Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war

noahpinion.blog

3 pointspaulpauper2 comments

This guy’s an economist, right? I get that it doesn’t mean he’s only allowed to have opinions about economics, but I feel like it would have added a lot more substance.

So the US is underprepared for a hypothetical war with China, and arguably is underprepared for the conflicts it’s currently in. Why is that? We spend vastly more than anyone else on defense, but just one of China’s shipyards is vastly more productive than our entire shipbuilding capacity. Why is that? It seems like we can’t spend our way out of the problems he brings up. Is there something about our political economy that isn’t working?

edit: spelling

Lack of budgeting controls (the DoD has never passed a comprehensive audit), lack of competitive bidding, cronyism...

I'm not saying these things don't exist in China, but there seems to be an alignment of incentives that doesn't happen here in the US.

Also, the transition of ARPA (strategic) into DARPA (tactical) took away truly transformative research and left us with less risky and less expensive but more short-sighted advances.

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