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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

The usual thought experiment for framing the magnitudinal difference between millionaires and billionaires, extended to trillions:

One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days).

One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years).

One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years).

The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.

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While I agree that war is a bad thing, the money is not necessarily wasted. At least not all of it.

All this money isn't being thrown into a burn pile.

It pays American soldier salaries, it buys products from American defense contractors that provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, it funds R&D that trickles down to the rest of society.

Thats more than 1 million soldier salaries and probably hundreds of thousands of jobs with companies like Boeing, Raytheon, etc.

And I know this is a generalization, and that some of our sharpest minds and highest caliber people are in the military. But I also have quite a few aquantences that really seemed to be on a bad path until they joined the military. It adds discipline and provides an outlet for agression as well as a salary for some people who would otherwise be difficult to employ. I would hazard a guess that without the military, domestic crime would go up a fair amount.

Again, this is not an endorsement of the military industrial complex, but I think that many tend to think of government waste as just total waste. When in reality, it's just a really inefficient engine of wealth distribution.

> It pays American soldier salaries

It pays soldiers to do "useless" work. These same soldiers could have been working as construction workers, teachers, factory workers, etc doing something productive. Instead, they've spent their lives killing and getting PTSD.

> it buys products from American defense contractors that provide hundreds of thousands of jobs

Once again, non-productive goods. Instead of building missiles and bullets, the resources could have been used to build new trains for example.

> it funds R&D that trickles down to the rest of society.

Don't need war for R&D. R&D money was going to be spent regardless.

It's about the opportunity costs. Money spent well vs money spent poorly.

> Don't need war for R&D. R&D money was going to be spent regardless.

I would say that is an assumption that is not fully true compared to knowing that war R&D has in fact produce technologies adapted in civil society. Reminds me of a false claim that if the Wright Brothers never were the first to have a successful flight, we would still have planes. We could have easily never have had a successful flight -> airplanes. Although negative, we should still give credit to war R&*D

But Wright Brothers weren't alone who build planes at the time and even weren't the first to have a successful flight. It was Santos-Dumont.

Oh interesting, did not know about Santos-Dumont. Probably my Amercian bias and history in school of just knowing the Weight Brothers.

It actually wasn't Santos Dumont. It was the wright brothers. But most Brazilians have convinced themselves otherwise. The sources clearly indicate the wright brothers were a year or more before Santos.

It's just that many Brazilians simply claim that the wright brothers and those that witnessed the flight were lying.

http://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/History_of_the_A...

if it really is for some reason the state's responsibility to make work for barely-employable people with aggression problems, can we agree that such a program that doesn't result in anybody getting bombed or shot up or colonized could also be hugely more cost-efficient than the military currently is?

What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world?

Our forefathers paid a higher price.

Security and liberty are not without costs.

That only works if the massive resources spent on Afghanistan and Iraq helped with the Pax Americana. I see no reason to think it did, and a multitude of reasons to think the opposite. How many millions have now died because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath?

because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath

And Libya and Syria...

And Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan again back in the 80s...the interventionist policy has always been about U.S. corporate interests abroad, not about democracy or peace.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A...

^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.

Lies My Teacher Told Me is another pretty good, depressing read that covers some of this and prior American history with analysis.

Maybe this is another lie my teacher told me, but is the US now responsible for Syrian Civil War?

Not entirely - it was already happening before we stuck our noses in. But there's little doubt that we made it worse.

From my perspective, it seems that GWB created the seed that would grow into ISIS. Then it was Obama that gave it the fertile soil to grow.

Not following your logic, Obama gave ISIS fertile soil to grow by removing American troops from Iraq, which seems the opposite of a Pax America policy.

I also don't understand how fighting ISIS made it worse.

Obama's attacks on Syria and especially Libya created a power vacuum - the incumbent leadership was bad, but in its absence there was a void that anything could move into. If Kaddafi were still running Libya, ISIS wouldn't have been. This is also true in Syria, but perhaps to a lesser degree than Libya, since the vacuum was less hard.

What pax has that money bought? Peace in Iraq? Afghanistan? De-militarization of Saudi Arabia? Iran? Israel? Correlation is not causation.

Generally speaking the "cause" of the pax Americana is safe (and mostly tax-free) international sea shipping. That's what made the huge difference.

Keep in mind that yes, that required shooting up a few countries.

How exactly did invading Iraq and Afghanistan, countries with 58 and 0 kilometers of coastline respectively, help keep international sea shipping safe?

Perhaps increasing the US presence in key shipping areas such as the Arabian Gulf and the Horn of Africa?

Which does not require to occupy countries without a costline? Especially if you own the largest fleat of aircraft carriers in the world.

Afghanistan was a base of operations for terrorists. Now you can define that a lot of ways, and countries and police forces do define it however is convenient at the time.

What matters for this however, is that it was a state sponsor and safe haven for people who'd go random places and blow economic interests up (from planes to tourist locations), located in a place where they actually had a shot at making stuff happen (ie. could have easy access to a lot of places). So Afghanistan had to go, both for it itself having to go, and to serve as a warning to other states what happens if you don't cooperate in the war on terror. The war on terror, of course, being the war to keep congress' economic interests safe.

Or you could argue that the current climate of world peace was brought on by multiple currents including: 1- An acceleration of technology development that changed the sharing of resources to go from zero sum to a positive sum situation. 2- That nuclear weapons and other WMD have created a MAD situation, guaranteeing only minor skirmishes by super powers. 3- A variety of other factors including the integration of global supply chains, women's voting rights, etc.

But please, don't let these factors get in the way of your narrative of American exceptionalism.

Given that America has constantly been at some sort of state of war since WW2, the concept of Pax Americana (which apparently started after WW2, while the Americans were in a cold war with the Russians -- and various new conflicts each decade) is simply a rewrite of history based on modern imperialistic pro-American propaganda.

Arguing that "security and liberty" (of Americans I assume, not the rest of the world) is worth "bringing peace" (read: starting wars and overthrowing democratically elected leaders) to other countries is just silly. Many millions of people were killed in the middle east (and many of them were innocent civilians). How would you act if a foreign power (acting as though they were the bringers of civilisation to a group of savages) decide to kill millions of Americans? I doubt you would think that those invaders were particularly deserving of the moral high-ground.

Slavery brought about a substantial percent of that wealth and standard of living. Did the forefathers pay a higher price than slaves? To what degree is that cost, disproportionately shouldered, responsible for today's security and liberty? And to what degree is it an on-going contribution? That's a contrarian view.

The standard view? Pax Americana is unquestioned by American political leadership regardless of political spectrum. Of course it brought peace, wealth, and improved the world, and continues to do so, and should continue to do so. Of course American interventionism is, on average, a moral obligation and achieves moral good. And Pax Americana achieved, is still impermanent, and must constantly be renewed. And further, it cannot be questioned by international law. That is the pre-9/11 position of the vast majority of Reagnite and Bush 2 foreign policy officials, as stated in the position paper "Rebuilding America’s Defense" (2000) by the Project for a New American Century think tank, 10 out of 12 founders of which were Bush 2 administration officials. And one of those officials who is also in the current administration, John Bolton, just said yesterday, the United States will not be held accountable by the International Criminal Court. Period.

While there are data points suggesting this is more of a right wing ideology, you won't see the left wing aghast at these plainly spoken positions. They merely present a less verbally assertive version of it.

It is not at all controversial to say, American political thought is still today, insisting Pax Americana is believed in, cannot or should not be questioned, is morally good and proper, and any international institution that disagrees, is instantly discredited. I would expect a Clinton administration would be quite a lot more diplomatic about it, but the policy would be effectively the same. Clinton did vote, at the time, in favor of interventionist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And "Rebuilding America's Defense" is often cited as pretext for these wars, as it spells out Pax Americana is under threat without another Pearl Harbor-like event to motivate the American public to the cause. And then soon after 9/11 happened.

last time we fought a war to secure and maintain pax americana was 1945

How does the Korean War fit in? Was the United States too aggressive to the peaceful North Koreans?

Which of the wars following September 11 were necessary for Pax Americana?

Could it be that these wars exposed how primitive guerrilla forces can bleed the mighty American military dry? It's not like the world has seen a very convincing show of force.

I for one worry that the bluff has been called and that every dictator in the world now knows that apart from the threat of nuclear war, the American military's capabilities are far more limited than some perhaps had thought. When relatively poor and simple battlegrounds such as Iraq or Afghanistan cause trouble one or two decades on, then what could America do against more advanced enemies or against more enemies?

This is to me the biggest worry: occupying two such relatively simple countries is a challenge. The Russians, the Chinese, Iran, heck even the tiny Syrian government, can now see that America had lots of trouble with what is currently nation No 54 and nation No 111 measured by GDP. Yes, I know that GDP does not equal military strength and that the US was officially not fighting the Afghan government. But in reality, the US was fighting primitive guerrilla forces in a primitive country. And the US didn't really come out impressing anyone with their strength.

> every dictator in the world now knows that apart from the threat of nuclear war, the American military's capabilities are far more limited than some perhaps had thought

Every dictator in the world fears an American military attack, because they will undoubtedly be overrun and dethroned. Look at how Ghadafi and Saddam tried to bend over backwards to show that they had no WMDs. American military prowess is second to none by a wide, huge margin.

A small occupying force like those allocated to Iraq/Afghanistan after the initial invasions simply can not defeat guerrilla warfare. The lack of post-invasion plans doomed these conflicts, but the initial dictators/governments had no chance of survival.

>>"but the initial dictators/governments had no chance of survival. "

That's the reason they all now want nuclear weapons.

True, and the lesson to be learned from North Korea is to depose despots with nuclear ambitions early.

sigh.. I imagine that the lesson of not messing with other countries is out of fashion

Other than the song "Imagine", when has it been in fashion?

What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world?

That's going to come with a big side order of "citation needed". To Americans? Yeah, arguably. "To the world"? Eh, there are a lot of non-Americans that might take issue. We can start with polls in Central America and the Middle East.

Then do polls in South Korea.

And then if you figure since you're in the neighborhood, why not poll older folks in Vietnam? After a while, one might see where I'm going with this. And if you need a hint: on balance, I'm not convinced of the claim.

Polls of older people in Vietnam might reflect some survivor bias. The communists weren't very gentle to regime opponents.

Apparently they weren't gentle to ethnic Chinese either, I have met many that were forced to flee in boats to avoid pogroms.

I think putting it in per-person or per-household terms is the best way to maximize relatability:

$1.5T / 320M = ~$4700 per US citizen, or ~$275 per person per year since 2001

$1.5T / 126M (number of US households in 2017) = ~$12000, or ~$700 per household per year since 2001

To me, an obvious interesting question is "If I had a choice, would I willingly pay this much for these results?"

The real question is whether I would pay anything at all for these results. I would struggle to name a single way that the recent wars have positively impacted my life in the slightest.

Less chance of another 9/11?

Arguable. It easily could have increased the chances of another 9/11 by stirring up a bunch of shit.

Thanks, now I'm gonna spend 2 hours reading about geological epochs on Wikipedia.

An alternative is a visual of what it looks like, starting from a single hundred dollar bill: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

For some reason I find it weird to think that it wouldn't take all that long to count to a million.

Well, if you're talking about saying the numbers in your head or out loud, remember that 1 second is probably not enough, give you need to breath, have a space between numbers and... think about saying or thinking of every digit in this number:

127862 in less than one second?

"All that long" is relative, but it took this guy a while to do it out loud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Harper

89 days at ~16 hours per day works out to ~5 seconds per number

Hm, not sure about this comparision.

The magnitudinal (?) difference going from millions to billions, being three powers of ten or (approximately) ten powers of two, is exactly the same as from billions to trillions. This works for thinking about countable stuff like populations, amounts of money, piles of grains of sand/rice, marbles and so on. Multiply by a thousand and you're good. However thinking about time periods is different, in that we rarely multiply time periods like this, or when we do we keep the units the same. Generally we don't think of large numbers of seconds as a collection of discrete things.

From your example, people tend to think about '11 days' vs. '11 000 days' or'31 years' vs. '31 000 years' and easily grasp the difference in size. With a bit of practice (and a fondness for Vernor Vinge) it's true that you could gain an intuitive feel for kiloseconds (around 15 minutes) and Megaseconds (around 11 days) although you would have to put up with the strange looks and constant requests for clarification...

My point is, using time intervals separated by the orders of magnitude in question is a poor way to get a feel for what billions and trillions of things (e.g. dollars spent on war) and you would be better off thinking about what a billion dollars might get you.

In fact, at USD 200 million each, it gets you five brand new Boeing 767-300ER jets. So, now thinking about the 1.5 trillion from the OP, that gives 7 500 of them. If you split up all the people alive in the world today into groups of one million, each group could have its very own 767. There would be eleven for Belgium and about three for Wales, the traditional country-sized units. Alternatively you could build two Shards[0] for a billion, and three thousand for one war. If you built all of those in Belgium, you'd probably annoy people, though.

If you prefer, you could convert it all to Gummi Bears! They are about USD 0.01 in bulk, and weigh about 2.5g each. So a billion dollars worth of them would weigh 250 000 tonnes, about equivalent to the gross tonnage of an oil tanker like the Globtik Tokyo[1] which was the largest supertanker in the world when launched in 1972. Our war equivalent in Gummi Bears is 250 million tonnes, for which the obvious object for comparison is the Great Pyramid of Giza[2] so the sweets would weigh the same as about forty pyramids.

I forget what my point was, now...

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shard

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globtik_Tokyo

2. https://sciencing.com/much-did-pyramids-weigh-7499289.html

You can put a precise number on it. It would cost $20 billion a year to solve homelessness in the United States[1], and something on the order of $30 billion to solve poverty world-wide.

For reference, Jeff Bezos is currently worth about $20 billion more than the next person on the list of billionaires. This means that he could solve US homelessness himself and still be the richest person in human history. The US military budget increase (which is a ridiculous thing to say given how ridiculously over-funded the US military is already) was $82 billion. You could solve world poverty almost three times over with just how much the budget was increased from 2017. (Note that many Democrats as well as Republicans happily voted for these increases.)

EDIT: Here's the source I found for the above $20 billion-per-year figure[1] -- to be honest I'm not quite convinced (I heard this elsewhere and I incorrectly assumed it was a more solid figure). So I might be repeating misinformation, and I'll stop doing it. I found a figure for solving extreme poverty but it's higher (~$100 billion per year for 20 years)[2]. For the $30 billion figure, a 2008 article claimed that only $30 billion per year is required to restart programs to solve world hunger[2].

The reason why I thought $20 billion per year might be reasonable is because I assumed it would be part of some kind of rehabilitation plan.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/us/homeless-rates-steady-... [3]: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000853/index.html

"solving" homelessness or world poverty is not a one-time expense. You can throw $82 billion dollars worth of food at the starving populations of the world and they'd just multiply and require even more later on, it's not that simple

OP's estimates are prices per year, which makes more sense. But $82 billion is only $11 per person per year; I find it hard to believe that this will be able to make a meaningful difference.

Oh come now, that's a truly silly claim.

Social Security was designed to reduce senior poverty (it did work), but spends > $900 billion every year to continue working.

No you cannot spend $20 billion and solve homelessness or poverty. You probably can't even make a double digit % dent in homelessness or poverty for a single year with $20 billion, even with 100.0% efficiency of payout.

Statements like that totally mis-characterize the kind of problems you are putting on our intellectual plates. They aren't point problems like a leak in a gas line. In fact, they're closer to, ironically, a complex series of conflicts in the middle east...

> No you cannot spend $20 billion and solve homelessness or poverty. You probably can't even make a double digit % dent in homelessness or poverty for a single year with $20 billion, even with 100.0% efficiency of payout.

Solving poverty altogether is out of the question with only $20 billion to work with, but since you mentioned homelessness - if we assume there are 1.5 million homeless in the United States, $20 billion would provide $1,100 per month per homeless individual for a year. (Assuming 100% efficiency of payout)

What am I missing in this consideration?

(Also worth mentioning that a Housing and Urban Development official, in 2012, estimated the cost to end homelessness at $20 billion.)

Estimated number of homeless in the US is around 500k (554k was the 2017 HUD estimate). That gives $35k-40k/year to spend on them if you only set aside $20 billion.

The city of San Francisco is spending 240m on its ~7k homeless so about 30k/y per. It doesn't appear the homeless problem there is getting better at all least being solved.

Right, but the context of the person I was replying to implied "100% efficiency" of the dollars spent. Is the $30k per year per homeless person in San Francisco actually reaching those people? Presumably that's how we evaluate efficiency - what percentage of the money spent actually reaches the cohort being targeted and not eaten up in administrative costs.

As far as I understand a significant amount of the money reaches homeless in form of various services. I doubt SF is just handing cash out though.

The absolutely astronomical cost of housing a homeless person, the amount of graft that goes into a y program designed for charity on that scale, and the knock-on effects on the housing economy by pouring that money in.

$1100 will buy you cheap rent and basic food. It will not buy you the ability to put our homeless into those houses or to run the kitchens to feed them. If you give it as direct subsidy, the money will go straight into the hands of drug lords. If you administer it, you will spend 50% more than that on just the administration costs of tracking down the homeless and offering them services.

The marginal value of a dollar decreases substantially as you give something more funding. We already have shelters and programs - they're ineffective at keeping people off the streets long term. Adding more shelters until there's always large quantities of empty beds will not help. Well meaning though it may be, it's giving a man a fish, one who doesn't want to be taught.

> What am I missing in this consideration?

If you give $2000 a month to every homeless person in say, San Francisco or Dallas or Smalleville, Nebraska:

* How many of them can afford an apartment with it?

* How many landlords will sign them? After all you are giving them money, not proof of income, and landlords are often particular about who they rent to.

* How many of them will decline to look for shelter with the money?

My point is that economic considerations like this often under-estimate the amount of footwork needed to make money actually useful. You would need to do a lot more than give them rent money, you'd need to move them to lower-rent places, find landlords that would rent to them, or spend considerable resources trying to convince them to even do anything with the money that involved housing.

Programs like medicaid are costly because they provide more than just money or medicine; they provide case workers and associated footwork—and those things are needed. There’s a much higher no-show rate among medicaid patients than other cohorts. They don’t sign up, they’re afraid of doctors, they don’t have addresses, and so on.

The problems some groups face are deeper than others, and helping those groups may require difficult and not-very-efficient overhead. It’s overhead that is still worth going through to become a better functioning society! But for a statement like "$20 billion can cure homelessness" to be correct, you'd have to believe its not necessary. This kind of work (what medicaid and medicare workers are doing every day for example) is very, very necessary, if you wanted to make a dent in the homelessness population.

That is what you are missing in the dollar figure consideration. Why they are homeless, where they are homeless, and the extent, which goes well beyond renting a flat, of what it takes to make a homeless person non-homeless.

I find it really hard to believe $30 billion is all it would take to solve poverty world-wide.

I don't even see how $30 billion could solve poverty in the U.S. Think about it, if that was true, what the hell are we wasting all the this money on social services? Apparently all it would take is $30 billion. We spend almost a trillion a year in social services, and yet you think another $30 billion is all it would take to solve poverty?

USA spends more combined on welfare than on war per year, so then why isn't poverty solved yet?

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