I’m not sure what you’re proposing—it seems confusing to me to have “production” of negative value. I generally think of “production” as optional—there’s a lower bound of 0 at which point you prefer not to produce it.
I think there’s an important question of different entities doing the producing and capturing/suffering the value, which gets lost if you treat it as just another element of a linear economic analysis. Warfare is somewhat external to purely economic analysis, as it is generally motivated by non-economic (or partly economic but over different timeframes than are generally analyzed) values.
You and everyone else; it seems I am the only one to whom the concept makes any intuitive sense.
But the bottom line is that the value of weapons is destruction, which is to say you are paying $X in order to take away $Y from the other side. Saying we pay $X to gain $Y value is utterly nonsensical, except from the perspective of private sector weapons manufacturers.
I agree that economic models are not optimal for war, but I see a significant problem where our the way we think about war and the way we think about war preparation activities are treated as separate magisteria, and as a consequence military procurement is viewed in Congress as an economic stimulus rather than something of strategic import.
I agree that economic models are not optimal for war
Go a little further, and I’ll absolutely agree. Economic models that only consider accounting entities (currency and reportable valuation) are pretty limited in understanding most human decisions. I think war is just one case of this. You could say the same for, say, having children—it’s a pure expense for the parents, from an economic standpoint. But for many, it’s the primary joy in life and motivation for all the economic activity they partake in.
But the bottom line is that the value of weapons is destruction.
Not at all. The vast majority of weapons and military (or hobby/self-defense) spending are never used to harm an enemy. The value is the perception of strength, and relatedly, the threat of destruction. Actual destruction is minor.
military procurement is viewed in Congress as an economic stimulus
That congress (and voters) are economically naïve is a distinct problem. It probably doesn’t get fixed by additional naivete of forcing negative-value concepts into the wrong framework. If it can be fixed, it’s probably by making the broken windows fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window) less common among the populace.
The value is the perception of strength, and relatedly, the threat of destruction. Actual destruction is minor.
The map is not independent of the territory, here. Few cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons, but no one would have cared about them if they couldn’t destroy cities. Destruction is the baseline reality upon which perceptions of strength operate. The whole value of the perception of strength is avoiding actual destructive exchanges; destruction remains the true concern for the overwhelming majority of such spending.
The problem I see is that war is not distinct from economics except as an abstraction; they are in reality describing the same system. What this means is we have a partial model of one perspective of the system, and total negligence of another perspective of the system. Normally we might say not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but we’re at the other end of the spectrum so it is more like recruiting the really bad to be an enemy of the irredeemably awful.
Which is to say that economic-adjacent arguments are something the public at large is familiar with, and their right-or-wrong beliefs are part of the lens through which they will view any new information and judge any new frameworks.
Quite separately I would find economics much more comprehensible if they included negatives throughout; as far as I can tell there is no conceptual motivation for avoiding them, it is mostly a matter of computational convenience. I would be happy to be wrong; if I could figure out the motivation for that, it would probably help me follow the logic better.
I’m not sure what you’re proposing—it seems confusing to me to have “production” of negative value. I generally think of “production” as optional—there’s a lower bound of 0 at which point you prefer not to produce it.
I think there’s an important question of different entities doing the producing and capturing/suffering the value, which gets lost if you treat it as just another element of a linear economic analysis. Warfare is somewhat external to purely economic analysis, as it is generally motivated by non-economic (or partly economic but over different timeframes than are generally analyzed) values.
You and everyone else; it seems I am the only one to whom the concept makes any intuitive sense.
But the bottom line is that the value of weapons is destruction, which is to say you are paying $X in order to take away $Y from the other side. Saying we pay $X to gain $Y value is utterly nonsensical, except from the perspective of private sector weapons manufacturers.
I agree that economic models are not optimal for war, but I see a significant problem where our the way we think about war and the way we think about war preparation activities are treated as separate magisteria, and as a consequence military procurement is viewed in Congress as an economic stimulus rather than something of strategic import.
Go a little further, and I’ll absolutely agree. Economic models that only consider accounting entities (currency and reportable valuation) are pretty limited in understanding most human decisions. I think war is just one case of this. You could say the same for, say, having children—it’s a pure expense for the parents, from an economic standpoint. But for many, it’s the primary joy in life and motivation for all the economic activity they partake in.
Not at all. The vast majority of weapons and military (or hobby/self-defense) spending are never used to harm an enemy. The value is the perception of strength, and relatedly, the threat of destruction. Actual destruction is minor.
That congress (and voters) are economically naïve is a distinct problem. It probably doesn’t get fixed by additional naivete of forcing negative-value concepts into the wrong framework. If it can be fixed, it’s probably by making the broken windows fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window) less common among the populace.
The map is not independent of the territory, here. Few cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons, but no one would have cared about them if they couldn’t destroy cities. Destruction is the baseline reality upon which perceptions of strength operate. The whole value of the perception of strength is avoiding actual destructive exchanges; destruction remains the true concern for the overwhelming majority of such spending.
The problem I see is that war is not distinct from economics except as an abstraction; they are in reality describing the same system. What this means is we have a partial model of one perspective of the system, and total negligence of another perspective of the system. Normally we might say not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but we’re at the other end of the spectrum so it is more like recruiting the really bad to be an enemy of the irredeemably awful.
Which is to say that economic-adjacent arguments are something the public at large is familiar with, and their right-or-wrong beliefs are part of the lens through which they will view any new information and judge any new frameworks.
Quite separately I would find economics much more comprehensible if they included negatives throughout; as far as I can tell there is no conceptual motivation for avoiding them, it is mostly a matter of computational convenience. I would be happy to be wrong; if I could figure out the motivation for that, it would probably help me follow the logic better.
The bottom line is protection, expansion, and/or survival; destruction is only an intermediate goal