e.g. Is the percentage of mass or resource allocation to a body's immune system similar to that devoted to a nation state's military and police force? Do all complex systems naturally normalize on a similar percentage devoted to defense that maximizes resources going to non defense productivity without leaving the system too vulnerable to attack?
Is this already a formalized area of study?
The USA military is about 1.4M people which works out to about .4% of the population. Thats pretty close to the .2% in the study!
The resource devotion of most all nation states seems to settle in this 1-3% range, excluding those with more active security tensions. Ukraine for example running an absolute fever at 34% and Israel chronically stressed at 4.5%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
The middle east in general seems to over allocate on their immune system. This would actually align with what I've been reading recently that modern Islamic culture is much more of a physical might makes right system. And that overspend on aggression and displays of power is part of what hampers their economic vitality while the more peace loving west gets to devote more resources to non destructive pursuits. Turning the other cheek and meeting in the middle is seen as weakness in the Middle East, but it counter intuitively is the reason that the west is the stronger system.
Similarly, those who get their vaccines spend less time sick with their immune system inflamed, and so get to be more productive at work or athletic pursuits and compete better than those that abstain.
Edit: one of the core functions of the immune system is identifying and eliminating pre-cancerous cells from your own body, if you downvote this out of reflexive politics you are a clown.
It is not that serious... The emphasis that you yourself added is counterproductive to your point and deliberately precludes discussing viewpoints that would be valid because nobody wants to deal with a "hyper-reactive".
I'm sure this has nothing to do with centuries of western imperialism in that region.
The US is the third most populous country so its military is still exceptionally big in absolute terms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...
The US military isn't large in terms of personnel in uniform as a share of population, though.
When you include reservists (of varying quality) the cake goes to North Korea with 30% (!), but notably also Cuba (11%), Taiwan (7.8%), Israel (7.6%).
During WWII, many nations managed to cumulatively mobilize 10-15% of their population (about 9%, 16 million, for the USA).
The US does spend more than average, but we're talking 3.5% vs the global average of 2.2% of GDP. So, the overwhelming might of the US military isn't because Americans are rapid warmongers, but because the US economy is the most productive per capita of all large countries by a massive margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
This reads like a euphemism.
First, if you think Stalin wouldn't have taken his armies right to the Atlantic coast of France after crushing the Nazis, you'd be badly mistaken. It was specifically U.S. military power (and the atomic bomb) that stopped him from trying this. The rest of the allied powers were too exhausted and small to be credible deterrents.
After that, over the following decades on multiple occasions, the same thing applied, a major power, like the USSR or China was tacitly or openly stopped from taking things further or attacking more specifically because of US presence in the background. This applies to South Korea for sure, but also to many places in central Europe and elsewhere.
Today, the U.S. remains as the biggest deterrent of further Russian encroachment into places aside from those that it specifically considers its rightful domains (Ukraine, for example, where even foreign threats of retaliation couldn't stop a nationalistic sense of having the right to attack). I'd argue that this is one of the major reasons why Finland wasn't invaded long ago. (U.S. presence and the dawning realization among the Russian leadership that its supposedly strong remodernized military is much shittier, weaker and more corrupt than it was "supposed" to be.)
> "Maybe," he said. "But I don't see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing."
> [...] "You can check with the FBI. That's out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It's been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are."
> Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "So?"
> [...] I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. "Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators."
-- Dead Beat by Jim Butcher
No clue if the math works out. It took me a while to find it, I kept thinking it was from one of the Blade movies instead.
My first thought was how software complexity imitates life.
I remember seeing a reference[1] that about 5-10% of all Windows operating system source code was dedicated to security in one sense or another, such as malware detection, cryptographic libraries, certificates, Defender, Bitlocker, UAC, all the complicated code for file permissions, privileges, authentication, etc.
[1] This is one of those things that is very difficult to Google for, and I haven't been able to find a reference to where I read it.
So estimating at 80 trillion cells per human, that puts our "defense spending" at around 2.2%, quite similar to nation state budgets.
Or at least, this is where the complexity of comparison gets out of hand.