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Comment by PaulAJ | Hacker News Reader

I'm more optimistic. WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them. These days such a strategy is a complete non-starter because no developed nation can withstand an invasion.

Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way. So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers. His troops are herding the geeks who used to program those computers into internment camps. How does this make him any richer than he was before?

If you conquer a third-world country then you can exploit its raw resources: a semi-literate population, farmland on which they can grow food, and maybe minerals they can dig out of the ground. That was essentially the thinking behind the Heartland Theory (see link). But it just won't work any more. These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-heartland-th...

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Worth considering:

> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[3] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[4] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[5] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay. J. D. B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[6]

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

I mean, he wasn’t wrong to argue that war was irrational, he was wrong in assuming that the leadership of the time was rational..

While he was proven wrong, his point was correct: WWI and WWII were economically disastrous to everyone involved except for the US. And in that case only because the US suffered no major damage to its infrastructure.

There's no way rational actors would start a war on the size of WWII. Only human insanity can cause another one. While that's no guarantee, it is still a strong preventative factor.

And maybe a few of those economically disastrous wars are needed to empirically reinforce that theory.

I imagine that the future may look back at this era and marvel at how the US lost its world leading position through idiotic wars, while China bumbled its way to world leadership simply by not having any.

It's a disservice to China to say that they "bumbled their way into it"

I think "bumbling" is a fair word to apply to a country that has ~20% of the population of the entire world, yet managed to avoid being a superpower for nearly the entire 20th century through idiotic self-inflicted wounds like the Cultural Revolution.

What policies do you regard as being intentionally instrumental to China's current success?

In the case of WW II the undamaged US was able to deploy its industrial capacity to "restart" the other industrial countries, first in Europe with the Marshall Plan and later subsidizing Japan as the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" to oppose the USSR during the Korean War. Eastern Europe and the USSR took longer to restart using their surviving industrial capacity.

In the event of a global conflict it is likely to go beyond the point where it is impossible to restart the current industrial system quickly enough to support existing levels of population. The population is now much more reliant on sophisticated technical systems for support and those technical systems are much more complex and fragile than in the 1940s. Consider how few major fabs costing 10s of billions are producing the lions share of semiconductors. Even fewer plants produce the capital equipment and critical reagents needed to reconstruct them and resume processing. The same is true for other supply chains.

Rational when considering economic theft across international borders. One cannot retrieve another countries GDP through launching a missile.

There is definitely a reason to start civil war internally though. Most of a nation's technological knowledge and economic worth is crystallized among masses of people yet the wealth generated by this knowledge is disproportionately concentrated among an elite few.

There is rational reason for this kind of war to be fought because such an attack on plutocrats does not destroy the economic value of a nation as it is not the plutocrats who hold such knowledge.

Even though there exists a rational reason for war to be waged based off of obscene wealth inequality I still believe it is unlikely to happen unless people start to starve.

There are many ways to rationalize a war though, sure you can't take over others' resources without outright destroying them, but if your goal was to simply wipe a competitor out and monopolize a scarce resource, the picture changes.

The U.S. did very much benefit from the balance of power change that resulted from WWII. War determines who's left, not who's right. Eventually someone might try to be the one who is left.

> Only human insanity can cause another one.

Or an accidental nuclear launch. One can't send an army by accident.

It was not new to say that war was destructive. Angell's central thesis was that war was so destructive that nobody would dare start one, or if they did, that it would end quickly. That thesis was subsequently proven wrong multiple times.

I don’t think your second paragraph is quite right. Rational actors wouldn’t deliberately start such a war. But each act involved in starting it might be rational, while producing a profoundly irrational result.

I think WWI illustrates this well. Nobody set out to start a continent-wide war that would last for years. Nobody in charge of things was particularly crazy. Each act and response as the war kicked off was the sensible thing to do.

WWII is definitely showing off the opposite. Crazy person decides to conquer everything in sight, is eventually stopped.

Once the first step was taken, it wasn't long before WW1 became inevitable, as the huge chain of treaties and alliances kicked in, one by one.

WW2 might have been a much smaller affair had the world, or Versailles signatories been willing to enforce Versailles, German rearmament etc, and reacted after Germany started rearming (34), brought in conscription or re-militarised the Rhineland (36), by Anschluss (annexing Austria) in 38 it wouldn't have helped much. Ignoring everything, and the democracies being highly unwilling to rearm in step rather made WW2 inevitable too.

League of Nations ignoring Italian invasion of Ethiopia didn't help either.

> Only human insanity can cause another one. While that's no guarantee, it is still a strong preventative factor.

But it was not a random insanity but a cultivated one.

So non-neighboring countries have a financial incentive to have other countries start wars.

In fairness WW2 was started by an insane dictator- nobody in Europe besides Hitler was particularly eager for it. And it was economically and socially irrational. Certainly didn't pan out well for Germany.

Correction.

WW2 was started by no less than 2 insane dictators, with the blueprint of the events to follow set in the secret pact of the MRP [1].

One of them ended up on the victors' side and the regime continuing to bring terror, misery and economic ruin to parts of Europe for a half century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

Hitler was insane, Stalin was very much sane and acted in his best self-interest.

> These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.

You should rethink your assumptions. Yes, a lot of the new wealth is created by technology, but ask any oil company if they would give up their oil fields, or to mining companies, agro companies, etc. In the US the biggest example is the Koch family that made a fortune by controlling land and natural resources -- the same theme repeating itself over undeveloped countries.

You can't run any major resource operation without smart people. Unless you want to do it with shovels, you need smart people to set up the machinery and keep it running. You need trade agreements so you can actually get that machinery shipped in.

If history has shown anything, then that smart people wont refuse to work under such a system. There is always someone who is willing to do the job and more importantly, as soon as the system is established, rewards for good work will drive the gross of smart people to work. After all they have to feed their families, too.

> You can't run any major resource operation without smart people.

Given "perfect automation", owning the means of production will be all, there will be no labor aspect to it. That's gonna be a whole lot of wealth and power in very few hands, and the few specialists needed to built and operate the machines may very well get be forced at gunpoint (i.e. threat of perfected, indefinitely prolongable torture of people they are close to and/or themselves) to do their work, and they will never know how many other specialists elsewhere recreate the same work they do to make sure they are not doing anything funny. If I can think of that in the time it took me to write this, absolutely water-proof solutions can be found, too. With enough in the balance, nothing is too cruel or too invasive.

edit: Who knows, "not smart" people might end up as pets in some kind of zoo, their harmless spontaneity a source of enjoyment for the owners; while the super smart people might end up completely scrutinized and controlled, being both a source of danger and power. Go further, and assume they will be bred for harmlessness and utility, whereas the remaining pet humans will at least be bred for harmlessness and beauty.

The main reason why China, United States, Russia and many other countries were or now are considered to be super powers is not because of access to raw resources but because of GDP and technology.

Technology is simply low value resources configured in such a way that it is now called technology. It is the physical crystallization of information.

There's no denying the fact that the transfer, production and copying of such information can only be done by expending energy. So the question is... Do we live in the information age or the age of oil? Only future historians would know.

>The main reason why China, United States, Russia and many other countries were or now are considered to be super powers is not because of access to raw resources but because of GDP and technology.

The main fuel (pun intended) to drive GDP and technology is raw resources. Without them, and even more essentials, like arable land and water, technology and GDP shrink to insignificance...

You will note most of these super powers gather raw resources from other countries. The country that has raw resources tends to be more technologically backwards.

That's because they are kept that way (if not invaded / colonized outright), so that their raw resources can be plundered.

But that doesn't diminish the importance of raw resources, rather the contrary. It just adds the importance of a strong military and being ruthless.

> But that doesn't diminish the importance of raw resources, rather the contrary.

It does diminish the importance of raw resources, so much so that simply having raw resources doesn't do anything for an economy.

Never did I say raw resources aren't required. But in the modern economy it takes a back seat to countries that are technologically mighty, because tech is what determines the power of a country not the availability of resources.

> It just adds the importance of a strong military and being ruthless.

If you think raw resources are taken by force think again. Most countries that have raw resources simply export their resources. Those raw resources move to other countries and are transformed into technological artifacts which are then exported back to the origin country in a form of lower entropy.

What this shows is that their is ZERO correlation with technological power and positional vicinity to resources. Power is in information more so than it is resources as all countries that are or were once considered super powers with High GDP had one thing in common: High Technology and not necessarily easy access to raw resources.

In fact, anthropological studies of human civilizations show the opposite. Low technology societies tend to appear around places where resources are plentiful and vice versa. The theory is, is that low resources necessitates ingenuity while high resource areas do not.

Think about the food resources located in Europe vs the amount of resources in tropical africa. The tropics are plentiful yet high functioning economies tend not to develop around these areas.

Please be more knowledgeable before voting me down. Thanks.

But we're not talking about companies in a narrow sector of economy but about whole countries. The companies are large in absolute terms but not that large compared to the rest of the economy. All the oil fields in the USA plus all the mining resources in the USA plus all the direct agriculture in the USA together constitute something like 3% of USA GDP, and it's about the same for every developed country except for places like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Even in the small and oil-rich Norway the oil fields contribute just 17% of GDP and the majority of productivity is elsewhere. In developed countries idustry & manufacturing is a much, much larger part of added value than resource extraction, and services are even larger part than industry & manufacturing.

If "mirror-USA" suddenly appeared next to it in the Pacific Ocean, and USA had the choice to go to war and capture all their land and natural resources, then that'd be a bad deal - a major war costs more than 3% of GDP, so gaining these natural resources (assuming that the remaining 97% of economy that's not agriculture/fishing/forestry/mining/extraction won't give you benefit because it's likely destroyed to the point that it just supports the local population and can't be "extracted") is not worth it.

Except that, even though agriculture, mining and oil exploration are a small percentage of the GDP (in the US), the rest of the economy depend on it. Can you tell me what the US would do if it suddenly lost access to oil? What about food production? The point is that these are strategic areas, even though they may not be the largest in a developed country. Being strategic gives a lot of political leverage to people who control these assets.

I think another thing is that governments have lost a lot of their power and are now somewhat controlled by corporations. This is usually assumed to be a bad thing, but most corporations don't like war, it's bad for business. It disrupts supply chains, kills customers, and generally makes things unstable. (Except for military contractors, but they seem to do well if there is a war or not).

I think climate change could bring another big war, because then wealth will become food and water, and that can be taken by force.

That's certainly not entirely true. Dick Cheney got himself and some colleagues from affiliated businesses quite wealthy during Iraq [1]. After all, the US military ate 600b$ in 2018; tax payers' money that in large parts went into private businesses.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-chene...

EDIT: ok, I oversaw the last part of your comment, but still, military businesses need the occasional war to be legit, I am afraid.

WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them.

The Gulf War [0] seems like a much more recent (1990-91) example of this - Iraq invaded Kuwait, taking control of their oil fields and deep water ports.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

The Iraqi invasion was itself a reaction to Kuwaiti slant-drilling, a nonmilitary attempt to capture wealth.

Do you have a source to support your claims?

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/03/world/confrontation-in-th...

> Some Iraqi officials have accused Kuwait in the past of using advanced drilling techniques developed by Amer ican oilfield specialists to siphon oil from the Rumaila field, a charge that American drillers deny, noting that the oil flows easily from the Rumaila field without any need for these techniques.

I’m not sure if I trust a genocidal tyrant or an oil company.

Perhaps it’s a bit much to claim Kuwait was asking for it.

It rather illustrates the reasons for this rule - Kuwait economy is/was quite different from pretty much all developed countries in that it was so predominantly based on oil fields that this invasion made sense. The largest oil producer in the world currently is USA, and still the USA oil fields are just a tiny fraction of its wealth production.

You could capture half of Kuwait's wealth if you got control over its extractive economy. You can't capture half of EU or USA wealth if you get control over all their natural resources, not even close to that.

>These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.

Operation Paperclip, North Korea and Los Zetas would disagree. It's actually easier to capture that wealth with a gun, because that wealth is attached to someone who cares about their life and the lives of their loved ones. You can't blackmail a mine or a wheat field.

I think you're half-right, but we're entering an unprecedented age where global climate change really mixes up the desirability of certain geographical features. I strongly suspect this is why a lot of immigration phobias are being whipped up (mass climate migrants will mix things up IMMENSELY), and where at least some of the next large wars will come from. Lakes and rivers will dry out, floodplains will flood, and previous choice living locations will become some of the worst around. Stress this enough, and war can indeed break out.

Wars never really went away. It's just that we managed increase our productivity enough that the old limited resources no longer constrained us.

Farmland is only a limited resource if you are not using artificial fertilizer. The land no longer needs to remain fallow after harvest, you can just plant again.

Because we can now turn energy into food, wars are now centered around energy instead. Russia annexes Crimea, USA goes to war with Iran.

Another way to say that is that farming is 1% of GDP in America now -- so the traditional war aim of capturing lots of farmland with peasants to tax is laughable.

Industry is down to 20%; in WWII capturing centers of heavy industry was a big deal, but again this seems dated.

Maybe energy's importance isn't quite captured by such figures, it's a concentrated tap of money which is easy for rulers to control. The US is no longer a net importer, but IIRC it's still Russia's main export.

>Farmland is only a limited resource if you are not using artificial fertilizer.

Until the supply of phosphorous mass agriculture relies on for fertilizer runs out.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/p...

Or as more and more arable land is lost to erosion

https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and-degra...

In this argument fusion energy would eliminate the need for wars, because all countries to safely generate huge amounts of energy, enough for desalination even.

Fusion energy would eliminate the need for wars.

China would conquer the developed country Taiwan in a second if Taiwan wasnt heavily armed and didn't have significant "allies" like the us. It would not be doing it to take over their wealth of course, it would be to cement their power.

China considers Taiwan a breakaway province (historically true one must admit) so it would be more like a civil war. They wouldn't call it conquest since its already Chinese.

It would certainly make for a diplomatic conundrum. Almost nobody recognizes Taiwan as an independent nation.

In a civil war only one side has a conventional army, usually.

I've read that the USA Civil War cost more than it would have cost to buy all slaves at normal market prices and then set them free. So the war was not about economics. It was about something much more primal. Which is probably true of most wars. I think you'd have a difficult time finding a war that was fought for purely rational reasons.

The only military threat today to the US homeland is an accidental nuclear launch.

That concern is real even in peacetime because of the inherent conflict of interest in the design of the delivery systems. They must reliably launch in minutes without the possibility of recall, yet also have literally zero possibility of doing so unintentionally. How much of that chain of events is under the control of (potentially faulty) software, and highly stressed people acting on limited information with minutes to act and trained to not question the order?

We've successfully deterred intentional strike by all but the most deranged adversary by creating a machine capable of accidentally causing tragedy of historic proportions.

IMO wealth & power comes as much from brains as it does from nature/ground/territory, same as it ever was. One is dependent on the other. Also, wars are absolutely ingrained in how USA became the richest country in the world, undeniably, and lot only back then in WW2.

Also this:

`A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. This view, broadly analogous to the modern factoid that there has never been a war between two countries with a MacDonald’s outlet, became so well established that, less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”`

http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...

Was he so wrong in stating that war between the great powers would be economically and socially irrational? WW1 certainly did not lead to long-term prosperity for the victors, and the attempted conquests of WW2 had disastrous consequences. Both conflicts largely ended the era of European supremacy.

I side with Taleb on the matter, the problem is that economists and economic arguments do not model reality nearly as much as they want it to, it gives an illusion of wisdom because the simple model seems coherent, it fails, they refuse to accept it, but still they enjoy trust and influence even though being wrong, catastrophically wrong, multiple times, and they remain at it, it's a kind of modern astrology, modern sophistry, etc(specially if you link that an illusion of knowledge will stand in front of a real one). Then everybody pays for it. In my mind the class of the economist is of the dark priest.

Btw it was economically rational for Germany to want to get strong expansionist & 'warry' since the Versailles Agreement probably meant they'd be made into a 3rd world or colonized country forever wouldn't they act upon it(there's a theory ww1 & 2 were actually the same ww). At the beginning of it too, if I'm not mistaken, their first aggressive actions were done on hoping to be able to keep the war localized as much as possible, that other countries would not want to pay the economic cost of chiming in(think Russia-Crimeia?), they didn't set out to start a World War, it just spun out of control. So obviously the categorization you made of "european supremacy" is void, since in the context it was irrelevant, they just saw themselves independently and seeking their own rational, economic, social, interests.

That's why modern warfare pushes out to non-physical theaters. Low-intensity but perpetual mind, marketing and financial games.

Wealth nowadays is not rare resources but information crystalized as products and knowledge not easily transferred to other places.

A computer is made out of worthless silicon but it is not the silicon that gives the computer value, it is simply the way that silicon is configured and the knowledge on how to reproduce such a configuration. War nowadays cannot transfer such wealth across national boundaries.

We live in the information age, but it is not just about the internet. Information is about low entropy configurations of what is otherwise cheap materials into these things called technology.

If china wanted Americas technology how would they retrieve it? Not war, but through espionage. The cold war beginning with Russia has largely replaced actual physical battle.

> WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them

What about Russia invading Ukraine?

And Iraq and Kuwait?

How is that about capturing wealth? It's about preventing the spread of NATO to Russia's doorstep.

It's about keeping Russian control of a Black Sea port, which can be considered "capturing wealth." NATO was already at Russia's doorstep without Russia invading.

That's not about capturing wealth but about capturing geopolitical goals e.g. Black Sea control, pressure on international political organizations and such.

All the contested regions - Crimea, Donetsk/Lugansk "national republics", Abkhazia and South Ossetia are actually a very good illustration of this concept. From the perspective of economic benefit, even ignoring the wider effects from sanctions and such, the captured (or, in some cases, captured-and-mostly-abandoned) regions have been and still are a net drain on Russian economy - they consume wealth of the mainland rather contribute back to it; you might or might not give these regions dotations to (re-)develop them so that they might be productive after a decade or two, but the results of these "adventures" clearly show that in the short term it's not reasonable to capture wealth of developed (or even not that developed; Ukraine as such and those parts especially are on the low end compared to most developed countries) countries by invasion because you don't really capture that wealth in an invasion, you generally just destroy it.

There probably are important benefits that Russian leadership is gaining (or expected to gain) out of these regions, but wealth capture isn't one of these benefits.

"I'm more optimistic."

I am not.

"WWII was the last attempt to capture the wealth of developed nations by invading them."

There were many reasons. I was not aware that "wealth" was one of them. For very advanced but small countries with a small population it may have made sense as a last grab to try to stay a super power.

"These days such a strategy is a complete non-starter because no developed nation can withstand an invasion."

I dont understand this statement.

"Think of it like this: Silicon Valley is probably one of the richest bits of America. So imagine that some dictator decides to invade it, and that the US military try to stop him but fail in some improbable way."

Silicon valley is rich because of knowledge, no because they have stored gold in the vaults or oil under the soil. ALso: "The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct global warfare has finally been breached, and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, in as little as perhaps twenty years and as the leverage of technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination -- with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win." Brave new War, john robb

"So this dictator now controls a bunch of ruins with no electricity containing broken computers."

This won't be a dictator but a nerd in this parents basement doing DoS or running a CRISPER Lab from his garage.

"How does this make him any richer than he was before?"

I doubt that "money" was the driving force beyond most wars in the last century. Power. Fame. Ideology. But money?

The 3rd world war will make the last two look like Disney land trips.

Hmm, interesting idea.

War been generally bad for the economy might not be enough if it benefits the parts that have the ear of government, yet another reason why lobbying is a bad idea.

Mining, and oil are still two very massive industries. The developing world suffers due to the greed of the "West".

Future conflicts between major powers are more likely to be fought over maritime trade routes and offshore oil fields.

> These days the real wealth comes from brainpower, but you can't capture that wealth by pointing a gun at someone.

At least not until we have general AI.

If machine brain power starts exceeding human brain power, then be very afraid of who holds the reigns.

> If machine brain power starts exceeding human brain power

That is so ambiguous... ML abilities are far far from a one dimensional measure, in many ways it has already far exceeded mans mental abilities, and in many ways it has not and has little promise to do so in even the distant future. Machine learning is great at automating basic things e.g a subset of image recognition or extremely narrow and specific things e.g playing Go, because these problems are well defined and can be engineered at one level and emergent at another.

It's not good at being conscious, because that is a chasm so deep and wide and non-specific in content that it is not a topology that can be so easily engineered with intent. When most people talk about conscious AI they mean AI that imitates human without realizing it - conscious AI is not some inevitable progression from our current toys, it's as if we are playing with the beginnings of chemistry and assume an entire highly sophisticated biological organism is going to be the next step.</rant>

I think we're just reinforcement learning agents. It's not such a chasm between current RL and human level. On the other hand we're also self replicators and have been shaped by evolution. Robots (physically embodied AI) are still far from that.

> On the other hand we're also self replicators and have been shaped by evolution

Yes which shaped our brain topology, ML is completely absent of that currently, we do it manually.

This assumes rational actors.

Hmm. I wonder if Putin believes the Heartland Theory? It would explain why he's so against the nations of eastern Europe joining NATO.

I think Putin's MO is making people in Russia complacent with the kleptocratic regime he heads - be it through relative economic stability/growth, or, lacking that, the pride that their country is feared by the rest of the world.

Still, you can only rely on the latter so much, so you want to be able to sell natural gas and oil without European/American sanctions getting in the way.

Keeping Europe politically divided would sink any chance of serious sanctions put in place against Russia. Keeping it from forming a military alliance would ensure that he can launch "hybrid warfare" at will without triggering a major military response.

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin's popularity soared. But just two years before that, there were major protests in the streets of Moscow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Russian_protes...

you mean, excluding actual capturof wealth after ww ii, like Crimea? Or soft ones like belt and road taking over Africa's infrastructure or the fight to keep Venezuela under US control?

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