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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a bit of a historical trope.

It doesn't even make economic sense. During a war you're not going to invest as much into R&D (especially basic research), industrial production, etc, because you know, you have to... build the things that kill the other people.

To me war feels more like the thing that publicizes the things we've discovered since the last war, because the way (pop) history is presented, everything is about:

- wars (because they're "interesting", finding out about the slow accretion of inventions that lead to the mass production of iron is less cool)

- great people (99% great men)

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R&D soars during war, at least for war relevant technologies. Rockets, jet engines, aviation, synthetic fuel, chemistry, smokeless gunpowder, steam powered ships, nuclear fission... You name it. And that is in addition to all the stuff needed to actually build those things.

If you think industrial production isn't invested in during war you should fresh up on any modern war since WW1.

Umm... that's the thing, does anyone have NUMBERS to back these claims up?

What we know is that military budgets SOAR (duh!), but what about washing machines? Transistors? Ballpoint pens? Antibiotics? The gazillion peace time inventions?

There's no part of me that can actually believe that you can ship off hundreds of thousands of folks off to war, you switch 10-20-40% of your economy to make bullets, and somehow research overall still comes ahead, it makes no sense. Let alone those cases where you country is physically under attack (which is most wars, not every country is as privileged as the US, to never have had a foreign power invade it at any serious scale in the last 200 years).

Research is more concentrated during war time, and more visible, frequently. But does war time research actually outpace peace time research? I don't believe that.

Technoligal advances in WW2 that are still valuable today: Radar, ASDIC, modern massproduction, jet engines, rockets, nuclear fission, operations research, modern aviation ingeneral, pressurized aircraft compartments, synthetic fuel

Just go on wikipedia and look up global production nimbers of war related stuff between 1939 and 1945 for increased industrial output.

I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying.

Yes, war related stuff goes up during wars. What about non-war related stuff?

What about peaceful explosions of the global economy and trade? My point is that those most likely surpass wartime growth.

Peacetime economic growth > wartime economic growth.

Peacetime research > wartime research.

You want reliable numbers, look up studies about economic growth during war and peace. Probably nobody will be able to answer that for you around here.

As far as research is concerned, without any numbers, I'd assume the focus shifts from civilian research to defence research. As does production. If it surpasses peace time production depends on the scale of the war. That output so should be measured in production units, war has the habbit of screwing up economic metrics.

There are lots of components of "non-war stuff" that originated from military R&D, and probably would appear much later if it wasn't for the Defense Budget.

And how many "war things" originated from non-military R&D?

After all every country's GDP is much higher than its military spending and for sure non-military research dwarfs military research.

This whole hypothesis seems unsound. It would mean that all civilian research is somehow much, much worse per dollar than military research. I highly doubt that.

I never said that, did I? You said R&D cannot increase during war, history showed otherwise. Now it's about war R&D outranking peace time R&D, which was never the question.

You seem to be lost.

Here, let me refresh your memory with the original trope:

> And war has historically been the impetus for much technological investment.

Yes, war also brings innovation. The only question worth answering as a follow up, is, does it bring more than peace?

Because otherwise it makes no sense glorifying war, which this line of thinking is fundamentally about.

yes, but a lot of those advances were based on R&D that was done before the war. I think war is more a time where newer technologies are put to the test, those that don't fail see widespread usage and that's why we associate that war as the introduction of those technologies

If you think wars don't spur technological changes, I suggest you look at the planes of 1940 vs those of 1945. Inventions in WW2 avaiation include radar and the jet engine. It's planes that ultimately ended the U-boat clockade of the Atlantic as improved technology increased the range of anti-submarine bombers such that the US could cover the entire Atlantic leaving the U-boats nowhere to hide.

I didn't say they wars didn't do anything. I said they probably do <<less>> than the equivalent peacetime.

99% of the examples you and other commenters use are in the military field.

And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.

Let's compare the washing machines of 1990 with those of 1995, instead. Let's compare Intel CPUs of 1980 with those of 1990. Let's compare desktop publishing in 1995 with that in 2000.

Heck, the more answers I get the more I'm convinced people are also partly influenced (I don't want to say brainwashed), by military R&D propaganda that needs to justify its budgets.

For every radar and jet engine there's a F22 jet fighter.

  > And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.

Then your perspective would be appreciated with facts, not questions. Though I agree that often the questions are more interesting :)

I'm interested in dispelling the notion that war spurs innovation, even though I hold this view I'd love any excuse to demonstrate that we don't "need" wars. What were the specific technologies that led to the change in washing machines from 1990 to 1995? How does that compare to a war-period of development? What drove Intel to improve the CPUs in 1990, as compared to 1980? How does that compare to the previous decade?

Thank you. I'm not quite a "history buff" but the implications of history are of course of interest.

You might want to read about the history of jet engines, the Manhattan project, the V-2 and related (R-series and Redstone) rockets, radar, GPS, and the internet. Just for some recent examples.

I know about all those. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30904417

What about peace time inventions? Which ones outpace the others? Are we SURE that war time inventions outpace peace time inventions?

Do we have any studies that prove or disprove what you claim?

Otherwise it's just a trope.

Please do post the numbers that you find, I am interested as well.

While it is not the only driver, a major early driver for integrated circuits was the need for reliability in military electronics. I saw an estimate that at one point 1/4 of all carrier based aircraft were out of service at any time due to avionics malfunctions. And the first major user of ICs, the Minuteman II guidance computer, would not have been possible without them. The Minuteman I computer was smaller and used discrete components, and could only be made sufficiently reliable by enormous testing and retesting at multiple system levels. Doing the same for the larger MM II computer would have been entirely too expensive.

ICs increased reliability by making interconnections far more reliable (being deposited on the chip together so failure is correlated.) Of course they are also smaller and use less power, but reliability was more of a brick wall issue.

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