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Comment by saubeidl | Hacker News Reader

I have a different interpretation of this. As our economy and expertise grows, we move further and further into foundational parts of the stack while leaving the implementation details to less developed countries.

All modern semiconductors need ASML machines.

All modern AI is based on research by Sepp Hochreitner.

The www is based on work done by CERN.

Most factories are run on Siemens automation systems.

We've moved on from lower-level concerns like building chips to a higher level, directionally controlling the way economies and societies develop.

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And it fails spectacularly when you see EU economic growth.

It only fails if you see economic growth as the metric to optimize for, which I would argue is another symptom of societies still focused on those lower levels of the stack.

Economic growth is an enabling factor for a higher level metric, quality of live. It succeeds spectacularly there.

EU countries have enough money to either pay for overly generous social services or defense, not for both. A stronger economy would have been enough to pay for both.

Defense will pay for itself through economic stimuli.

... and other fantastic stories

It's basic keynesianism.

That would suggest either basic Keynsianism or your understanding of it is wrong. Resources directed towards the military (with the exception of research) represent almost pure waste from an economic perspective.

You've got a bunch of poor people starving and set up a factory to produce a couple of bombs and pull some farmers off the land to have them march up and down the parade grounds. That isn't going to put more food on the table. Sure it might be a good idea regardless because being invaded sucks, but it isn't wealth creation without a very creative understanding of wealth. A society can't be better off without creating new wealth.

Said poor farmers will make better salaries, which they will spend in the economy, which drives growth for everyone.

How do you figure that? This is literally telling some of the people who would be growing the economy to stop doing that and focus on making military goods instead. That can't be done and also have a stronger economy. The resources for the army have to come from somewhere - they're resources being directed away from strengthening the economy towards strengthening the army.

I suppose there could be some sort of plowshares-to-swords program where they build tractors and bulldozers that can be repurposed into military gear on short notice. But I havn't heard of that working anywhere before and my read of modern militarys is that the gear gets pretty specialised to military use. And the soldiers need to actually focus on soldiering rather than being part timers.

At some level a country needs an army because without one they don't get to have an economy, but it is a dead weight in terms of prosperity. Military expenditure comes directly out of what people would otherwise use to improve their own lifestyles.

Unfortunately, apparently these lower-level concerns also seem to include building an industry around and benefitting from these innovations...

Calling TSMC "implementation details" is delusional.

If the only thing you needed to make cutting edge chips were some machines from ASML every country in the world would be making their own chips right now.

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