At 09:44 PM 2/5/97 -0800, Sean Roach wrote:

This time I have opted for a point by point. At 07:59 PM 2/5/97 -0800, jim bell wrote:

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1. Large numbers of potentially competent and useful people get put into useless jobs: "Army, Navy, and Marines, and Air Force" spring to mind. (Those people who still think military spending is really necessary obviously haven't read AP.) This point I can not argue with, at least not directly. I do believe that the military way is wasteful of resources.

Notice, however, that "pre-AP-theory," there was never any "good" way to theorize getting rid of the military: It always appeared that OUR military was needed to protect us against THEIR military. AP fixes that problem.

However, this is one area that has actually benefitted the lower-income bracket in that it gives them "inexpensive" (off-chance of death) access to good training.

"War is good business...Invest your son!" There's no doubt that militaries look like a good deal to at least some fraction of the population. However, as is usually true, the amount of money that could be saved if we didn't have to buy military junk would do just as well applied to other products or services.

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2. Large amounts of money are spent on military hardware, money which goes to fund people who would otherwise develop useful products in the non-government private sector. Three things that promote technological growth, expansion, war, threat of war. As for expansion. we really have no where else to go. As for war and threat of war, the computer was invented during a war, atomic energy was harnessed during war, the internet was created during threat of war. Many advancements, though not all, come to benefit society later. For that matter, steel was probably invented during a war as well, but I can't prove it.

I think that's a somewhat distorted way to look at it. War drastically changes the economics associated with technical developments: In WWII, millions of dollars became available for development of computers due to their ability to decrypt codes. It is by no means surprising that suddenly making it 10x more affordable to buy computers (not by reducing their costs, but by raising the amount of money provided) would make computers appear to be the product of war. You may recall estimates (which are frequently re-quoted, BTW)that proposed that there would only be a market for (say) 5-10 computers in the world. That estimate is frequently cited as an example of how wrong they were, but in reality that estimate assumed pricing based on then-current costs, and they were probably accurate! It is the _subsequent_ development of transistors which made those original estimates "wrong." Nuclear power, similarly, was born in a flood of money for the same war. Expensive government installations, such as Los Alamos, NM, Hanford Washington, and Oak Ridge Tennessee were built for that purpose. Activities which would have been highly uneconomical during peacetime were suddenly worth doing. If war makes technical development happen, it is only because of how supremely wasteful it is. Useful things still get done, but they get done in a highly uneconomical fashion and _before_ they would normally be done in a non-war world. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com