One of the big benefits of blogging for me is the chance to try out my ideas on an audience I couldn’t easily reach (or at least hear back from) in any other way. That’s particularly true when I’m writing a book, which is always a difficult process for me. My last post, on the opportunity cost of war produced a great comments thread. Particularly useful was a discussion, started by Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, of the oft-heard claim that war stimulates scientific and technological progress. I’ve used my response, along with points appropriated from commenters to draft a new section for the book, pointing out how this claim ignores the problem of opportunity cost.
As always, comments of (nearly) all kinds are appreciated, and useful ones may be recycled.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the obvious waste and destruction of war, it’s often claimed that war has economic benefits, and even that it’s necessary to the successful functioning of the economy. One version of this argument, based on the idea of ‘military Keynesianism’ will be discussed later.
In this section, we’ll look at another popular argument, that war is a spur to research and development (R &D), and therefore to peacetime prosperity. This idea has some superficial appeal. Penicillin, nuclear energy, computers and jet aircraft are examples of technologies that were developed, or advanced rapidly, during World War II, and played a major role in postwar prosperity.
In all of these cases, the underlying research had been undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s. The outbreak of war led to a massive push to apply this research on an industrial scale, producing millions of doses of penicillin, hundreds of thousands of jet airplanes, and of course the atomic bomb. ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer was commissioned to compute artillery tables, but did not appear until 1946, when it was used in computations to produce the first hydrogen bomb.
Opportunity cost reasoning leads us to ask what was foregone to release the resources. In large part, the answer is ‘research of the kind that made these developments possible’. War gives great urgency to the “D” part of R&D, at the expense of R. This can produce some impressive short run payoffs.
To be counted against that is the loss arising when scientists are shifted from fundamental research to activities more directly relevant to the war effort, much of it with very little value beyond the immediate needs of the military. The there are the vast numbers of young scientists whose careers were interrupted because of military service, and older scientists.
For quite a few scientists war service has been more than a career interruption. Harry Moseley, widely regarded as the greatest experimental physicist of the twentieth century, was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. [Bohr (I think) said that even if no one else had died, the death of Harry Moseley alone was enough to make the First World War an unbearable tragedy.]
The great theoretical physicist Karl Schwarzschild died the following year. Many more died before having any chance to contribute. one can think of the 50 fatality rate suffered by the class of 1914 at the École Normale Supérieure https://books.google.com.au/books?id=EjZHLXRKjtEC&pg=PA329&lpg=PA329&dq=ecole+nationale+superieure+casualties+world+war+i&source=bl&ots=asLFDx9V5p&sig=gr4l5-65JgNhXGRaCHkEz39xzmk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=ecole%20nationale%20superieure%20casualties%20world%20war%20i&f=false.
A tragic and heroic story from World War II is that of the scientists of the Pavlovsk Experimental Station near Leningrad (now St Petersburg), twelve of whom starved to death while protecing the station’s seed bank during the siege of the city in 1941. Other losses include the mathematicians Jean Cavailles, shot by the Gestapo, and Wolfgang Doblin, one of thousands of Jewish scientists and doctors who perished in the Holocaust.
As this example shows, scientific projects themselves were not immune from the destruction. The first programmable computer to be built was not ENIAC, but the Z1 designed by German Konrad Zuse. This computer and its successors, the Z2 and Z3 were destroyed by Allied bombing raids, and Zuse’s work was not resumed for years.
Yet again, the idea of opportunity cost as ‘that which is not seen’ provides a corrective against any attempt to minimise the costs of destruction.
John Quiggin 
I agree with the basic premises above. Chomsky makes a point about military research leading to many advances.
The title or first sentence of his statement is “The military is misunderstood.” This has ironic as well a literal connotations coming as it does from Chomsky.
However, to expand on Chomsky’s point and put it in context I think we would have to say this. It illustrates a capitalist military-industrial complex and its government vastly over-fundinbg government military R&D and vastly under-funding government contributions to other channels and kinds of research. In that kind of environment is not surprising that the main spin-offs from government scientific research are from military research.
Australia, when it had a CSIRO that hadn’t been gutted and hung out to dry, had useful outcomes, with non-military government R&D producing useful advances.
This may be side tracking a bit but I think the more interesting question is how widely technologies would have been made available had it not been for modern industrial warfare. Mass consumption and the rise of mass prosperity, for western nations at least, seem to me to be a by product of the mass production kicked off by WWII. Would we have the quality of life we have now if not for the huge range of goods and services that have come about from a mass producing/consuming economy? To be sure technology facilitated all this but as JQ points out this was due to the application of existing tech rather than innovation. Would we all have smart phones in our pockets without whole economies having been turned to the war effort, or would touch screens, mobile cell technology, and lithium batteries all be expensive curious with no mass market to make putting them together viable? Would we have technology benefiting all or a few without assembly lines set up for planes and tanks, plastics and penecillin that were turned over to producing consumer goods after the wars?
I could agree that research and innovation takes place with the stimulus of war, but for whose benefit?
Tinned food was developed for the Crimean War by the British and The Union had the beginings of automated prduction and assembly lines for rifle manufacture during the American Civil War. The beginings of mass middle class prosperity predates both world Wars but so does military driven mass production. When you get back to the middle of the nineteenth century teasing apart which came first requires more research then I can give at the moment.
Cheers
Cam
Mass production existed well before WWII: witness the Model-T Ford production line, for instance. War creates reasons for wanting particular technologies, and for sure some of those technological efforts pass through to the wider public. On the other hand, thousands to millions of people tend to die in the big wars of our time. [I’ve already commented on the folly of attributing an economic value (whether positive or negative) to the casualties of war, so I’ll set that issue aside.]
Then there are the smaller wars, of which there are dozens. Africa has quite a few wars in progress, the on-again, off-again nature notwithstanding; it is difficult to see how those wars have created any substantial technological progress, and certainly no indication that they have passed on any such progress to the wider public, many of whom have been slaughtered in said wars.
I suspect that the economic benefits of most wars are quite illusory: after serious destruction of infrastructure and residential buildings, the aftermath of a war necessarily involves substantial economic development to replace at least some of what was lost. Starting from a low base—due to the destruction preceding the end of a war—the economic growth as a percentage is liable to be skewed strongly towards high growth, at least in the early stages of development, post-war. I’d be interested to know if this is the case.
I’m not a violent person, but if a politician wanted to take us to war in order to reap some mythical boost to our economy, I’d be prepared to biff them on the nose, and then wax lyrical about the economic benefits of getting cosmetic surgery to improve the broken mess of a nose. Okay, I wouldn’t really do that…but the thought would cross my mind.
@Donald Oats
Your comment about the destructive and wasteful aspects of (often continuous) wars in poor countries prompts the thought that those wars for which it may be claimed technological and scientific advances were a product are mainly confined to the industrial era. Wars in poor countries are also fed by arms manufacturers and dealers in rich countries. The idea of war does not exist in an historical vacuum, and the wars of any age will reflect the state of technological development, the social structures and distribution of power in the nations concerned. And if there are disparities and inequalities among nations, we should expect to find wide variations in the modes and impacts of war that reflect that inequality (which is not to deny that the suffering accompanying war is universal). We have also seen in the industrial era wars that have reflected, and impacted on, the internal class struggles of nations (e.g., for WWI alone: the Russian revolution, the near-revolution in Germany, the severe jolts to the class structure of British society continuing at least to the mutiny in the Royal Navy in 1926, the mutinies of returning Australian soldiers, etc.). We can also mention the liberating consequences of WWII: although the Japanese claim that they were liberating Asian nations from European and American colonialism was always hollow, Japanese wartime expansion and occupations did have just that effect in many places.
In sum, I could say that wars may have a significant transforming effect on the means of production (and the products of an economy), but they can also have a transforming impact on the social and political relations of production.
Your comments about digital computers misses the fact that computing was greatly advanced during WWII at blexley Park and other places for cryptographic cracking. Arguably producing earlier digital computers, which were, however, kept confidential for decades.
*Bletchley Park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
The poster child for war advancing technology is probably aviation in WWI. In 1914, military planes looked like Blériot’s; the copilots dropped bombs by hand. In 1918, the British had a long-range bomber, the Vickers Vimy, capable of flying the Atlantic.
If people are saying that modern industrialised war (meaning post-Napoleonic war) promotes technological progress then they are simply saying as follows. Statist and dirigist action by and large promotes and accounts for technological progress since that time and NOT free market forces.
The operative principle in modern technological progress has mainly been statism; that is state planning and state spending. The fact that it often seemed to take modern total war to fully induce this process simply illustrates the general reluctance of the capitalist class to countenance most other significant forms of state spending and planning.
Do capitalists particularly favour war and if so why? It’s an interesting question and it might depend on geography. If the calculation is that you can fight the war on another nation’s territory and you can smash its productive apparatus and maybe even take control of its industry reconstruction and resource extraction then this gives new sources of income and a competitive advantage. Island nations and island continents in the modern capitalist era (Britain, Japan, USA and perhaps now Australia) seem to favour this model at remove. Fight on other continents. Smash up their bailiwick. This seems to be the cynical, realpolitik, geostrategic model of late stage imperialism.
Of course this last conflict model is a lose-lose for the great mass of all national populations but it still brings in great net gains to those capitalists and their political friends ensconced in the military-industrial-financial complex. This is true so long as they can have the war abroad and not on home territory. Island powers and island continent powers (like Britain, Japan, the USA and maybe now Australia) have had a natural advantage in this cynical game. Powers that share(d) continents (France, Russia, Prussia, unified Germany, China) have found that on shared continents what goes around comes around a lot more often. Britain also found the same when air power meant small sea separations counted for little.
War does not encourage scientific innovation or original research.
However it does alter the economic and social structure of the countries involved into centrally planned command economies. In war all participants become communist/fascist at the economic level, most of the free market gets suppressed.
The population are also uncommonly united in common purpose, all of which leads to much more effective exploitation of existing resources, both material and in the form of scientific ideas. At least for the goal of winning a war, capitalism does not seem to be the optimal way to achieve this.
Atomic power and electronic computing were both pre-war sciences, but with little effort to develop or apply them. There is a possibly apocryphal story of Wittgenstein asking Turing in the 1930s what use his theoretical ideas in pure maths about computability were, as unlike engineering maths they could have no any practical application!
The atomic bomb and war time computing power were developed rapidly because of the socio-economic system, but using existing ideas and technology. Transistors, a lot more science that improved out understanding of material at the atomic and quantum level did not come until after conflict ceased. Until new research, the war development was all based on electrical tubes/valves and established forms of industrial manufacture.
War, because of its socio-economic impact amplifies the application and exploitation of existing technology and science. But it is revealing that the transistor, DNA, and much of current technology based on material science and miniaturization were post-war developments.
If you suggested that the US empire had been planning world domination through military/financial/resource superiority, only a few years ago you would have been accused of kitchen-wrap millinery.
Farce.
We are enslaved to the military industrial complex (well, most of us), and those who think they aren’t should wonder why they think the “money” in their account will necessarily still be there tomorrow.
I suspect that if you graph technological development over 400 years you would a cross over of development from the hands of governments and the wealthy to the minds of business and the public at large. Governments still drive technology and many of todays wealthy are such due to their successful commercialisation of technology that they developed, but the greater throughput of development is at the hands of business and regular people.
I think that it would be truer to say of todays wars that they disrupt communities and stiffle development. I’m sure there is an appropriate bell curve to quantify this in terms of community wide access to technology, degree of complexity, and sheer volume of knowledge.
@BilB
Well, it seems to me that only governments and large corporations can now do significant R&D. Modern R&D is very expensive and requires large resources. Even the community knowledge you mention can only be employed if some government or corporation can pay a huge salary and wages bill. The same goes for laboratories, large field trials and so on. Only organizations with the command of huge resources can run these. Much R&D now is only going to happen at government level or transnational corporation level.
The right wingers certainly do like their trickle down stories. Tackling problems directly could never be the solution—the money must always pass through them and their political friends.
If there’s an argument from public interest for doing R&D in a particular field then resources permitting, a rational society would do the R&D without the pretext/motivation of a war to get it done.
If the only or main way that technological progress serving humanity can be achieved is through creating a mountain of corpses and trauma buried under the ruins of the product of social labour, this condemns the order of rule that requires that overhead. It offers conclusive proof that the organisation of governance violently offends the collective interest; that it is not merely parasitic but the product of fundamental flaws in human social organisation.
What we have here is not merely a stark example of ‘opportunity cost’ but an express valuing of privilege over human well-being — the murderous and destructive logic of elite rule. Since a rational and collaborative human community could have realised the war-produced ‘benefits’ non-destructively, it follows that the war is merely a cost of irrational governance that failed to prevent entirely the benefits of a rational social order.
@Luke Elford
“Trickle down” is the right metaphor too. The rich get deluges and floods of government money. The poor get the tiny trickles that escape from the great dams of elite wealth accumulation.
I notice the new Gerald R. Ford class supercarriers are only going to cost US$10 billion each. It is planned to build 10 of them. That’s a mere US$1 trillion plus program costs. Then there’s the fighter planes I guess etc. etc. This is just a few measly trillion overall. I mean you couldn’t do anything else useful with such small change. (That’s sarcasm BTW.)
@Ikonoclast
10 carriers at $10 billion is $100 billion, not $1 trillion. I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but it costs what it costs.
The Canning by-election Liberal candidate Andrew Hastie was a SASR commander of a unit which is under investigation for allegedly cutting the hands off of (dead) Taliban enemies, in order to identify them by their fingerprints. Without getting into the ethical issues of the story, the thing that has me a bit surprised is that the SASR unit didn’t have the technological savvy to use the zoom function on their mobile phone’s camera, and to take snaps of the fingers, and the faces of these dead Taliban; I guess they don’t have time to watch CSI or NCIS to see how it’s done :-). Heck, I suspect they wear on-helmet cameras when in the field, so a camera shot from the helm-cam would be sufficient.
All that technology wasted…
One of the greatest advances for human civilization – mass printing – was invented/discovered and developed as a completely peaceful pursuit. The powerful elite didn’t like it one bit.
@Donald Oats
I haven’t looked into it deeply (the ethical issues are a big concern) but I wonder what they were supposedly going to check the fingerprints against? Even if they had a database of “bad guy” fingerprints, so what? The dead were dead, so it would only be for identification of a person we have already killed. Doesn’t make much sense.
Although he may have held that most lethally dangerous of ranks one can have these days, i.e. to be a “number two” (as in: “Allied forces today killed the number two leader of….”).
@James Wimberley
Oops, silly mistake. Of course, you are correct.
This is a fascinating area for me. I’m not particularly hawkish but I do believe in having a military to deal with those circumstances that can only be handled with “the last argument of kings”.
I’m also reasonably well aware of the level of engineering in miltary systems (past and present) – I’ve bumped into COCOM and ITAR several times in my life even though by choice I’ve never worked on weapons systems.
Our host has already mentioned that much of the technology in question was already in development before a “war effort” brought it to fruition.
It has been said that development technology happens in discrete jumps. You’re standing on a plateau and the next plateau requires a jump enabled only by some new technology…
If you jump and miss, your technology disappears into the chasm only to be rediscovered at some later date when that enabling technology exists.
(eg: steam engines and metalurgy)
What a “war effort” brings is something quite difficult to acheive in regular commercial circumstances. I don’t doubt that we’ve progressed significantly quicker than we would have in many areas. (As to what cost…)
But I do believe there’s a feedback loop – modern defence tech owes as much to cell phones, VCRs and personal computers as they do to it.
There’s also the “fallout” thing – one origin story about Silicon Valley is that it’s a result of a glut of engineering talent after military spending cutbacks in the 70’s.
This is why I’m in favour of building submarines (planes, missiles, whatever) here.
If you are building them then you must aquire the required enabling technologies (and skills)… if you don’t have the enabling technology you can’t build them. The enabling technology (industry) itself is a strategic asset.
Who cares if you never get a submarine out of it.
And I do believe were perfectly capable of delivering… some people just don’t get how hard it is to make complicated things or why it’s worth the effort (insert grumbling old grey beard guy here).
Search for WWII optical bomb sites and the contemporary whitepaper that discusses the problem with having no optical components manufacturing capability in Australia.
(^ arghh. “bomb sight” not “bomb site”)
@Megan
Yeah, I thought the same thing about the finger-printing, which is why I wondered that no mention of photographs of the face were made in the news article I read. I would imagine that some of the Taliban have on-file finger prints, but definitely not all of the leaders (or number two). It would be a fair bit quicker to photograph a few fingers than to hack off a hand, I would have thought.
Souveniring body parts and desecrating the dead is an old habit of those involved in US imperial wars.
It was – and remains – the most logical explanation of what these proud brave aussie diggers were up to.
Ikonoclast @12,
You can say those things but I doubt that they are true. There is a huge amount of development work done by industry that you will never hear about. An example, the Rev Bill Crews being interviewed reveals that as a young out of uni Phd he was employed by AWA and for this company was the first person in Australia to produce ultra pure moncrystaline silicon and make integrated circuits from this material. Not the CSIRO, but AWA. Who would have known. Intel, Microsoft, Ford, German chemical companies
Click to access the-german-chemical-industry.pdf
, IBM, Bell telephone Laboratories, …..Huge and long list of Private industry doing ground breaking research.
I don’t believe the argument that most research today is done by government would stand up to scrutiny.
A rather different point. You can make a better case that cold wars – conditions of intense political rivalry without actual fighting – do accelerate technical progress more cheaply. Consider not only the US-USSR conflict in 1945-1990, but the rivalry between Imperial Germany and Britain and France in the decades before 1914. Dreadnoughts, aircraft, chemicals, radio. The absence of overt warfare made the cash and opportunity cost of the military spending, and military-related research, much lower. It’s difficult to imagine DARPA and the first Internet without the Cold War. Mind you, the second Internet – the Web – was invented at CERN, an entirely civilian research centre.
PS: An earlier example is the Longitude Prize and Harrison’s marine chronometer. The impulse for the enormous prize was the loss of an entire British fleet by Cloudesley Shovell on the Scillies in 1707. The background was the intense maritime competition with France throughout the 18th century. The problem was extremely difficult and required numerous advances in precision clockmaking to solve.
It’s also noteworthy because of the success of the prize mechanism, now being revived on a small scale by DARPA and Google, and considered by mavericks as an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. Also by the openness of the prize to all comers. The great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler won an award of £300 (£50,000 today? – a bourgeois income for a year) for advancing the astronomical method.
PPS: there is a Greek saying attributed to Heraclitus: “Strife is the father of all things”. It is sometimes translated as “war is …” but polemos is apparently wider, and the epigram works better in the more general sense.
@BilB
“I don’t believe the argument that most research today is done by government would stand up to scrutiny.” – BilB.
But that wasn’t my argument was it?
I wrote, to quote directly from my comment 12: “Much R&D now is only going to happen at government level or transnational corporation level.”
My point really was that modern research, for the most part, is complicated, expensive and highly technical. Only large organisations with large resources, for the most part, are going to be able to fund it.
This is a quandary for those who dislike big government and/or big corporations. We seem to need vast conglomerates to run big research and build big projects. How do we square that off against the desire to avoid oligopolies and monopolies be they state or private?
For my part, if government is genuinely social democratic I am happy for it to be big and to run natural monopolies. Further, we need to explore how to run worker cooperative conglomerates (worker owned and managed rather than capitalist owned and managed). There also needs to be a better stakeholder model which recognizes all citizens are impacted by big projects and all citizens need a say in them.
@James Wimberley
In the early days of the scientific and industrial revolutions, the lone “natural philosopher” (proto-scientist), researcher, maker or inventor could make discoveries and advances. This is much less the case today.
“John Harrison (3 April [O.S. 24 March] 1693– 24 March 1776) was a self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker.” – Wikipedia.
I haven’t noticed any self-educated, home-spun physicist building CERN or the equivalent on his/her own.
This goes back to my discussion with BilB in posts 12 and 30. Big organisations make the main advances now for the most part. The question essentially is how do we operate and regulate these big organizations? For private benefit or social benefit? The private benefit model concentrates wealth, creates large inequalities and ignores serious and damaging negative externalities.
Ikonoclast, whereas you are more than likely correct in claiming that high expenditure R&D is undertaken by Government Institutions (universities predominately) and transnational businesses on the dollars spent scale, I feel that the broader variety of R&D is undertaken by small business and private individuals. This other level of research is done with low cost techniques, but that should not be seen as being ineffective.
The point that I am making is that the amount of research being undertaken has ballooned way beyond the scale that a war could stimulate. We are in a technology age which would only be suppressed by war.
For example
http://blog.cafefoundation.org/2015-british-human-powered-flying-club-rally/
not to mention the CAFE (Comparative Air Flight Efficiency) Foundation itself. In aviation the majority of primary innovations have come from the efforts of individuals. Corporate Aviation expands and refines those features for commercial exploitation.
Electric aviation began with hobbyists with and model air planes. The first electric powered man carrying aircraft was a microlight form a paddock in a suburb. The first fully functional 2 seater solar only powered aircraft was made by a husband and wife team. Airbus are now moving into the field of electric aviation with their eFan project (which is largely driven by the design efforts of one person). The first micro gas turbine was an individual who built a working engine using parts such as a camping gas canister for the combustion chamber. That technology is now a booming industry.
A thorough study of R&D would reveal some huge surprises, I believe.
It’s nice to say that a rational government could have given us all penicillin, jet airplanes and computers with the right employment creating investment in the 30s, without any need for a war. It’s probably true. But by that standard, we didn’t have a rational government, we don’t have a rational government, and we never will have a rational government. So the question seems irrelevant as posed.
A better question for political economists would not be “could we have gotten all this great stuff earlier if we didn’t have warmongering, economically irrational governments” but “given that we will always have warmongering, economically irrational governments, does having an actual war lead to better economic outcomes than not having one (e.g. having a cold war military industrial complex, or a 1930s economy with no state investment).”
An important effect of WWII not discussed here is the impetus it gave to anticolonial struggles worldwide, especially Asia.
As much as I love the Internet, computers, video players and other high-tech products, I think the price we have paid for this is far too high: around 16 million dead in the First World War, 60 million dead in the Second World War, millions more dead in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, many hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen etc., the enslavement of most of the Irish nation since the time of Cromwell, the enslavement of the British working class in the satanic mills of the 18th and 19th centuries, the enslavement of much of black Africa and the destruction of stable indigenous societies in Australia and the Pacific.
This is only some of what has occurred in human history in the second millennium AD. I think humanity would be much better off without the high technology and the terrible price paid for it. Whilst we consider ourselves smart in the 21st century, much knowledge of past stable societies has been lost.
There is a small hope that some of today’s world leaders, who have shown themselves to be far more humane and enlightened than Abbott, Obama, Cameron and Hollande and Merkel, may find a way out of the mess faced by the world today.
@James
There was plenty of enslavement before the high technology came along, James. There’s also not a lot of point lamenting what might have been. We can only deal with what is, and try to influence what is to come.
@Nevil Kingston-Brown
I think the lionisation of “rational government” is misguided. Reason is the slave of the passions, as David Hume (I believe) said. Many extraordinary wasteful and destructive programs (including at least some of the wars mentioned in this thread) have been prosecuted in a highly rational, technocratic manner, albeit in pursuit of the wrong ends. What we need is more like humane government. Technocracy can easily become oppressive in itself, if not restrained by some humanitarian principle.
@Ikonoclast
In the Olden Days, groups like the PMG/Telecom Australia were government funded and put a big budget in place for technological research. CSIRO were also government funded to conduct research of national significance, especially in agriculture and mining. The USA used to pursue a similar strategy, until it decided to privatise and break up the biggest such labs.
On the Cold War, I think the accelerated scientific progress happened, but at the expense of other research which could have been done, but wasn’t. Anything which wasn’t relevant to superiority in the Cold War would have been relegated to last place in the funding trough. In other words, the Cold War placed a substantial bias upon the research topics which could easily win funding, essentially reducing the funding available for research of no special importance in the context of the Cold War.
The war on accumulation type super accounts is on again, aided by ‘financial products technologies’. Superfunds invest in financial securities more or less continuously, which includes buying at prices leveraged by borrowing. Then some event, actual or imagined, triggers a deleveraging and here we go, the selling season starts and prices fall a lot. An opportunity cost (not sure it is ‘the’ opportunity cost’ because I don’t know the rankings of alternatives) for people, more so for some than for others, is higher mortgages. Just a thought on the daily struggle, which, at times looks like a trench warfare.
@BilB
You might be right and I might be out of date somewhat. The miniaturisation and electronics trends might have taken some aspects of innovation back to the “lone wolf” inventor.
@Ernestine Gross
Years ago when compulsory super was brought in, a friend of mine said to me, “That’s a big new honey-pot. The robber bees will be after that in no time.”
I see no need for the existence of private super. This is not the same as saying “I see no need for private investment.” If people want to invest privately for super or any other purpose they should be able to do so. But there is no reason a private investment for super should get differential treatment from any other investment.
In addition, a sensible, economically viable nation really does not need any kind of dedicated private super system (separate from private investment as such). A dedicated national public super system for all would fit the bill. It would supply reliable super for all more cheaply and efficiently and with a 100% government guarantee.
Private super is just a honey pot for the robber bees. I am expecting, sooner or later, a huge stock market crash which will wipe out most super funds. Many people under about 50 today are unlikely (in my opinion) to ever see their super money.
It is hard to read Richard Feynman’s account of his time as Los Alamos designing the atomic bomb without being impressed at the focus and intensity that was given to that effort, also the bottomless resources – intellectual and material – that the manhattan project had. The story is in the ‘los alamos from below’ lecture – check youtube. There was an urgency to the effort which i don’t think you could get under many other circumstances. I wonder if anyone would have even thought it feasible to develop a bomb in peacetime (to do so would be an act of aggression in itself?)
“…mathematicians Jean Cavailles, shot by the Gestapo, and Wolfgang Doblin, one of thousands of Jewish scientists and doctors who perished in the Holocaust…”
I would be wary of citing these as examples of the damage “done by war*. Certainly, you can argue that any violent death is as much a tragedy as any other violent death. On the other hand, most people will see a distinction between the death of somebody executed by a criminal dictatorship and the death of a soldier in battle or even civilian “collateral damage”.
Why weaken a good argument by citing examples that people feel do not fit the discussed topic?
Also, if you aim your text mainly at present-day situations, murderous regimes similar to the Nazis (or Stalin’s Soviet Union) are few and weak. The Islamic State and North Korea are the only more or less valid examples that I can think of. So these examples are not too relevant to a discussion related to present policies.
Pr Q said:
War-preparing, rather than war-waging, was the dynamo driving 20th C sci-tech progress and therefore economic growth. As the Romans used to say: Si vis pacem, para bellum. The Cold War gave sci-tech the best of both worlds, a focused nation-wide drive for high-powered machinery without the massive opportunity costs of an actual shooting war. Sorry for banging on endlessly but on this blog, JUN 2013:
To repeat: I am not arguing for a state policy of aggressive militarism, merely for the proven utility of national development through competitive military R & D. But the opportunity cost of our Davos-globalist “piping times of peace” seems to be a form of national intellectual stagnation.
Recent research supports the view that, from the late 19th C through late 20th C, national military preparedness has been the most powerful spur to sci-tech progress. Tyler Cowen (NYT JUN 2014) makes the (Toynbeean) point out that civilizations that face survival challenges use their brains to over-come adversity:
There are political and technical reasons why Military-Industrialism (M-I) turbo-charges sci-tech: On the political demand side, keeping the “the dogs of war” on a short leash mobilize public (and elite) opinion for major R & D efforts. Fear of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully. They don’t call them Arms Race for nothing.
On the technical supply side, military R & D drives research to fundamental levels in order to “reach for the sky”, literally the case with the A-bomb and Space Race. The computer and digital revolution were both a product of military scientists, Turing and von Neumann both worked for the DoD. Cowen elaborates:
Cowen points to research which suggests the prevalence of the Occident over the Orient stems from a kind of militaristic “keeping up with the Joness” driven by the Alpha-males striving for status-dominance jockeying for postion at the helm of nationalistic ships of state:
Its no accident that the German state was both the world’s leading sci-tech Researcher and Developer and the world’s leading military power. The combination of Prussian militarism and Protestant industrialism developed the world’s first M-I complex. Modern higher education was launched by Prussia in the 19th C, combining the Humboldtian Model of pure research with the polytechnic’s pursuit of applied development. But the German political elite jumped the gun, focusing more on war-waging more than war-preparing and in so doing gave the M-I complex a bad name.
By contrast the US managed to place constitutional controls on elite militarism and channel scientific research into dual use technology, Ruttan points out that industrial standardisation grew out of the Yankee Civil War effort:
Oddly, given his much quoted valediction, Ike was a poster child for the M-I complex. He appointed the von Neumann, the worlds best scientist and an ardent supporter of the military, as his sci-tech advisor. He then amped up the military’s role in sci/tech leading to a staggering double barrelled success with NASA winning the Space Race and DARPA establishing the Internet.
Since the end of the Cold War the rate of (non-IT) innovation has declined, a fact lamented by ntellectuals as disparate as Peter Thiel, Robert Gordon and Vernon Ruttan. The main reason is that capitalist economics – such as privatisation, deficit reduction, IP policing and commercialisation – have trumped nationalist politics. Ruttan (Is War Necessary for Economic Growth 2006) is pessimistic that the end of Cold War-inspired R & D has taken the edge off sci-tech progress:
The one outstanding exception to this disappointing trend has been the spectacular development of AI. In 2005 “AI winter” effectively ended when Stanford won the robot desert navigation challenge. But this exception proves the M-I complex rule because the challenge was sponsored by…DARPA.
@alex
Since you raise the point, I’ll just mention that lots of development of new weapons technology has taken place in peacetime. The hydrogen bomb was a product of peacetime development; so, in earlier ages, were the dreadnought and the Maxim gun. I’m not clear on what larger significance the point has.
Because Quiggin decided to be a jerk and close comments for the opportunities cost column about war, I ll make a comment about that column inasmuch as there s nowhere else to do so. And if Quiggin doesn t like that, he can learn to like it. A recent study by the Policy Economic Research Institute finds that military spennding is the worst way to create jobs in the U.S. Military spending produces half as many jobs per dollar as spending on education.