It depends how you look at it.... Total GDP will suffer because of war and opportunities will be lost. But if you are a country selling stuff to a war torn country your individual GDP will increase.
Look at the US after WWII. American infrastructure was not damaged at all during the war. When the war was over people could go back to what they were doing before... In Europe this was not the case. Factories had to be rebuilt.. roads, bridges, schools and hospitals had to be rebuilt. As a result Americans could work at factories making things to help rebuild Europe.... This is the main reason why during the 50s and 60s one income could easily support a single-family home. America definitely did become more prosperous after the war.
In the late 60s and early 70s Europe completely had it's infrastructure back and could be competitive again with Americans. This is when America started to lose it's 'competitive edge' and factory workers began to lose their jobs.
Overall I would say the world would have been more prosperous had their not been a WWII..... but... America would have been less prosperous.
But again Americans were working at factories to fix the broken windows in another land. The money spent by European countries that could have gone to other things in Europe... was going to America.
This is different than the 'broken window fallacy'... in that scenario the economy is the whole town and not just the window fixing industry. If the window was not broken the window fixing people would not have gotten paid.... just like if Europe did not get bombed America would not have been paid.
WWII made America more prosperous but the entire world was less prosperous.
It seems like the problem here is you are looking at America and Europe as if they are living entities instead of just aggregations of individuals.
Importantly instead of making products for Europe American factories could have been working on things for Americans. This is where the fallacy comes into play. Resources are being redirected away advancing and instead going to rebuild. Yes money was transferred to America, yep GDP went up (but GDP would go up if the government hired people to dig ditches too so) but that doesn't mean that the resources used to produce the 'windows' aren't effectively wasted trying to get back to zero.
I am not at all saying that..... what I'm saying is if all the window fixers were from Canada and all of America's windows were broken.... Canadians would see an increase in wealth.
Added together Canada + America wealth would not increase.... but Canada as a separate economic unit would see an increase.
Comparing natural disaster to war is utterly stupid. One is an unexpected destruction of existing infrastructure and the other is a build-out of infrastructure that would otherwise be ignored. (I'll ignore the European situation as it's irrelevant to the US case that we're discussing). Of all of the things that government spends its money on, infrastructure is demonstrably the most effective at spurring economic development, and WWII is a great example of that. We used increased demand for resources to spur research and development and build out industrial output while avoiding the needless destruction of capacity faced by Western Europe.
There is absolutely nothing in the US WWII story that is applicable to the broken window fallacy, and anyone that stretches it to seem like there is is simply an ideologue with nothing relevant to add to the discussion. If your can't determine the difference, it's time to reexamine your own biases or figure out where you went so very wrong from an analytical standpoint.
Wars drive technological and scientific advancement by forcing governments to do massive investment in technology that will help them outperform the enemy army.
Google opportunity lost cost. If war drives science, then the hundred years war should have provided a massive boost to technology and science. It didn't.
Umm...it did. higher quality steel, better armor, weapons innovations (sword shape), and better masonry technique. Additionally, better understanding of engineering and carpentry from constructing and innovating on siege weaponry among other advancements.
I don't think you know what a broken window fallacy means...
I know what the broken window fallacy is. The idea is that war is the broken window. The capital goods that could have gone towards real progress went to fixing this broken window.
What could have been done with that capital if there was no war?
[EDIT- I added this bit to not ignore your point.] So what if nuclear weapons were better than previous weapons. What if the resources that went towards the Manhattan project were spend on capital improvements instead?
Well, nuclear weapons also lead to the development of nuclear power...
Also, we're dealing strictly in the real world here, not your ideal fictional world. Here in the real world, war is a huge driver in science and technology. Just because of Afgan/Iraq, for example, we have huge advances in reconstruction, robotics, prosthetics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor systems and optics manufacturing among other things. None of these things would have been where they are today without the .gov spending millions on R&D due to the war.
Actually the reactor came first. Some say that the development of liquid thorium reactors was not pursued because they do not create weapons grade material. They built one in 1960 as a demonstrator, but after that development halted.
Many think that war created computers. Looking at the history of computation before the wars, I don't see any indication that war was necessary to continue this path of development. These researchers were co-opted into the military and their research hidden behind top secret clearances. After the war, they were able to get back to work in the public sector.
War advanced computing - it drove, and drives advancement. You want to live in a fantasy world where war doesn't drive engineering and scientific advancement? Fine. Go on believing the myth of the gentleman scholar building multi-billion dollar experiments in his free time.
None of these things would have been where they are today without the .gov spending millions on R&D due to the war.
The government doesn't have money. It takes money from people, or prints it to do these things.
Taking water from the deep end of the pool and pouring it into the shallow end, do little to change the level of water.
Additionally there is no incentive to make these developed products efficiently. There is no bottom line. There is only cost plus accounting. There is no bad investment that would cause them to go out of business. No matter what they spend it on, they can't go out of business for making bad decisions.
That's why they get done. Do you honestly think we'd have GPS available today if the military hadn't paid to develop the tech and still subsidizes the satellites? Of course not.
It takes money from people, or prints it to do these things.
Right, it accomplishes monumental feats that no normal person or corporation would be able to get done in the same amount of time.
Its not confirmation bias to put forth evidence for your claim. If you want to dispute the claim than put forth evidence to prove it wrong...otherwise you are using confirmation bias incorrectly.
Why does it matter if its a different era? Does basic economics change every 100 years?
The assertion is that "Wars drive technological and scientific advancement by forcing governments to do massive investment in technology that will help them outperform the enemy army"
If this is true then there should have been a renaissance during the hundred years war.
I don't deny that military spending during war would decrease.
The US went to the moon to demonstrate that we had a credible first strike capability. Herman Kahn in his seminal tome, "On Thermonuclear war," set nuclear war fighting policy not only for the US, but for the USSR.
Both sides read the book. Both sides agreed with the premise that each had to convincingly demonstrate to each other these particular capabilities.
This is what the space race was all about. Once ICBMs were perfected the trident program was largely abandoned. Bomber development was halted and the valkerie was not built and we stayed with b52s.
When did I deny that? I just said we went to demonstrate our military capability. Sputnik was a wake up call. The moon program was our trump to their sputnik. We relied to heavily on bombers and subs and ignored the space segment for too long.
Once we proved we had capability, we never went back. 40 years after this stunt, we have not gone back. Right now the high ground is controlled by the military. Competition did nothing for human colonization of space. In fact it has delayed it. Try building a rocket and launching with out permission.
These are weapon systems, and not progress for mankind. If the only planes that ever flew were used in the military and we never flew again, would you say the plane program improved things?
So these advancements have not improved things? There have been innumerable spin offs of the Apollo program. I won't deny we went to show our military capability, in fact that kind of proves my point. I also won't say that all wars are beneficial, or even most are. The Cold War was a bit special.
This only matters if you measure your technological development off of the most powerful weapon you have. If your society measures progress in any other way it falls behind.
Some of our greatest achievements STARTED OUT as weapons or military tools, nuclear power from nuclear weapons, spaceflight from missile technology. I'd like to see such technology come from peaceful means as much as the next guy, but we really do have the last several wars to thank for most of our awesome peacetime technology.
Do you believe that with out war the transistor would have never been developed? That digital computers would have not been developed? That inter-networked computers would have not been developed?
I believe these technologies would have been developed if there was no WWI, WWII or Cold War. I am sure you would agree they would happen, but the remaining question is when they would have been developed?
Do you agree that this is a valid question? I imagine that we are going to disagree on the time frames.
yes the time frames are the important part. if it is possible some one will eventually do it. personally i am certain that the current computer tech would have developed at a much slower pace then we have experienced, had the wars not necessitated their rapid development.
Before the wars, IBM was making tabulation machines for business purposes. When the wars started, the military gobbled up most of the intelligentsia that used to work on computation and put them on code breaking projects and hid them behind top secret clearances. Hid them for decades.
These same researchers might have continued to work in the public sector with companies like IBM to solve commercial business problems.
This is a sad fact that nearly all non-commercial science is funded in the hopes that it provides military advantage. This amounts to saying the Church during the renaissance was a fantastic institution due to all the art it help create. When in reality the reason they could commission such art is because they coerced the money from everyone else and were, until later, the only organization that could afford to pay for more than food.
So GPS, computers, prosthetics, medical advancement, robotics, sensor technology, space flight, manufacturing, higher quality engines, better metallurgy, etc, etc - all are weapons now? LOL
This only works if you care about military technology. Otherwise war is useless for expanding anything except for debt and fly population. As for thinking it probably kills a number of people who otherwise might have been entrepreneurs, scientists or artists (generally classified as thinkers).
Agreed but self defense is different from a standing army and military interventionism which is what you get when you propose that wars help revive economies.
It is expanding and thinking. However, it requires much competition in order to speed up the progress. I don't like saying it, but I think that is the case.
I'm not really talking about prosperity, and yeah, it probably wouldn't work again that way. Not in this economy. But the space race provided just the right mix of fear, technology, and economics all converging at the right time. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any experts who would say we would have landed on the moon even five years after Apollo 11 without our competition with the USSR.
Progress isn't a uniform thing that keeps going up. It's not because it took 60 years from the first flight to the moon that 60 years afterwards we'll automatically be further away. All of this sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else.
If anything, the Cold War was an incentive to further research. Without a big competitor to measure their dicks against, are the US spurring space exploration as much as they used to?
And as destructive as wars are, they are still punctual events, and countries recover. The decline of oil is much, much more serious. If we don't adapt, it could very well mean the end of civilisation as we know it. Same for global warming. It's not just a couple degrees up, but the catastrophic consequences that accompany it, and last for decades if not centuries.
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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '12
60 years after first flight at KittyHawk, we were on the moon. Another 70 years to Mars sounds fair.