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The fact remains that the people on the other end of this weapon are still people, and all weapons of this kind are still a deadweight loss, economically speaki

The fact remains that the people on the other end of this weapon are still people, and all weapons of this kind are still a deadweight loss, economically speaking. Think about it in these terms: you have a pile of money and a bunch of smart people. You can invest in a) creating a new technology that will make human lives better and trade with other people to increase global wealth or b) creating a new technology that will kill the people you would have traded with in the other scenario. It is possible to both recognize that a certain amount of killing people is likely necessary in this crazy mixed up world of ours, and still be saddened by the waste and stupidity that that necessity represents. It is a huge error in economic thinking to forget that killing people is necessarily the result of waste and stupidity, either on their part or ours. Personally, I won't work on anything whose primary purpose is killing people (and I've turned down jobs and contracts because of that) and I'm always a little saddened when I see good engineers investing their lives in such a profoundly unproductive activity.

apendleton 12y ago
With you on the larger point, but for the sake of argument, creating weapons technology isn't necessarily deadweight. Military applications have driven all sorts of technological developments that ultimately resulted in civilian economic growth (the Internet probably being the most salient here). Even this contraption probably required development of new compact power systems that might have all sorts of uses eventually. And it may well be that the Internet would have happened anyway, but there seem to be some inventions that nobody would have had the drive to produce if not for wars... nuclear power might be a good example.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Nuclear power plausibly would have been created without military incentives--it just isn't that hard, and all the pieces were in place before Manhattan. Nuclear weapons are somewhat harder (uranium bombs are relatively easy, plutonium harder, fission much harder.) So if we're making imaginary arguments, I'm going to imagine a world where nuclear power was invented via civilian research, but limited military research meant no nuclear weapons :-) The important thing is that it doesn't have to be military research that drives any of this stuff. If you want spin-off benefits--and who doesn't?--invest heavily in space exploration. It would have precisely the same odds of civilian spin-off benefits as military research, and would involve building stuff that a) isn't primarily intended to destroy itself and whatever productively useful thing it is aimed at and b) would get us closer to spreading humanities eggs across multiple baskets. So "spin off benefits are good" is not a very strong argument for military research. It's a strong argument for research, but why not fund something productive rather than destructive?

apendleton 12y ago

With you on the larger point, but for the sake of argument, creating weapons technology isn't necessarily deadweight. Military applications have driven all sorts of technological developments that ultimately resulted in civilian economic growth (the Internet probably being the most salient here). Even this contraption probably required development of new compact power systems that might have all sorts of uses eventually. And it may well be that the Internet would have happened anyway, but there seem to be some inventions that nobody would have had the drive to produce if not for wars... nuclear power might be a good example.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
Nuclear power plausibly would have been created without military incentives--it just isn't that hard, and all the pieces were in place before Manhattan. Nuclear weapons are somewhat harder (uranium bombs are relatively easy, plutonium harder, fission much harder.) So if we're making imaginary arguments, I'm going to imagine a world where nuclear power was invented via civilian research, but limited military research meant no nuclear weapons :-) The important thing is that it doesn't have to be military research that drives any of this stuff. If you want spin-off benefits--and who doesn't?--invest heavily in space exploration. It would have precisely the same odds of civilian spin-off benefits as military research, and would involve building stuff that a) isn't primarily intended to destroy itself and whatever productively useful thing it is aimed at and b) would get us closer to spreading humanities eggs across multiple baskets. So "spin off benefits are good" is not a very strong argument for military research. It's a strong argument for research, but why not fund something productive rather than destructive?