The opportunity cost of war (slightly updated)

In very, very round numbers, Afghanistan has a population of 30 million, average per capita annual income is about $2000, and the US and its allies have poured at least $1 trillion into the war over the course of 14 years. Arithmetic was never my strong point, but it looks to me as if we could have doubled the income of everyone in Afghanistan for those 14 years, and it would have been cheaper.

it looks to me as if we could have doubled the income of everyone in Afghanistan for those 14 years, and it would have been cheaper.

The US also takes in about 3 million temporary workers a year. Maybe Afghans could have just moved over that period.

the outcome is a bitterly divided between two hostile communities

a bitterly divided what? inquiring minds want to know

Rich Puchalsky: People might think that way, but they generally don’t actually say it. The Iraq War produced many arguments trying to justify itself, but hardly anyone said that blood and carnage is just something we should be seeking out for its own sake. (Quite the opposite, since most arguments for the war were preventative in some sense.) Even “suck-on-this” was making an instrumental argument about how the Iraq War would discourage terrorism.

UserGoogol: “People might think that way, but they generally don’t actually say it. ”

All right, but if they are thinking that way, then we should say it even if they don’t. Consider the absence of public displeasure with the Iraq War after the fact. It is looked on in retrospect as both a mistake and a crime by the left, who opposed it in the first place. For evidence, try the U.S. Gallup poll on this page. “[…] do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq […]” went from 23% to 42% within a year, maxed out at 63% in 2008, and is now at 51%. There’s at least a core third who never disapproved even of our most discredited recent war. And the disapproval that does exist has not translated into any kind of action against the people who brought us the war.

So, no, people have not yet started to openly say that they like blood and carnage for their own sake, but the justifications that would cover this up are increasingly flimsy. No one really has a retrospective justification for the Iraq War, but this doesn’t really trouble anyone not on the left.

JQ is right that “any observed behavior must be utility maximizing” is a bad bromide which I fell into in an attempt to imitate economist-speak. I’ll rephrase it as: the reason that a country like the U.S. goes to war is because some people get positive benefits from war. These benefits include both the usual financial benefits to the oligarchical class, which gets to skim off public funds in various ways, and the psychological benefits of vicarious participation in war to a much larger public. Arguments against war that point out that war has opportunity costs appear to me to be doomed to futility, because I think that the number of people who calmly calculate the costs and benefits of war in financial terms and then decide that it has a net benefit is very small. (The number of people who calmly calculate this decision in financial terms is small: the number of people who do so and then get an obviously wrong answer is even smaller.)

@Rich Puchalsky
Are you personally acquainted with anyone who derives “psychological benefits” from “vicarious participation in war”? Or are you just assuming that many people who watch pictures of carnage on TV must be deriving psychic rewards from it? Isn’t this just another variation on your usual refrain that most people are bad, aggressive, and love to lord it over their perceived inferiors in a social hierarchy?

For an anarchist, you seem to take a rather grim view of ‘human nature’. Instead of reading your comments on this theme, we could all just turn off the computer (or the phone, or the tablet, or whatever the f*ck people use to read the Internet) and sit down with a paperback copy of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (which was not Freud at his best). Same message, afaict.

John @18,

But isn’t that all about “opportunity costs”? The very fact that America keeps going to war, again and again and again, is because we so easily rationalize doing so. We are never wrong. Ever. Apparently. Rah rah rah, John Wayne, Rambo, Bush on the flight deck, etc. etc.

You are absolutely correct that, like good programming language in reverse, if not this, then that . . . . but how do we stop doing the “this” part, if we always think it’s forever justified?

It is amazing that when it comes to spending on the poor, it’s all about “opportunity costs,” especially in the GOP. But wars? They get to slip by all of that. Nothing is measured. Nothing is calculated. Except BS like cake walk and it will pay of itself.

I’ve never heard that when it comes to spending on the poor or the environment . . . which does, actually, “pay for itself” many times over. War never does.

Are you personally acquainted with anyone who derives “psychological benefits” from “vicarious participation in war”?

No, because I chose my friends better than that. Because of biased samples — self-selecting and deliberate bias by the selector — the mental stability of the “average person” is grossly overestimated by everyone who doesn’t work low-end retail.

“Of these human-made calamities, the greatest is war. The wars engaged in by the US, Australian and other governments come at the opportunity cost of domestic programs that could save thousands of lives every year. The cost of war, in terms of American (and Australian) lives, is many times greater than battlefield casualty counts would suggest.”

I think there are two problems with these statement:

1. I don’t think the greatest human-made calamity is war at the moment. The environmental problems such as climate change are potentially the worst unless fixed soon and will also last longer than war and its effects. And war and these environmental disasters have some similar causes these being vying over control of resources.

2. It sounds somewhat parochial to limit the opportunity costs of war to “our side” – the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Aghanistan, injured and disabled people, polluted the environment, destroyed buildings and infrastructure, increased unemployment, in 2000 17% of Iraqis lived in slum like conditions, in 2011 50% of Iraqis lived in slum like conditions etc

Underlying the OP is a very simple model of the economy – one where the point-persons of flatland bump around trading with each other, like molecules, and the state sets the rules and skims energy off the bumping. But economies, like societies, have structures (it’s not flatland but a very hilly terrain indeed). In these structures states do much more than set the rules. They are one of the key paths through which activities are mobilised and ordered, and that mobilisation and order is key to much wealth production. In other words, if the state does not engage in some common pursuit, there is no money there at all to spend on other things – the money is an outcome, not an input.

Historically, war has been one of the main ordering purposes of states. We have clearly reached a point where it cannot remain so. Although the costs and benefits cannot be measured in money, the costs now far outweigh the benefits. Yet we need something to fill the gap.

I would suggest that there are opportunities where non-military actions are the least bad options, at least in that they allow for less terrible outcomes to occur.

What would have been the likely range of outcomes in Kosovo if not for the 1999 NATO intervention, for instance, and those outcomes’ costs for all the populations involved? I would suggest that optimism is not likely to be justified. We could go on, and on, talking about different scenarios. The second Gulf War left everyone involved badly off, but what of the first? In that it’s pretty unlikely that Saddam would have voluntarily withdrew from Kuwait once he occupied it, life for Kuwaitis would certainly be much worse.

Sometimes the least bad outcomes are all we can hope for.

That there are “physchological benefits” to war seems to me to be too general to be saying anything useful. (And arguable, at least, as a main cause of war). Afaik , what we do know about the reasons individuals fight and support (or “enjoy “) wars is that for every negative reason (revenge, some vague bloodthirstiness ) more do it for quite admirable reasons; honour, in group solidarity, adventure, idealism. Namely that they feel it’s the morally right think to do.
The average soldier/war supporter might not be a single minded utility maximiser, but she’s generally not a monster or helpless victim either

Rich Puchalsky @ 5: “many people enjoy war … This psychological benefit is a component of the utility function”

1 what is and is not to be counted as utility for an individual in a utility function is a normative question.

2 when thinking through the normative issue of what to count it is not obvious that everything that is in some sense “enjoyment” should be counted. A classic case is the “sadistic pleasures” a sadist might get from torturing a victim. If there are enough sadists doing it to a single victim is the torture then to be seen as overall beneficial from the POV of the utility function? An alternative is to give certain “toxic” pleasures zero weight in the utility function or even count them as negatives.

3 even if some enjoy war in some ways it is not obvious that the enjoyment they get is greater than what they would get without war. To enjoy war one would, I suppose, need to have a number of other psychological features. Those features might make the person experience overall less enjoyment. For example experiencing a “thrill of conflict” may feel good but it could also be accompanied with negative experiences of fear, anxiety and anger. In the background here lurks the distinction between utility as quantity of experienced enjoyment vs utility as revealed preference (revealed in choice/action pattern). With the revealed preference view peoples wishes (support) for war is evidence for their enjoyment of war. With the other view people might be in the grip of psychological features that pull them to support war even though that gives them overall less enjoyment (even if we set aside increased risk of death for oneself or loved ones).

Chris: ” It can nevertheless be true, that without the pressure of some emergency, we wouldn’t have allocated resources to RND in the way we did.”
Agree. Though again hard to argue the counterfactuals here. I have some “emergency brings focus and effort” intuitions, but on reflection I’m not sure I can trust them. I think we humans could have, without all those resources and all that manpower spent on military RND, still decided to devote the same amounts of resources/effort directly to other problems e.g. in medicine. After all people would still have suffered from disease, accidents, psychological distress and all the other risks of human life. But I may be wrong. If I am wrong, if conflict and war are necessary triggers for us to do our best in areas like medicine, then I’d consider that a strong reason for attempting genetical enhancement of the human genome, perhaps along the lines of what Persson & Savulescue argue in their Unfit for the future.

Firstly if you are going to consider the opportunity cost of war rather than peace, you need to establish the actual cost of the war, and differentiate that from the cost of the peacetime military establishment. Soldiers are paid, equipped and trained in peace as well as war so much of the cost of any individual war is not a true opportunity cost.

Secondly, you need to address the standard defence of peacetime military spending, which is couched in terms of insurance. I certainly recognise that I lose money on average by buying insurance, since otherwise my insurers would go out of business, but I am content to turn the risk of catastrophic loss into the reality of affordable losses. Peacetime military spending in the US and similar western democracies is certainly very affordable. The success of this analogy to insurance therefore depends on understanding how we can quantify the likelihood of something catastrophic happening (which we probably can’t, in any meaningful way) and just how catastrophic it would be (possibly more interesting as an issue for an economist).

Thirdly we must surely acknowledge that a cost/benefit analysis about going to war is made by two actors – in this case governments – just as a decision to trade in a market is made by the market participants. Both decisions have externalities which are not very helpfully considered as opportunity costs, it seems to me.

John @ 38: “War gives great urgency to the “D” part of R&D, at the expense of R”
Sounds correct in general. But we have two questions here:
1 For some fixed amount of R&D resources does war cause a shift of some R to D?
2 Does war cause an increase in the amount of R&D resources? (Due to the kind of urgency effect Chris B mentioned as a possibility.)

“Do any readers have specific examples that would be apposite, for example, promising young scientists killed in war.”

I do not on the spot recall any such case. By comparison it is very easy (for me) to recall cases that fit the “did military research during the war that later had positive spinoff effects” pattern e.g. Turing. But it is much harder to know of, and even harder to recall as vividly, some would/could be Turings who were snuffed out early by war even if there were a lot of them compared to the actual Turing and the many details of his life that we have available. I suspect there could be a psychological tendency to in hindsight want to see war as having had positive spinoff effects, to make the obvious awfulness of it seem a little bit less abhorrent.

“Do any readers have specific examples that would be apposite, for example, promising young scientists killed in war.”

Harry Moseley, “the greatest experimental physicist of the twentieth century”, killed at Gallipoli. Bohr (I think) said that even if no one else had died, the death of Harry Moseley alone was enough to make the First World War an unbearable tragedy.

43: I’m glad our resident, hey colonialism is great comm enter is here, seemingly obvlious to the views of the every one who as lived under it;

From a more purely economic perspective, it is also useful to think about the potential macroeconomic benefits of war. This seems to be visible in e.g. the US mobilization for WWII, and maybe even in post-war European economic miracle. This is a tricky issue as wars obviously can be very destructive from a macro perspective as well (Europe between WWI and WWII). I think these benefits are only in part Keynesian in a crude way — they also seem highly dependent on specific institutional changes associated with specific wars. It is also always possible to argue that one could get these benefits to through some other form of mass economic mobilization, some ‘moral equivalent of war’, but here one runs into Rich and Peter T.’s point again — societies seem willing or able to mobilize around war in a way they aren’t around other things.

The benefit that supporters of war tend to cite is that maintaining armed forces and using them leads to being enslaved and thus in principle losing everything (a loss equivalent to many trillions).

In some respects therefore the decision to maintain significant armed forces is a classic prisoners’ dilemma – if a nation could be certain that the others would disarm, then they would too. However, to have insignificant armed forces in a world where others have very large armed forces does seem to expose one to genuine long term risks (the US is partially an exception to this as logistically it is hard for Eurasian powers to get at). Therefore most nations maintain reasonably substantial armed forces for rational reasons.

An argument could then be made (on the basis of some of the more socio-historic type reasons listed above) that waging limited war is an inevitable concomitant cost of maintaining significant armed forces – it’s simply not realistic in practice to have all this massively expensive armed potential lying around and not use it some of the time, and historically almost all significant armed forces seemed to get used for foreign adventures or squashing internal dissent occasionally (although in some cases like Egypt and China they take odd detours into becoming business conglomerates). Therefore it could be argued that bigger nations are faced with a stark choice between A) the package of significant armed forces + occasional limited war or B) eventually being overrun. This doesn’t reject your logic that each individual limited war is a pointless waste, but it puts a context as to why we seem to be stuck with them regardless.

Incidentally I have seen this line of argument used (can’t remember where) to defend a military posture for the UK that consists almost entirely of the Trident nuclear missile system and nothing else. You can prevent a catastrophic invasion of the UK with Trident but it’s completely useless for waging limited war with, thus saving us a fortune in additional war expenditure….

“Do any readers have specific examples that would be apposite, for example, promising young scientists killed in war.”

There was also Karl Schwartzchild, for whom the familiar “Schwartzchild metric” and “Schwartzchild radius” are named. He was hardly young, being over 40 when he signed up, but I think it’s fair to say his career was cut short given that he produced three ground-breaking papers while actually at war.

As often, I think there are several different ideas here which need to be distinguished from each other. Simplifying, they are (1) the costs and effects of war (2) the utility of war, as opposed to other theoretical options, as a policy tool (3) the attractions political, economic or other of war as an option, (4) the economic effects of defence spending in peacetime and (5) the way in which governments make spending choices more generally. Different arguments apply in each case.
All Eisenhower’s speechwriter was saying is that, as we all know, a given amount of money can only be spent on one thing. If I buy I copy of your book, then I can’t send the same money to a charity supporting Syrian refugees. Everything, in other words, has an opportunity cost all the time. It’s wrong to assume, though, that the actual process of deciding government spending works like this: in no government I have ever known do explicit trade-offs between social and defence programmes take place. Usually it’s an anarchic free for all in which political power translates into higher budgets. There’s no reason at all to suppose that in practice reductions in the defence budget would be reflected in increases in, say education.
Ironically, something very like the opportunity cost argument nearly lost Britain and its allies the Second World War: the orthodox Treasury view, echoed in many other countries, was that defence spending could not be increased, because this would have to be at the expense of other programmes, or higher taxation, both of which were regarded as impossible. Fortunately, the Soviet Union had a different approach to opportunity cost analysis, and built up its military at the same time as investing massively in education, infrastructure and social programmes. Which is a good thing, or we’d be having this discussion in German, if we were having it at all.
Eisenhower was not talking about wars. If he had been, he would be disowning the very operations of which he was the supreme commander. He was talking about peacetime defence expenditure, which increased enormously in the US in the 1950s, and worried a lot of people because of its political implications. I think we’ve got over at least some of those worries, for two reasons. First, most military spending does not go on wars, but on supporting foreign and security policies. Britain and France retain nuclear weapons as status symbols, because of rivalry with each other, as a way of remaining P5 members, to preserve their positions with the US etc, even if they are hypothetically also available for practical use. But in both cases the opportunity cost (from a fixed defence budget) is other programmes, not some hypothetical social spending bonanza. Likewise, Sweden had (and still has) a relatively high defence profile as a way of underlining its neutrality and commitment to territorial integrity, not because it’s going to try to take back Norway. Second, much “defence” spending is actually indistinguishable from non-defence spending. In most militaries, around half the budget goes on personnel, many of whom are civil servants, and their related costs. Much of the rest goes on civilian purchases, ranging from fuel and clothing to commercial vehicles and civilian electronics components. The idea that defence spending is an “arms bill” that can be traded against higher social spending is an anti-militarist myth. (Incidentally, some defence spending has direct social benefits: French military teaching hospitals are among the best in the country and are open to all).
This is not to argue for more (or less) spending on defence, simply to point out that the opportunity cost arguments are actually rather complicated. It’s certainly true that military interventions have a long record of failure, and that most of these failures have been very expensive. No argument there. But how, methodologically, do you identify the opportunity cost of (say) the 2003 Gulf War? Would the money have been spent on poverty reduction in the US? On tax cuts for those with too much money already? On other military programmes? There’s also a difference between opportunity costs and simple alternatives – political solutions are always cheaper, but can’t necessarily address the problem.

OK, link fail, google “monument aux morts en landowski” if interested.

” The book is after all about the economic perspective and it’s useful to make clear the irrationality of war from that perspective. But it would also be useful to come to a deeper understanding of the psychological and social-structural (re Peter T’s point) underpinnings of war.”

There’s a difference here, I think , between why individuals fight in/ support wars and why states do. States or organisations could more plausibly be seen as behaving instrumentally than individuals.
Also, Noting that people fight for honour , relationships, in group solidarity etc also allows for more scope in managing peoples violent urges. If the perpetrator of a violent act thinks what they do is right, it means there are ways of developing norms and structures that could channel their exuberance more positively. Afaik this is what a lot of violence intervention programs do.
This is where rich is wrong, IMO. Afaict he imagines violence is pathological, the result of some deeply ingrained desire to dominate. Where in reality it seems to be primarily moral, a desire to right a perceived wrong.

Oops. Should have been “Old and Middle Kingdom”.

Ronan(rf): “Afaict he imagines violence is pathological, the result of some deeply ingrained desire to dominate. Where in reality it seems to be primarily moral, a desire to right a perceived wrong.”

Just as I’m not aware of many people who have done calm, economic-rational cost benefit analysis of war and come to the conclusion that wars have net benefits, I’m not aware that many people have thought morally about war as a way of righting perceived wrongs and come to the conclusion that they are morally good ways of doing so. Moral writing about war tends to come to the opposite conclusion, for obvious reasons within the consensus system of morality that most people in our contemporary culture(s) hold to .

I don’t know how you separate out a poorly thought through “desire to right a perceived wrong” from what I’ve described. If I said that when someone gets in my way I like to punch them in the face, that’s “a desire to right a perceived wrong”, isn’t it?

To put the point in (2) above another way, without the invasion of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001 there would be virtually no girls attending school because the Taliban would still be in power. Not to acknowledge this when discussing how many more girls (and boys) could have been enrolled in school if only there had not been so much spent on the military aspect seems a little strange.

I think people need to mark the difference between being non-rational and being irrational. People don’t make their actions because of an explicit cost-benefit analysis and that’s fine, (people aren’t and shouldn’t try to be perfect utility maximizers) but if their actions wildly fail to meet a cost-benefit analysis, that’s still bad.

Of course, if the argument is that there’s other benefits which aren’t being taken into account (and some of the replies here are making that argument) well then that’s different. But simply saying humans aren’t utility maximizers doesn’t address the issue that war seems to cause costs in excess of its benefits.

Further to comment @66, see:
http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-just-war-tradition-and-sovereignty.html

The quote from Eisenhower seems a bit ‘zero summish’ to me, like saying all the money spent on sports, the arts, or other entertainment could he spent on nurses, teachers, and doctors. Could the revenue used for war really be raised for other government spending programmes? Or the GI bill, would the government have funded that many university places in other circumstances? This is where opportunity cost gets too fuzy for me with so many counterfactuals and the law of unintended consequences, while it’s still a useful concept trying to actually calculate it seems meaningless. How many of the people killed before going to university would have been great scientists otherwise? Plus my instinct is to include the costs to the other side even if the decision makers don’t, it is basically a negative externality so you should have the invaders giving compensation, the invaded paying a bribe, and diplomacy used as a way to get an agreement.

Two possibly relevant quotations from my possibly unreliable memory:
Voltaire: a rational army would all run away.
Clausewitz (summarised): it is when an army retreats in disorder that it suffers really heavy casualties.

John Quiggin: Thanks for the update. I’m following your logic there now.

I once hired a superintendent for construction on a small tract in Southern California who had an interesting observation – acquired from his military service in Korea

“It was the most miserable real estate and weather that I had ever seen – so why didn’t we just buy the damn country? It would have been cheaper.”

And it would not have involved killing so many (my comment).

Stephen
I thought there was rather a long tradition, from Augustine and Aquinas onwards, of moral philosophers doing exactly that?

Yes. As I tried to point out @66 and 67.

If LFC and David want to argue by truncating a quoted sentence without notation (and in David’s case, even putting in a period), then they can. But the sentence was “I’m not aware that many people have thought morally about war as a way of righting perceived wrongs and come to the conclusion that they are morally good ways of doing so.” In particular, Aquinas / Augustine just war theory has little to do with serious moral analysis of contemporary wars, and generally amounts to admitting that they are almost all unjust or giving all of them and by extension almost any war a blanket moral pass.

I was going to make the point, like others, that a war requires two sides and there is a huge difference between the cost/benefit calculation of a war of choice, and that of a defensive war of survival, or say an insurgency.

But the extract in the OP specifically talks about discretionary overseas military interventions by Western powers, although it could make this even more explicit. I think LFC’s point stands about the relationship between invasion and aid programs, but most of the other wrinkles people have raised only come in when you generalize from these wars to War. As long as the book stays specific (the title doesn’t help IMO) I think they can be avoided.

#79. Cut and paste error. Like LFC I agree that these ideas have little contemporary relevance, and, indeed that they can be dangerous. That’s why I wanted to shift the argument, just a little, towards wider issues of the use of violence as opposed to other options, when you actually have been wronged. (And in South Africa, which I used as an example there was actually little doubt that wrongs had been committed and little doubt also that non-violent solutions could not right them.)
I think self-defence is a bit of a diversion. It’s an inherent right that states have always had, and if an invader crosses your border you obviously have the right to fight back. There again, states don’t always do so – think of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Alice Thomas, quoting another: “so why didn’t we just buy the damn country? It would have been cheaper.”

I think that’s a bit of a mystery.

On a general level, social and political psychology plays an important role and may offer opportunities for policy intervention. Rich offered a link upthread to Altemeyer’s work on the common political attitude cluster commonly known as authoritarian. Altemeyer’s work suggests that a social group that is too homogeneously made up of authoritarian followers is prone to pathological collective behaviors. In particular, authoritarian followers are prone to feeling hostile and fearful with reference to perceived out-groups, and experiments suggest that an homogenous group of authoritarian followers will both miss opportunities to cooperate and will provoke conflict with their propensity to be compulsively suspicious and hostile.

In less homogenous groups, where there are more cosmopolitan potential leaders, having some authoritarian followers actually strengthens the group’s ability to act coherently as a group, so it is not a simple question of those people being evil irredeemable racists, or whatever.

Another problem Altemeyer identifies is that authoritarian followers are not good judges of leadership character, and they are easily manipulated and misled by certain rhetorical tropes and dictatorial leadership styles, so people with what social psychologists sometimes call a social dominance orientation find it easy to demagogue them.

I said violence, not war. The reasons a group or state engages in war can be instrumental. The reason an individual engages in/or supports violence *can* be (and IMO primarily are) moral. The reason an individual supports or fights in a conflict is generally due to a perceived moral obligation, rather than an authoritarian character or desire to dominate.
A person doesnt have to be able to calculate a cost benefit analysis in a sophisticated manner for the concept to have some applicability to human decision making, and she doesnt have to be Augustine to live by a moral code. David mentions the ANC, but there’s no reason that violence enagaged through moral systems less understandable to educated western eyes (say the Taliban) arent also morally driven, or violence that is less excusable to ideological driven perspectives (say humanitarian interventions, or Iraq) arent perceived as the right thing to do by a lot of their architects. Think of the gang member who kills to avenge his friends death. This is usually seen as fulfilling an obligation to his friend and gang, a moral neccessity.
To talk about a moral belief system isnt to expect coherency, or to engage in moral relativism, but to think about how people conceptualise their behaviour, individually and within larger communities who share their values. Just because we might not share someones moral code doesnt mean it’s not a genuinely held system of values and obligations. So it is a distinction that matters IMO; whether your opponent is driven by character defects, or by contextually specific moral codes that make demands and tie them to obligations.

Yonan: I realise the thread is wandering, but I do want to say that it doesn’t seem to me to matter a damn whether the Nazis were, or ISIL are, “driven by character defects, or by contextually specific moral codes that make demands and tie them to obligations”. I think one could make a fairly good case for the latter.

Ric@79: is it that you aren’t denying that there is a centuries-long tradition of highly intelligent moral philosophers arguing about what is, or is not, a just war; but rather, that you don’t agree with their conclusions and so would prefer to ignore their existence?

Rich: we’re talking past each other. You want to discuss whether your values justify recent US wars. Maybe that’s the only thing worth talking about, for a USAian. A broader topic would be which values justify which wars, but that may not be what interests you.

A point in JQ’s defense: as I read the OP, he’s not taking any position on the causes of war or the motives for fighting. He’s saying that whatever those causes may be in a particular case or in general, the money expended in fighting (and associated activities) could have been spent otherwise, often more productively/beneficially/whatever. At that level of generality, the point seems pretty hard to contest, and applying it to esp. misguided cases of the use of military force (e.g. ‘o3 invasion of Iraq etc.) brings it into sharper focus. (That still leaves open the issue of when force or violence might be necessary and/or defensible, with the armed struggle against apartheid, mentioned above by David, being a sort of paradigm instance of a fairly recent case where a strong, albeit not open-and-shut, argument cd be made for force. But I think it’s not directly relevant to the OP where the examples are mil. interventions abroad by the U.S. and allies.)

Also on the OP: the U.S. agencies’ use of ‘Value of Statistical Life’, although not surprising, is somewhat unfamiliar and non-intuitive (at least to me) and might need some elaboration, at least in a footnote.

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B. Wilder @84
I don’t think war (or ‘non-cooperation’) “contains” or “frames” cooperation. I’m not at all persuaded that war is on a continuum with the domestic administration of justice etc. A threat of ‘violence’ in the form of criminal prosecution may “contain cooperation in a strategic space” that excludes certain forms of non-cooperative behavior, but I think that’s quite different than the war issue. As for this — “The purpose of war … must be peace, and cooperation — though perhaps on different terms than originally on offer” — I’d say, from the initiator’s standpoint, always on different terms from those originally on offer; otherwise there’d be no reason to resort to war. (There is a whole contemp. literature on the ‘bargaining theory of war’, going back to Fearon’s ’95 article, but I don’t think JQ needs to engage it b.c he’s not addressing the causes of war. I can’t properly summarize the argument, prob. b.c I never studied it carefully, but there are various summaries, doubtless of varying degrees of accuracy, available online. Phil Arena had a good one on his blog a long time ago. I think it’s all basically irrelevant to the OP, though.)

Sorry, the blockquote above should end after the first paragraph. The rest of the comment is my response and shd not be in blockquotes.

Sorry LFC, I was a bit harsh – I have very little patience when it comes to discussing war, probably because some people very close to me have lived through wars as civilians and their perspective is completely different from most people discussing war in the abstract.

Let’s talk pyramids instead of wars (and may I recommend John Romer’s splendidly empathetic book on Early Egypt). Bunch of fishers/farmers/hunters who express their communal identity through rituals that include the dead build ever more elaborate tombs and religious sites. This feeds back into stronger organisation, which is applied to farming/fishing/defence/law, which generates more wealth, which feeds back into more elaborate tombs and associated temples….

An analysis which takes the wealth for granted would find all the tombs etc of negative value. But the tombs do not just consume wealth, they enable the production of wealth. Without them, you would just have a bunch of fishers/farmers/hunters in small huts, happy but poor.

States are our current pyramids. The ability to make war is an expression of the level of organisation that generates our wealth. They don’t have to make war (and indeed modern war is more likely to degrade than enhance their level of organisation), but they need to do something that, in economic terms, consumes wealth in order to generate the organisation that makes wealth.

JQ: The famous “fiscal crisis of the state” reflects the fact that the demands on states far outstrip the resources available to meet them.

Or, possibly, it reflects the difficulty of solving problems of political coordination and breaking political stalemate. Which isn’t quite identical with a shortage of resources.

Hmm. Since you mention Eisenhower – the defense of armed liberal internationalism is usually invoked in opposition to an equally caricatured depiction of post-Depression era of mostly-autarkic states interacting through bilateral and often secret negotiations

That is to say, the counterfactual is not a world in which Americans stay home but other things stay the same, but in which Americans stay home and the wider world is dominated by political movements hostile to liberal-democratic capitalism, which was once Soviet communism but now would be Islamic extremism, assorted east-of-Berlin, west-of-Japan ultranationalisms, etc. The economic (net) benefits of world trade in a world-system where GATT MFN norms dominate should be included. It might not be a system that one likes or regards as having positive net benefits – you can probably consult Plume for opinions – but nonetheless it should figure in the scales.

Japan today has no interest in conquering resource-rich regions of Asia, but it is also today a country that can just buy the oil and rubber that it needs. Yes, it might have to pay a high price for it, but that’s different from a total denial from a tolerably industrialized quality-of-life for a large portion of its people.

Conversely, a world-system where aggressive protectionist/territory-oriented ultranationalism is capable of acquiring prestige domestically (if perhaps unsustainably in the long-run, where we may all be literally dead) is not necessarily less armed in global terms. Neville Chamberlain had to put off domestic priorities in order to afford British rearmament, well before the Germany began actually picking off bits of Czechoslovakia.

CCC@38:

Is military R&D different

In the US, it’s certainly run differently.

The civilian agencies (especially the NIH) tend to favor safe, incremental projects, but give individual researchers a lot of autonomy. There’s certainly bureaucratic oversight (e.g., for purchasing), but the grantees work independently and without much, if any, interim feedback. DARPA and the other defense/intelligence funding agencies prefer ambitious (sometimes overly so) moon-shots, often on aggressive timescales. Program managers run a portfolio of similar projects and do a lot of managing within and across those projects. These projects are also often structured as contracts with specific deliverables (build an X, design a Y, test Z under conditions A,B,C, etc), in contrast to the open-ended NIH/NSF grants.

In theory, a civilian agency could act either way. The NIH periodically makes noise about changing the grant system so they’re not (effectively) repaying people for work already done as “pilot data.” However, I suspect that the military agencies do have a little more latitude for trying and failing at ambitious or silly-sounding things–if nothing else, the military agencies have more bipartisan support.

I already had the concept of
Externalities to hold my own at the dinner table,
and see Economic Democracy

So…Why do I need Opportunity Cost?

Because,
When the frame switches from
Economics as +/+ trade
To 
Economics as opportunity cost
We can switch the frame too
On the same Picture 

The intellect is always running to safety,
Isn’t it?

“Can the economist counter-factually calculate the costs of non-intervention in Syria?”

What is a “cost of non-intervention”? Let’s assume, based on historical precedent, that intervention in Syria would kill many people and that eventually stability would be achieved under the leadership of a new or old dictator who we sponsor who we “have” to attack and put down in turn in another decade. Since that’s the alternative to “non-intervention”, shouldn’t that be the cost comparison?

“Presumably much of this could have been prevented by an appropriate response of the international community at the end of 2011 – beginning of 2012” is assuming the conclusion to your argument in its premises. Is the international community the kindly social worker of nations, ready, willing, and able to make Syrians treat each other well no matter what their politics are?

david @108

Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that “a world-system where GATT [WTO] MFN norms dominate” is desirable (or more desirable than certain alternatives), I do not accept the view — which, for some, seems to be an article of faith — that the U.S.’s current global military footprint is necessary to keep that system in place. Cut the number of U.S. military bases around the world in half (from 700/800 to 300/400), and I doubt that the system of world trade would be much affected. Many of those U.S. bases don’t have much or anything to do with safeguarding trade routes and shipping lanes.

Should the U.S. be paying Djibouti tens of millions of dollars a year to lease a military base there, even assuming (which I don’t know is the case) that a certain fraction of those resources is devoted to fighting piracy in the Indian Ocean region? India wants to be a Great Power: let the Indian navy safeguard the shipping lanes in the region. Why does the U.S. have to do it? Having India do it would also presumably make less necessary the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia, where the U.S. has been responsible for displacing a lot of the inhabitants (see David Vine’s book on it).

The Pentagon, which has the entire world divided into military commands, and the U.S. military-industrial-R&D complex have an obvious interest in keeping alive the proposition that the U.S. is (as Madeleine Albright notoriously put it) the “indispensable nation,” the only country capable of providing “global security.” But this is a self-fulfilling (or self-perpetuating), circular proposition, because as long as the U.S. keeps its defense budget so high, certain other countries can keep theirs relatively low. The U.S. is the only country that has seen fit to ring the entire world with military bases, and the base network has become self-perpetuating, its existence maintained by a combination of bureaucratic inertia, public inattention, and a steady stream of new supposed “threats” that require to be dealt with.

The only way to test whether the existing U.S. global base network and U.S. global military footprint are truly necessary for “global security” is to begin to reduce them and see what happens. If an increase in ‘chaos’ or terrorism or trade disruption ensues, the footprint can always be restored to its former dimensions. If the amount of ‘chaos’ and disruption stays roughly the same (or even goes down), then we will know that the existing base network was not necessary to “global security” and is simply a mechanism used by the U.S. defense establishment to perpetuate its current size and global reach.

(p.s. to david: you hyphenate “world-system,” but you don’t sound like an adherent of Wallersteinian world-systems analysis.)

LFC: “The only way to test whether the existing U.S. global base network and U.S. global military footprint are truly necessary for “global security” is to begin to reduce them and see what happens”.

Yes, that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan, didn’t it?

As for the US commitment to NATO, further reducing that might have some consequences I wouldn’t like to see, and I doubt if many Americans would like them either.

Stephen:
I don’t think a c0nversation between us on these issues will be very productive or illuminating. But I didn’t say anything specific about NATO. The U.S. and NATO have recently and publicly increased their visibility in and commitment to the Baltic states, which are NATO members. I have no particular problem with that. But on the broader question(s) we are probably not going to agree.

“The Laughing Boy”:

Reason,

No, the answer isn’t passivity. Not at all. It’s engagement via humanitarian, diplomatic, cultural exchange modes, etc. Vigorous engagement, if the other party or parties are willing. And they must be willing.

One of the biggest reasons why right-libertarians have this so wrong is that they want true “isolation,” other than business interactions. While they generally have the right idea about wars, they basically ruin all of that by hating the very concept of collective, international help. Ron Paul, for instance, fought for more than two decades to kill UNISEF and pretty much defund any and all humanitarian AID programs. What we really need is to reverse our thinking on this. Stop the wars, but radically increase our humanitarian aid, cultural exchange programs, scientific and educational exchange programs, as well as political diplomacy. To me, nothing could be more logical or obvious.

LFC@120: I think we might agree on more matters than you suppose. That US military commitments are on the whole excessive, or overstretched; that some US military spending is misguided; that recent US military actions have mostly varied from ineffective to counterproductive to catastrophic; and that US commitment to NATO and especially the Baltic states is a case where US actions have been valuable and should not be ended by US withdrawal into isolation.

So where do you think we differ?

This is, I think, slightly on topic: what are the opportunity costs to Labour if Burnham and the Labour elites overturn a Corbyn election, especially with a promise to apologize for the Iraq war and actually behave a little bit like a leader with principles. I’d say the Scottish voters never return to Labour and the Greens/UKIP get a big boost.

A Corbyn victory makes it more difficult for Cameron to bomb another country, not impossible of course. I can’t recall caring much about which suit Labour pushed forward to the microphone. Launching a legal challenge over this election is an extremely bad idea, in my view.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leadership-andy-burnham-calls-for-urgent-meeting-over-concerns-that-large-scale-tory-infiltration-could-lead-to-legal-challenge-10465250.html

This, too, is worth reading: lifelong Labour supporter goes Green this year, wants to come back to support Corbyn – elites say, NOPE!!

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/you-too-could-be-called-a-star-by-the-compliance-unit-the-hysterical-labour-purge-has-gone-too-far-10465047.html

The Cold War demonstrates that you don’t actually have to start fighting to incur opportunity costs. The incapacity of western elites to understand that after four years of war, more destruction than any country had ever suffered in history and twenty-five million dead the Soviet Union would regard virtually any measures as justified to make sure that never happened, again began a vicious circle that not only drained resources away from more useful programs, but also nearly ended the world on several occasions . Narrowly-avoided nuclear war has to count as an opportunity cost by anyone’s reckoning.

novakant: “I agree that the US should have minded their own business, what on earth did they want in Vietnam? But since you mention “both sides”: do you really think the Vietnamese should have just bent over to get f@cked by their imperial overlords?”

I think that a whole lot of Vietnamese would be alive instead of dead now if they had, and I can’t see what they gained historically from those deaths. Were the Vietnamese people exploited any less by their state than they had been by imperial overlords? I guess that wars of colonial liberation are supposed to provide national pride, but if you think it’s worth going to war for national pride, you’re going to find yourself going to war a whole lot.

A relevant article today in Salon from Noam Chomsky:

America is the gravest danger to world peace

“The Greatest Threat”

Opponents of the nuclear deal charge that it does not go far enough. Some supporters agree, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” The author of those words, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, added that “Iran, in its national capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement [the governments of the large majority of the world’s population], is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.” Iran has signed “a historic nuclear deal,” he continues, and now it is the turn of Israel, “the holdout.”

Israel, of course, is one of the three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

. . . .

According to the leading western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States. The rest of the world regards it as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

Plume @132
there is no Al Queda if Reagan hadn’t supported Bin Laden and his soldiers in Afghanistan

Al Qaeda came into existence in 1988, when Zawahiri’s jihadist group merged with, or was incorporated into, bin Laden’s group. Until the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and probably during it as well, a main enemy/target of the Zawahiri group remained the Egyptian regime; Zawahiri had been imprisoned (and tortured) for several years in Egypt after Sadat’s assassination. While the CIA did funnel money to the mujahideen in Afghanistan and while the presence of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia did inflame Bin Laden, I think it goes too far to say the U.S. created al-Qaeda. It’s not a straightforward question, because the U.S. is so entangled with Mideast and S.W. Asian politics in the period, but I think the way you’ve put it is an overstatement.

LFC@139: but what do you think the alternative to “NATO expansion” was? The governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechs, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, with the full support of their peoples, asked to be admitted to NATO, partly or largely because they hoped that would give them protection against being reincorporated into the Russian zone (which, God knows, they had experienced, suffered from and had reason to fear and to abhor).

Should the Western members of the existing NATO have turned them down?

Or should they have said, hey, if the Russians want to take you over again, not our problem, peace in Europe depends on not annoying the Russians?

Stephen:
I haven’t thought about this in a while, so it actually took me a couple of minutes to remember that one position (which I thought made some sense) was that NATO, having been born in 1949 basically as a Cold War alliance (though retrospectively some tried to argue otherwise), should have declared victory after the events of 1989-91 and closed up shop. It should have been replaced, if that was deemed desirable, by a new organization with new aims. Maybe that was never a real possibility, I don’t know. I didn’t follow the debate on NATO expansion all that closely. I’ll leave it at that. I’ve expended more time on this thread than I intended.

novakant, I’m not a pacifist in that I do pretty much accept that people are going to defend themselves. But I think that your summary above is ahistorical. Foreign powers didn’t start dropping napalm on Vietnam until the war was well underway. If the people of Vietnam were supposed to have had any choice about whether to pursue the war or not, then not pursuing it would have led to no napalm being dropped. For instance, the partition after the First Indochina War could conceivably have been negotiated into a de facto border.

@146:

Check your facts. It was the U.S. that reneged on the 1954 Geneva Accord, which would have unified the country under a general election and helped to set up the Diem regime in the south.

(Ps I’m not implying rich holds the vulgar materialist perspective linked above, which I know he doesn’t. This is a hazy add on rather than reply to anyone)

@143. In 1945 the Soviet Union was bankrupt and starving and the government was desperate to demobilize as fast as possible. Stalin was not interested in taking over any more territory, not least because the Soviet Union did not have nuclear weapons and would not have for some years. Soviet troops withdrew from Austria on schedule, but it’s doubtful if Stalin (or the average Soviet citizen) felt any need to justify the retention if huge (if not very high-quality) forces in and near the Soviet Union given what they had been through.
But this is a very interesting opportunity cost example. Although Soviet postwar economic recovery was very impressive, the absolute priority given to military expenditure meant that lots of other things had to be sacrificed. This was considered justified at the time, but of course it illustrates that decisions about defense and war are rarely entirely rational, and so rarely suitable for rational economic analysis.
For what it’s worth, the mood in the US at the time, justifying the Cold War military buildup, was pretty extreme as well, even if nowhere as paranoid as in the Soviet Union. Some of the NSC documents from the 1940s make you wonder if the authors were entirely sane.

Are you allowing the people of Vietnam any agency or not, novakant? “In no case have there been benefits remotely commensurate with the cost, for either side (for all the millions of lives lost, is Vietnam much different now than if the war had never been fought?)” was written by JQ in the context of agreeing that “the insanely destructive wars waged by the (North) Vietnamese” were a bad thing.

Let’s assume, based on historical evidence, that the U.S. and other imperial powers will break every agreement, attempt to assassinate your leaders, engage in economic disruption and hostile propaganda, and support coups to overthrow your government. It is not excusing the U.S. or blaming the victim to still say that if you can, you should avoid war in response to all of these, because once war starts even worse crimes will be committed against the people. It is not saying that imperial domination is wonderful to point out that exploitation under the Communist Party of Vietnam was harsh, and ask what did the people gain by replacing imperial domination with state capitalism.

LFC@144: since you’re still adhering to this thread, could I ask what you think the alternatives to NATO expansion post-1989-01 might have been?

You suggest NATO could have declared victory and dissolved itself, possibly to be replaced by something else. Fine, but it seems to me that the alternatives were
1) Shut it down altogether, no remaining alliance, each European state to look after itself. Russia left unthreatened but, if revanchist, undeterrable.
2) Yanks go home, remaining European states form alliance. Strong enough to deter Russia? Acceptable, if truly independent, to US?
3) Replace iNATO by another European/American alliance, different name, with mutual guarantees of support if attacked, covering the same area as before. No change in the West: former Soviet satellites and republics left deeply vulnerable.
4) Replace it by an alliance including Russia and other states of the former USSR. But how can that be presented to Russians, or at least Putinesque-paranoid Russians, as anything other than a conquest by the West?

Your views?

LFC- Well yeah I did acknowledge that above, but I also think it’s more complicated than that. I think there any number of plausible similarities between why the president of the US or an insurgent in Liberia chooses to fight or support a war. I mean look at the rhetoric of the Bush admin pre Iraq; revenge for 9/11, obligations to lead the free world, responsibilites to defeat tyranny/protect the homeland etc These claimed motives might be only rhetorical (although I dont believe they are) but even if so, the fact that these framings are used shows that this conception of war and violence resonates with their publics.
This doesnt mean that violence cant still be instrumental (violence still serves a purpose, people still have mixed motives) or that it’s irrational (acting morally isnt irrational) it just means that people are primarily (though of course not always) driven by obligations, in group solidarity, honour, morality etc rather than pure self interest.
I dont think that’s in conflict with claims that states (and insurgencies,terrorist groups etc) use violence strategically or in pursuit of defined interests (though it complicates the picture on how those preferences are formed)
Whether or not it has relevance to states and non state actors after their various preferences and motives and interests are aggregated into policy ? Sure, why not ? To some degree? Id be surprised if you thought that values were irrelevant to FP formation. And what is an alliance or a responsiblity to a social group in another country than a morally felt obligation ? These are also strategic concerns, but strategic concerns loaded with normative preferences, and at times that make very little strategic sense.
I dont think Strohm is going on the say so of one anthropologist, but a considerable amount of evidence and research

Stephen @155
W/r/t #4, I think this could have been presented as something other than “conquest by the West.” Have to remember Putin did not come to power until later. There were moves in the direction of including Russia as some kind of ‘associate member’ via the Partnership for Peace, if I recall the name of that initiative correctly. In short, it seems to me there were possibly some missed opportunities here. More creative thinking was needed than just “NATO can [somehow] help nascent democracies transition to democracy and capitalism/markets/neoliberalism/fill-in-the-blank/etc., so let’s expand it almost to Russia’s borders.”

My expression of opinion is denying Vietnamese people all agency?

R.P. @153:

You’re just arguing adventitiously in a historical vacuum and engaging in a self-manipulative procedure that I term “putting yourself in the right”.

What did the Vietnamese people gain from the war? Well, how about, for better or worse, independence and unity, (from China, as much as the Japanese, French and Americans)? And as for the agency of the Vietnamese people, they fought, suffered and died on all sides for 30+ years. It would seem that they exercised plenty of agency, unless you think agency is only a hierarchical imposition from the top and center and never a response from below. And, pray tell, what sense does it make to apply a stretched chain of consequences 70 years later with “perfect” hindsight from another historical era, to a prior era whose horizons could never have anticipated such distant “outcomes”?

“Let’s assume, based on historical evidence, that the U.S. and other imperial powers will break every agreement, attempt to assassinate your leaders, engage in economic disruption and hostile propaganda, and support coups to overthrow your government. It is not excusing the U.S. or blaming the victim to still say that if you can, you should avoid war in response to all of these, because once war starts even worse crimes will be committed against the people.” Really? It is always better for weaker nations to submit to the demands of stronger ones, especially after a century or more of colonial subjection? One can agree that wars are horrifying and always only a last desperate resort, without denying a “natural right” to self-defense against aggression.

JQ, as is his wont on these sorts of topics, observes that wars are not “rational” in utilitarian/economistic terms, that they are “negative sum games” in which the “costs” exceed the “benefits”, (however defined), even in most all cases for the putative victors, if any. But he then fails to draw the obvious conclusion that wars are not to be accounted for or explained in such utilitarian/economistic terms, (even if they involve economic “causes” and consequences), but would require a much different framework of accounting/explanation to deal with their historical phenomenology, as it were. Because they are much more a political than an economic matter. Politics concerns conflicts and their resolution, not material surpluses and their optimization and distribution. And thus all political orders are latently or explicitly, potentially or actually, rooted in violence, in the mutual coercion that maintains any cooperative order. (The “rule of law” is always at least as much about the generation and imposition of power as about any concerns for “justice” or “rights”). So JQ just hews to a status quo proceduralist liberalism, assuming that the “better argument” would hold sway and automatically provide legitimation for the current order of violence, (despite all strategic orientations, sophistical manipulations, and genuine argumentative gaps and impasses, which is sufficient, at least, to vouchsafe his unimpeachable “good intentions”. But that’s not any real guidance for dealing with these thorniest of issues.

You here seem just to be peculiarly afflicted with a version of the “white man’s burden”.

j.c. halasz @164

Politics concerns conflicts and their resolution, not material surpluses and their optimization and distribution [sic — as if a whole lot of political conflict were not precisely about the distribution of material surpluses] And thus all political orders are latently or explicitly, potentially or actually, rooted in violence, in the mutual coercion that maintains any cooperative order. (The “rule of law” is always at least as much about the generation and imposition of power as about any concerns for “justice” or “rights”.)

What you’re saying is basically the same thing that Bruce Wilder said @85:

What puts violence outside the strategic space in which cooperative and mutually beneficial trade takes place is a threat of violence .

…. Violence and the threat of violence, usually on a smaller scale, is what contains cooperation in a strategic space that excludes many forms of non-cooperation as options. …

This view of things puts war on a continuum with such phenomena as labor strife and altruistic punishment [whatever that means], as well as the public administration of justice and the private pursuit of torts.

When I questioned this view, Bruce W. apparently backtracked from it @107 in a somewhat cryptic comment that I didn’t reply to.

Be that as it may, the view you (j. halasz) express here and the view that BW expressed @85 both go wrong, ISTM, by assuming that because “all” — I would say most, not all — political orders rely on the implicit threat of state-directed violence against ‘rule-breakers’, there must be the possibility of war lurking in all political orders. This does not follow, istm. And if you’re not drawing this conclusion or inference or deduction, then why bother pointing out that “all political orders are latently or explicitly, potentially or actually, rooted in violence, in the mutual coercion that maintains any cooperative order”? Either (1) this is supposed to somehow connect to an argument about war — and, if it does, neither you nor Bruce W. have persuasively made the connection — or (2) it’s irrelevant. I suppose your and Bruce’s implicit, unstated argument might be that war is perhaps sometimes necessary to the maintenance of “international order,” as coercion in the form of criminal prosecution is necessary to the maintenance of domestic “order.” But if that’s what you mean (and I’m not sure it is), it doesn’t undercut the point that there are still opportunity costs that can be weighed, at least retrospectively if no one bothers to try to do it prospectively.

And this leads to the point that I think you are overreading JQ’s post. He’s not trying to “explain” war in “economistic” or rationalist terms. He’s not trying to explain war, period. He’s saying that war and military spending have costs in the form of lost resources that could have been used to do other things. He believes these costs usually outweigh the benefits, but that’s actually a separate point. Neither point is a theory or an explanation of the causes of war or the ‘roots of violence’, nor is it presented as such.

Matt @99: yes.

I guess that people are really strongly wedded to the myth that fighting bullies instead of capitulating them is likely to make your life better.

Fortunately humanity doesn’t solely consist of utilitarian bean counters and some people have a different idea of what “a better life” means and are willing to make sacrifices to achieve it – there would be no resistance fighters without these “myths”, only conformists and collaborators.

But even if we accept utilitarianism and it’s ideas of happiness wholesale – it is simply not a very good long-term strategy since it quite obviously encourages those with the biggest guns to f@ck people over again and again – and they will do that, just like capitalists will always try to squeeze the last bit of profit out of everyone. Hence the need for pushback.

David: you say NATO offered “the French the hope of not being abandoned again as in 1940”. I don’t see why it was particularly the French who saw NATO as a way of ensuring they were not abandoned by their neighbours if threatened.

And I really don’t see why you think the French were “abandoned in 1940”. Wasn’t it more a matter of the French abandoning themselves?

Stephen,
I think the French would instance(I don’t necessarily speak for them here) four or five things . (1) In 1919 Wilson pressured Clemenceau into making concessions at Versailles in return for a bilateral security guarantee that he knew in advance (as was later disclosed in official documents) the Senate would never ratify. (2) The pressure put on French governments in the 1930s by the US (to whom they owed a lot of money after WWI) to reach a peaceful accommodation with Hitler, as well as (disputed) accounts of military material ordered from the US not being delivered in time for the German attack in 1940 (3) The British withdrawal from Dunkirk and the subsequent destruction of the French fleet in Oran by the British and (4) the unremitting hostility of Roosevelt to De Gaulle, who tried numerous times to sideline and replace him, and who favored the setting up of a military occupation government in France in 1944, using many of the figures from the Vichy regime. De Gaulle managed to head off this particular trick, which would certainly have started a civil war. (It should be mentioned that Churchill was almost equally antipathetic to De Gaulle.) The subsequent betrayal at Suez simply confirmed the French in the belief that they had been right all along.
The issue is not, really, who’s right and who’s wrong. The fact that the French lost in 1940 through a combination of simple bad luck and a disinclination of their political and military elites (unlike the common soldiers) to fight the Germans, is true enough, but it’s also true that in all the myth-making about 1940, a sense of abandonment features heavily, and always has. So while the French pursued various policies (independent nuclear systems, withdrawal from the NATO military structure) which might have saved them if the Americans did what the British had done in 1940, they also did their best to keep the Americans involved as much as possible. “At least they’ll be over here already next time” was the argument used in the 1980s, and there was also a security treaty which had been ratified by the Senate, and thus was more likely to be respected.
The French were not the only ones to feel abandoned in 1940 of course – the British did as well. But their anger was mostly directed against the French. In reality I’m not sure anyone in the Cold War really believed in Americans security guarantees, but countries other than the French were generally too polite to say so. As a result, NATO policy consisted to some extent (as one General put it in my hearing) of making sure “the first soldier to die is an American.”

Stephen,
we can debate this endlessly, but, as I said, I was trying to explain French behavior, not defend it. All of your points are reasonable interpretations as far as they go, but it’s precisely because they didn’t share your view that the French reacted as they did, and why the dominant myth of 1940 (elastically defined I agree) is that of betrayal by the Anglo-Saxons and the wish to ensure such betrayals were less likely in the future. Hence NATO. As regards Churchill, though, there’s a significant difference between his treatment of de Gaulle before and after the North Africa landings in 1942. Earlier, Churchill was very supportive of de Gaulle because, frankly, there was no real alternative. But we know from official documents of the time that, once Algeria (and thus French territory) was reconquered, Churchill was very keen to have someone else than de Gaulle in charge, and spent some time maneuvering to bring this about.

LFC @166:

Just to clear up a few points.

I expressed elsewhere that “opportunity costs” is a weak and dubious economic concept. The idea that they would resolve without remainder into market prices is nonsense. (The I would think that is what JQ is aiming to get across with his Hazlitt book). And such a notion is entirely a counterfactual construction. Obviously, there are trade-offs and whenever one chooses the realization of one possibility other possibilities are thereby excluded; that’s pretty basic. But there are other “costs” involved beyond individual decisions, fixed costs, sunk costs, path dependencies, etc. But if opportunity costs and toting up costs and benefits in such terms doesn’t bear much weight in it’s own domain of application. extending it beyond that domain makes even less sense. (I would guess the Busheviks were using some lunatic version of cost/benefit analysis in invading Iraq, which was to be converted into a Cato Institute wet-dream staffed by Young Republicans).

So JQ is pretty much just trafficking in banalities. (Rich Puchalsky was engaging in fact suppression and counterfactual historical revisionism). That wars and preparations for wars have “opportunity cost” is almost too obvious to state. (Though multipliers are model artifacts rather than brute facts, the usual estimate for military spending is at most .7, a drag on the economy, unless you by the contention of some Marxists that it constitutes an outlet for excess capital accumulation and maintaining profits). That “resources” could much better be expended elsewhere and otherwise is not a proposition that would provoke much disagreement, at least ceterus paribus. There are two frustrations that are not being addressed however: 1) what level of provision for military defense to deter wars and aggression is required (and how is that to be determined in a world or uncertainties and threat inflation), and 2) why is it that only war and military expenditures seem to allow for the sort of mobilization of “resources” for some “ultimate” purpose, in a way that no other projected ends seem to allow or inspire. (The “Arsenal of Democracy” which ended the Great Depression in the U.S. os often cited by Keynesian maximalist as a model for a true full employment economy; but it was dismantled and we got NSC 68 instead). But even stating that wars are costly far beyond benefits, wasteful and destructive, already amounts to understatement. Wars tend to involve immense collective sacrifices, as well as coercive solidarities, that far exceed any sort of economic accounting, even “moral” economy. So if JQ is not explaining anything about war, he’s also not adding anything to the stock of understanding.

For the rest, there is the “Hobbesian problem of order”, (for which Hobbes himself provided no adequate “solution”), and the textbook definition of the sovereign state as the organized monopoly on legitimate violence, (though I think that in that strange alchemy between violence and legitimation, the “organized” part gets under-emphasized). No, I am not committing a genetic fallacy that just because states arose from military violence, such violence is alw2ays their essence and states don’t evolve other functions. For that matter wars don’t necessarily occur between states, but can occur within states or involve non-state actors. Nor am I claiming that state-directed violence against law-breakers derives directly from war-making powers, (though there is often enough a connection, both ideologically and functionally between foreign and domestic security apparatuses). Nor do I think of the potential violence involved in social conflicts as just physical, let alone lethal force. Structural and symbolic violence, the obliteration of the position of others, are at least as important in maintaining political domination. I would just tend to say that not all law-breakers are created equal and that the criminals are not just to be found among the hoi polloi, but still more among the ruling elites. ( I would think that #BLM might be a better example than ordinary law enforcement) . But the analogy is based on the fact that war is always a suspension of settled sovereign order, which is why it always resembles a criminal enterprise and invites further criminality.

Philosophically speaking, the further point is this: there is no total “reason” grounded in absolute premises, nor unconditioned and unlimited “universality”. So relying on rational argument and reasonable persuasion alone to resolve political conflicts, which are endemic, is something of a fool’s errand, however well intended. All arguments sooner or latter arrive at aporetic impasses. Further, arguments are never simply disinterested exercizes about arranging the furniture in the heaven of ideas, but rather always, in however mediated a fashion, connect up with practical projects and concerns, such that impasses and oppositions are conflicts as well. (The word”argument” is itself ambiguous, which is why even the most abstract and formalized arguments can degenerate into angry polemics). So the resolution of political conflicts and the securement of authoritatively binding agreements allowing for the undoubted benefits of social cooperation across differences must always rely one non-rational supplements to argumentative persuasion, not just violent force, but fraud, corruption, unprincipled compromises, repeated ‘games, etc.. (Brute force is itself never enough, which is why winning the war is often less difficult that winning the peace, i.e. legitimating any settlement). Impotently appealing to “good will” in some transcendental noumenal sense and uttering the truism that war is bad doesn’t do any actual good. We all live in the world and not above or outside it and we all have to deal one way or another with its grotesqueries. If one wants to avert wars and open up more productive or fruitful paths to conflict resolution, then struggling to understand the phenomena grouped under the rubric of war and apply what one can learn to situational analysis would seem more reasonable, even if at the same time irrational. Simply scrubbing one’s conscience clean to avoid any complicity one way or another is no solution.

“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”

@179: Most of the French troops evacuated from Dunkirk by June 4th spent some time in England (for understandable reasons) before being returned to France. The second phase of the German offensive began on June 5th. By June 9th, the surviving units of the French air force withdrew to North Africa, On June 10th, Paris was declared an open city.

I would not dispute the courage of some French units that fought before, and after, Dunkirk. But the French who chose to return rather than stay in Britain achieved nothing that I know of. Of course, some may have felt they were doing the right thing for France.

Fortunately humanity doesn’t solely consist of utilitarian bean counters and some people have a different idea of what “a better life” means and are willing to make sacrifices to achieve it – there would be no resistance fighters without these “myths”, only conformists and collaborators.

But even if we accept utilitarianism and it’s ideas of happiness wholesale – it is simply not a very good long-term strategy since it quite obviously encourages those with the biggest guns to f@ck people over again and again – and they will do that, just like capitalists will always try to squeeze the last bit of profit out of everyone. Hence the need for pushback.

I enjoy a little schadenfreude that Vietnam finally kicked out its colonial oppressors and their allies after 30 years of armed struggle, because I believe the colonial/capitalist war against the communists was morally illegitimate. But 20 years after the war the Vietnamese were earning peanuts making products for Nike, and the government that liberated them from colonial oppression apparently did so to guarantee its own monopoly on oppression. It seems like non-elite Vietnamese didn’t materially win much from winning the war.

I am glad that some people believe myths about resisting bullies, or at least believe that they must resist regardless of the true likelihood of success, precisely because of the horrible incentives if everyone just complied every time a better-armed bully showed up and started making demands. Yet I also believe that fighting instead of complying usually produces its own horrible problems.

I think it is horrible that the Egyptian military staged a coup against its elected government. I think it is horrible that Saudi Arabia is still ruled by a hereditary dictatorship. I don’t want the Egyptian military or the House of Saud to get away with it. But I look at Libya and Syria and think that ending tyranny may have an unacceptably high price, especially since there’s no guarantee that the winners of a civil war will be especially aligned with the Enlightenment values I regard as the opposite of tyranny. If I wish Syrian-scale armed struggle on Egypt, because I believe so strongly that tyrants shouldn’t get away with it, I’m also wishing an incredible horror on the Egyptian people.

Americans are good at remembering to fight: we recall the Munich Agreement and (mis-)apply it to every situation that even vaguely suggests military action. We remember “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” We’re apparently not so good at identifying, remembering, or learning from times that escalating to armed conflict failed to solve the original problem and introduced more problems of its own.

It reminds me of how American English has no proper translation for the term “war criminal.” We have no term for the times you shouldn’t go to war against tyrants. Nor is there any term for powerful Americans who committed atrocities in wartime. In American English the very idea is inexpressible, like hot snow. The rare American who calls a President a war criminal is widely regarded as someone with a brain disorder, like someone who mistakes his wife for a hat. “American war criminal,” “stupid rebellion against tyranny” — things that we are (mostly) unable to even talk about. What a lousy way to find out that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct.

Deleted. I asked nicely, but you didn’t pay any attention – JQ

I agree with Bruce , it’s about who rules you , where u see your values and identity accommodated within the ruling structures, not having a few more pennies in your back pocket

“The obligation to avenge a murdered lord is treated as so absolute that to fail to do so is tantamount to killing him oneself …. The obligation to avenge is one of the basic elements of the bond between lord and retainer or father and son, and the man who fails to perform that obligation dissolves the ties that linked him to the deceased “