spending, we get roughly the same outcomes, more medical innovation, higher profits from running health care operations, and millions of people with poor access to health care. We've chosen profits over people. I could judge the choice, but I'm only here to point out that it is a choice, not some fundamental lack of resources. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_(PPP)_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...
- orangecat 12y agoWhat about peace and love? Isn't that good too? Sure, and wealthy societies tend to be much more peaceful.
- mkempe 12y agoWar 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 http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html [2] http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html
- rayiner 12y agoNobody claims war creates wealth. People do claim that war creates wealth locally even as it destroys wealth globally.
- ceras 12y agoI don't think that's a fair response to the article - it's arguing something more nuanced. Right in the 4th paragraph is this: > This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.
- crazy1van 12y agoThe argument seems a bit too nuanced if there is such a thing. "The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth" "This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies" How can both of these things be true?
- salem 12y agoThe title does not match the gist of the article. It should be something like "Fear of war motivates politicians to do their job properly"
- danelectro 12y agoThis is the main significant conclusion to me. Simply that losing a major war can mean ultimate removal of the entire political system of the vanquished, even if it does not result in replacement by that of the victor. This is the steepest threat that politicians ever face. This is when all the stops are pulled out, and incentive given to those who "new ideas" might otherwise be discouraged until a larger external threat is looming. The beneficial element is not the war itself, but the wide & deep threat to the politicians. This encourages them to unleash the forces of innovation which have naturally been throttled historically to preserve the status quo. These are the powers-that-be, if they weren't that powerful it wouldn't be so. War is always a net loss. Any small local or focused gains fall mainly to politicians or those politically connected. This is nothing new, it will always be less than 1% of us who have a "Daddy" Warbucks. For greatest efficiency in creating wealth or innovation, minimize the violence & destruction while doing whatever it takes to make your politicians bend to your will as much as they would to an overwhelming outside force. Even when threat becomes reality, removing evil politicians pays off much better than merely seeking plunder.
- carsongross 12y agoIf 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.
- jjoonathan 12y agoYes, I think that's the subtext.
- carsongross 12y agoI just wish it was the supertext.
- JacksonGariety 12y agoHere you go[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891557
- RawData 12y agoWe've managed as a society to turn all the potential warlords into football coaches and let them orchestrate their little armies on the football field instead of the battle field.
- protomyth 12y agoOnce 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.
- hackuser 12y agoWhat is the basis of this statement? The economists I've read say that the US gov't didn't do enough in the 1930s (I'm not sure how much Congress and how much Roosevelt are to blame), as they lacked the political will to spend as much as was needed.
- fennecfoxen 12y agoThat's ridiculous. The problem going into the Great Depression was the monetary policy, which was tightened when it needed to be loosened. The problem going through the great depression, what made it really great, was the New Deal -- not today's political footballs like social security, but the radical restructuring of the American economy in a borderline Soviet wave of regimentation and anticompetitive cronyism. We don't think about this much today because it was mostly disassembled, but every so often you hear some story where the government wants to take farmers' raisins for a pittance of compensation (and the crop is at risk of spoiling). Or milk-price boards. Those are just the last lingering vestiges of the system at work, a system run with a mindset that they could drag the nation into prosperity again by burning crops in the time of famine (to support prices don't you know). No I don't have a well-sourced essay for you. Go do some real Depression research. Look up work by multiple economists.
- protomyth 12y agoStart by looking at the difference in handling of the 1920 and 1929 crashes (Hoover was involved in both, overruled as Secretary of Commerce and implementing his spending binge as President). Hoover's foolishness worked about as well as Bush 43's and Roosevelt's authoritarian policies kept us down. Government spending hasn't got us out of a depression and the excuse is always "we didn't spend enough".
- Zigurd 12y agoIt'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.
- hyperion2010 12y agoSo 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.
- diziet 12y agoHow about Civil Wars?
- hyperion2010 12y agoAn 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).
- vishaldpatel 12y agoWe need to get everyone who calls for war to go fight them... you know.. for the economy.
- WoodenChair 12y agoYeah so in today's dollars the Iraq War cost more than World War 1, so says the Congressional Research Service: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf
- jorgecastillo 12y agoThis is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, I am not even going to read this article.
- andyl 12y agoOne important point of the article is that war is good for innovation. In war, people unite around common goals, and are willing to sacrifice in a way that is impossible in peacetime.
- teddyh 12y agoOne might attribute this to the willingness to abolish patents in wartime, like the American aeroplane industry was forced to do during the first world war.¹ Since the state is the one concerned with fighting the war, and the state is the only actor effectively able to abolish patents (since the state is the one granting them in the first place), it is not odd that war is the only thing which can effect this change. It has been argued that patents, as a whole, is a retardant to innovation. These historical facts seems to bear this argument out. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
- blahber 12y ago/shoddy Lack of Discipline. Lack of Honesty. Lack of Charity.
- nateabele 12y agoIt's a bummer that we now live in an economy that is so inured to government spending that the very idea that war improves the economy would even occur to people.
- KC8ZKF 12y agoIt's not a new idea.
- mrxd 12y agoSounds a bit like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.
- lsh123 12y agoI feel this article assumes that the major war will happen "somewhere else". The last major war caused complete destruction of the economies and infrastructures from Seine to Volga. Today, a major war pretty much means nuclear/biological/chemical warfare. What kind of growth is author thinking about after that?
- richiverse 12y agoMisappropriation of public funds is the greatest driver of economic growth! Let's do more of that.
- joshsegall 12y agoJudging by the content of the article I get the sense that he didn't choose that title. The gist seems to be that some previous wars helped focus our values and priorities of spending, and that recent wars lacked that focusing aspect. There is no spending argument in the article, which is good because econ 101 tells us that war spending doesn't increase demand and doesn't create jobs. However, the author's theory doesn't point to any solutions, so it is not interesting. I could also point to many other factors that may have changed US (and global) values and priorities aside from wars, so I don't find this theory compelling in itself either.
- Orthanc 12y ago"Lack of smashing and fixing windows may be hurting the economy"