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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

>Just like wars, in trade wars one side gets hit worse than the other, which is kinda the point I guess.

but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it? Are people really willing to immiserate themselves if they know the other guy is even worse off?

I always thought of wars as conflicts over resources where one side, at least, though they could gain more by fighting than what the fight would cost them. But some wars, I have a hard time putting some wars into that framework without going way out into conspiracy land, and even then, what possible profit, say, could the US have gotten out of Vietnam, or the USSR out of Afghanistan that would justify the cost of those wars? was it just an error in judgement about how much such a war would cost?

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Sticking to trade wars, let's say country A is the current leader and country B is catching up. A might start a trade war knowing that it will be worse off right now, but B will lose more, and A will remain the leader. The competition from a stronger B could be even more costly to A than the trade war.

And also, yes, some consider relative wealth more important than absolute wealth; "I'd rather have $100 and my neighbor $10, than I have $150 and my neighbor $140."

>And also, yes, some consider relative wealth more important than absolute wealth; "I'd rather have $100 and my neighbor $10, than I have $150 and my neighbor $140."

I actually think that's a bad example, 'cause if I have 10x what my neighbor has, I can easily convert some of that wealth differential into real wealth for me in ways I couldn't if we were more equal. "Hey neighbor, would you like to mow my lawn for some money?" so in a real way, the neighbor example is more about how much you want local labor vs mass manufactured goods.

IMO it's misleading to think of the "sides" in these things as giant monoliths. If I had to simplify I'd say in wars, civilians and soldiers on any side lose, people selling arms win, people winning elections based on fearmongering win, and so on. I wouldn't divide the "sides" by countries, but by activity.

> So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication.

-- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002

A lot of wars lately have been proxy wars from the Cold War (or the fallout from that, particularly in the Middle East): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proxy_wars

Oversimplified has a great couple of Youtube videos that explain it all (this was where Vietnam finally made some kind of sense to me) in an accessible and entertaining way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I79TpDe3t2g

> but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it?

Some fun philosophical questions...

Do you actually know that both sides are worse off at the end?

How do you personally believe this should be measured? How confident are you that that measurement approach is correct? What is the definition of "correct" in this context?

Do you conduct your measurements at two discrete snapshots in time: before and after? Are consequences 5, 10, 50 years down the road irrelevant, both in theory and in fact?

If you are measuring GDP, do you think looking at the aggregate national level is satisfactory? Might there be some unintended consequences lurking in the shadows waiting to bite you in the ass if you ignore regional GDP?

Do the very real (democratic) consequences of people's opinions matter in your measurement, or are you content with measurements limited to the the theoretical world, where people behave as they "should"?

It's interesting how easily technical people can see the complexity in their software models, but seemingly remain blind to the complexities of planet earth and human nature.

I think if you are going to seriously argue that the US net benefited from the Vietnam war... or that Vietnam itself would not have been better off if it wasn't attacked by the US, I just don't know what to say.

Vietnam wasn't attacked by the US, at a minimum because Vietnam wasn't one country at the time of the war, leaving aside the question of which of the Vietnams (along with the corresponding superpower puppetmaster and allies) was the aggressor.

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