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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the author considers war as negative to productivity when the ultra-productive century included two world wars. Isn’t destroying and rebuilding stuff good for GDP?

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You are not the first to think that. That is called the Broken Window Fallacy, obviously by people who disagree. But it makes sense to me that if you spend resources on repairing damages, or weapons which don't generate more wealth, you are not investing and growing. What happened to the US in WW2 is an anomaly.

Well in war there's chance to have greater return than loss by pillaging your enemies. Not so much for those broken windows cases.

destroying and rebuilding stuff is good for GDP in classical Keynesian economics and most others based on that, but there have been criticisms that this leaves out the obvious part that there must be a negative side of the ledger indicating destroyed resources.

maybe the maintenance costs lead to a kind of forced deprecation and hence war is not that "expensive" anymore

sure from an accounting standpoint there must be depreciation of munitions, and battleships and all that stuff, but the ledger does not allow for destroyed and bombed out farmlands and so forth.

I'm pretty sure if this had been pointed out to Keynes he would have agreed but probably noted that it was not as easy to calculate that part.

No, not at all. Destroying something, well, destroys it. Rebuilding it then means you spent a lot of effort with nothing new to show for it. That’s the opposite of production.

But since you spent money on the rebuild, and money spent to make something shows up as economy, it looks positively productive.

I think your point and mine together is that the way we measure economy has some horrible problems. Is there any economic measure of destruction?

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