Hacker News Reader

Comment by muro | Hacker News Reader

Taleb describes this well: globalism allows for optimization (cost, efficiency), but increases risk. To reduce risk, add redundancy (locally).

View on HN

In some ways it decreases risk though, too. The risk of war, specifically. The US and Chinese governments are far from friends but our economies are much too interconnected to allow either side to instigate too much of a disagreement.

For the most part globalization is good but the pandemic has certainly highlighted the value of strategic redundancy or at least an emergency plan B.

Isn't WWI the usual counterargument to globalization reducing the risk of war? Or were the countries back then not interconnected enough?

That's a good point. Perhaps globalization alone only marginally reduces the risk and it's the combination of globalization + trust (or at least not mistrust) that reduces the likelihood of war.

If that's the case then the US government's efforts to take supplies away from some of our closest allies is even more dangerous and short-sighted than I initially thought.

A month ago I would have said a mask factory in Canada vs. US is nearly equal in terms of national security because Canada could be trusted to help in a time of crisis. I'm sure many Canadians felt the same way. Now I'm not so sure that's true and I certainly don't blame the Canadians.

No shortage of ink was spilled on the wishful thinking that globalization will prevent future wars... All through the 1910s.

I wasn't familiar with this counterargument, and did a quick dig and found this primer:

https://www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2017/06/14/th...

Do you have any particular recommendations/sources for further discussion around this argument?

Not really, it's just something I've seen used as the most common counterargument to "tighter economic connections decreases risk of war", given that apparently in 1914 people thought international war was nearly impossible due to all the trade interdependencies. I honestly never dug deeper into the similarities and differences between then and now.

Back then every component of a battleship, the most powerful and advanced weapon of the time could be built independently by Britain, France, Germany, Italy, USA, Japan etc. Today, there are very few weapons systems that do not depend on allied countries for a critical component. E.g. it is quite well known that Britain's nuclear powered subs use US reactors and US missiles, but even the steel plate for the hull is likely sourced from another country as there is only one steelworks left in the UK which probably is not able to produce the right alloy in the desired thicknesses. In fact, industry in the UK has declined to the extent that we could not independantly produce a WW1 era battleship any more without a vast restructuring of the economy which would take decades.

If a half-arsed backward place like N Korea can produce ships , rockets and nuclear weapons I am pretty sure the UK could pull it off.

That's the thing, though: being self-sufficient in manufacturing is now considered "backwards".

"Reducing" and "completely eliminating" are very different things.

This was the prevailing thought before World War 1

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

The economist Norman Angell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Angell) published a highly influential book, The Great Illusion, making this exact argument. In 1909.

It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

I think one of the greatest mistakes made over and over by sociologists, futurists, and economists, is to assume that people are rational.

The problem with this argument is ignoring the counterfactual cases: the wars that have not occurred, that would have occurred otherwise.

Europe was mired in endless wars for millenia. It's now in the longest stretch of peace in centuries and, by sheer coincidence, at its highest levels of trade.

In the rest of the world trade has steadily risen and wars and deaths from wars have fallen steadily. Correlation might not be causation, but it would interesting know what third factor explains both "more trade" and "fewer wars" other than "it's hard to fight a war with the people who feed you".

I suggest that the third factor is US policy.

Before World War II, Britain had its trading empire, France had its empire, Japan had its empire, etc. Oceanic trade between nations not in the same empire ran a high risk of the cargo simply being confiscated or destroyed by one of the imperial navies. A key pillar of the US's strategy in the Cold War was to use its naval supremacy to prevent the return to the imperial trading system; in other words, it extended to nations an offer of the ability to trade freely on the world's oceans in exchange for that nation's joining the US in opposing the Soviets.

The United States also suppressed wars. For example, the 2 nations that arguably had the most powerful pre-WWII militaries (Britain and France) allied with Israel to attack Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, but the United States, worried that the Soviets could enter the conflict, threatened Britain and France with economic sanctions unless they withdrew, which they did.

Or rather, it was the nuclear “balance of terror” that emerged between the US and the USSR. Neither of those powers wanted to risk a confrontation that could turn into World War III, so they both had a strong incentive to limit their own ambitions and to restrain their allies/client states.

Europe fought the two most destructive wars in the history of the world in the three decades immediately following the publication of that book.

I guess you could argue that things could somehow have turned out even worse than that, but that feels like a reach.

You could just as well argue that the highest levels of trade are the result of peace, not the other way around. Especially given that levels of trade were already high enough for people to make this same argument before WW1, as this book illustrates.

It did quite well for its author though. It appears he got a Nobel Prize in 1933. Maybe he was pulling the illusion thing.

The book didn't argue that the war wouldn't happen, only that it would be economically disastrous for everybody involved, and thus to choose to go to war is foolishness, since everybody is strictly worse off than they were before - i.e. there are no absolute winners. Countries did go to war anyway, and, exactly as predicted, it was a disaster for all of them, proving the point.

Most people think WW1 was so bad because people kept killing each other (with machine guns, artillery and poison gasses). Less so because they severed their commercial ties.

Today, yes. But in that era? The notion of declaring a war to profit from the plunder (or reparations, or whatever you call it) was not yet dead back then.

Empirically, I'd say it's doing very well.

The world has more trade than ever, and fewer wars than ever.

If you're referring to WW1, lowering a risk and completely eliminating it are different things.

> It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

It's aged wonderfully. The Europeans proved its premise in spades between 1914 and 1945.

Sorry, trying not to nitpick, but you mean Globalisation, not globalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com