Really interesting from an ecological standpoint, but from a resource concern isn't the purpose of relying on each other (e.g. Russian gas), to link the economies so we have strong incentives to avoid wars?
The idea was to make the idea of going to war unthinkable because we relied on each other, and it's quite easily to calculate the deficit in deaths in Europe after that.
There are statistics saying it was extremely effective; Even when you account for Russian conflict against the Chechen's and the Serbian/Albanian conflict in Kosovo..
https://www.statista.com/chart/15458/the-estimated-number-of...
Unless you're referring to the obvious horrific cost to human lives, war isn't "expensive" in any real sense in terms of national finance. War is profitable: any money "spent" goes somewhere. Many wars have lifted countries from recession.
The only slight argument one could make for the expense of war is military consumption of fossil fuels (but we're already talking about control of that resource, so that's self-fulfilling).
I think the fact that wars can be economically beneficial is a blazing indictment of our economic competency.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
In other words, war can compensate for a "demand shortage," notwithstanding that in a sensibly run economy, such a thing should never be expected to exist.
(Yet, sometimes like around 2008 countries still fail.)
If the rich folks keep it, then it doesn't contribute to anything (eg not to inflation), and you can just print more.
In fact, the latter is much better: you can have your central bank gradually buy up the rest of the world without any inflation nor devaluation of your currency.
If the rich people "X" it and it gets in the hands of other people without burning those people's economic output on RPIs, then X is called "donating", not "spending". And in that case, we might as well cut out the middleman, cough UBI cough.
Bastiat's parable alone is not particularly convincing in itself as it chooses to deal exclusively with currency (something that's provably debunkable by looking at economic systems even slightly more complex than the oversimplified whims of one shopkeeper), and not with the allocation of resources to society in general, which is much more negatively impacted by war / broken windows.
It's the broken-window effect, if your political system is captured by a glassmakers' lobby.
> it's still better for your economy
No. It's not. It's always worse in every way other than pure monetary terms.
I mean sure, but that's contingent, not required. For instance, imagine two nations going to war with combat robots that can be perfectly recycled. The only effect is direct consumption of labor. However, due to the militarized society, the labor would be worthless otherwise.
I agree that some measures of economy (GDP? unemployment?) would get better in this scenario, but the whole effort wouldn't serve any other purpose than to increase those values, making it a little pointless.
I guess if this is what you're trying to say, then it is indeed an indictment of how we do economy.
Could you just give people the money without burning their labor in spectacular explosions? Yes. But we don't. :shrugs:
There exist (with quite a lot of empirical validation) some situations where moving the money around improves the society, even if the reason the money is moving is a slight loss.
It's not as simple as "spending money on wasteful things doesn't benefit anyone", but it is always the case that if you would gain even from breaking windows, you would gain even more from spending on something useful.
However, war is expensive in strictly economic term due to the physical destruction of resources.
A bombed factory cannot produce cars. If the skilled engineers needed to rebuild or operate the factor are not available (dead, otherwise occupied, etc), this will also result in economic loss.
The investment to convert a factory from car-making to military-vehicle making only generates long-term value if the military continues to order from that factory. Otherwise, that investment does not generate a return, likewise it takes additional investment to convert it back to car manufacture.
Ukraine is not selling much wheat this year, due to the war. Since this wheat is perishable, its economic value is lost.
It does. It also destroys cartels, rentiers, economic caste systems, captured government regulators and regressive tax regimes.
This is one reason the US, Japan and Germany recovered so strongly after WW2.
Yes, capitalists are insane.
Sure, if you simplify things enough you could argue that all wars are about resource interdependence because attacking someone for cutting you off from resources or for withholding your resources is also "about resource interdependence" and even civil wars are ultimately about unequal access to resources. But at that point you could say a peasant revolt is about "resource interdependence" because the lords own the land and the peasants provide them the food.
I don't think "resource interdependence" is the right framing. Colonialism was essentially "resource interdependence" but that is clearly a different dynamic than e.g. the European Economic Area (or EFTA).
Realistically, it's probably more about a mix of defensive pacts (essentially military MAD), economic interdependence (essentially economic MAD) and a somewhat level power dynamic (limiting the potential for exploitation).
> Most wars involve resource control. That doesn't mean most wars are about capturing resources.
What's the difference beyond technicalities? Resource control -vs- resource capture, both are issues of resource interdependence. External resource control isn't a priority in a system of resource independence.
If you cut off my access to drinking water by blocking the river that runs through both of our countries you could call my dependence on your exported bottled water "interdependence" if we already have a trade relationship, but if I declare war on you over that it's not "because of interdependence" but "because you were trying to take advantage of me". Interdependence might actually make me less likely to declare war because I have to contrast how much you "stealing my water" hurts me with how much being able to trade with you benefits me and how waging war will affect those things.
I guess we will have to unwind back to definitions because afaict, Colonialism was about domination of a people to extract their resources, by using the people as a disposable resource. I don't think the people being dominated depend(ed) on the colonisers.
Such a weird exchange. You used better terminology to explain what I meant ("resource interdependence") but still seem to have a different idea of what my point was.
Seeing what the likes of Gerhard Schröder is doing and given other economic incentives that favoured Germany I don't think that was the main idea behind it.
That's at best a nice side-effect, if it actually works.
Nah, the main reason is that specialisation and trade is just so much more efficient. You get more from less.
Hardly. It just hadn't on gone long enough and far enough. I'd say that the entire cause of the war is just that- that the interests of the two sets of elites didn't line up yet. They eventually would have because ownership would have become much more distributed as always happens as a result of neoliberalism.