At 08:20 PM 4/13/2005 -0700, Nick wrote: >> On the other hand, if a given amount of government spending on the >> war has greater benefits to the country than costs, once again, by >> all means that spending should be undertaken. > >As I think about this, I'm having a hard time applying cost-benefit analysis >to war at all. The costs are not quantifiable and benefits aren't very >predictable (which is to say, I suppose, that a risk assessment is needed, >which I assume is non-controversial on the face of it). Certainly the money >costs are, although there are plenty of ways to count. But the cost in terms >of the impact of the war on people is incalculable, I suspect.
Well Economists are known for assigning values to everything. Some things are harder to value than others, but there are always ways of coming up with reasonable approximates. >At a personal level, I can report that the cost of losing a family member in >the war turned out to be far, far higher than I ever imagined, in terms of the >pain we're all feeling. Although I remain on guard against self- >righteousness, I do believe, five months later, that those of us who have been >directly touched by such a loss really do have a much better idea of the cost >of war than those who haven't. And most of us can hardly bring ourselves to >imagine multiplying what we're feeling by 100,000+. Parents having to bury >children, in particular, feels so deeply wrong that doing any sort of math >around it seems impossible. That is true, the loss of a child is always very painful. On the other hand, over the weekend I wrote a very long and detailed message outlining the case for war. Central to several elements of my case was the fact that some people would die, others were likely to die, and still others could potentially die as a result of inaction in the situation in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was killing thousands of Iraqis every month. 5 Americans had already died in an untraced bioterrorism attack on our nation, and Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles that had not been accounted for as required by the UN. The presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia in order to keep an eye on Saddam Hussein, and Hussein's starvation of his own people had inflamed many Arabs against us and turned them to terrorism. With impoverished North Korea now in possession of fully assembled nuclear weapons, there was now a new chance that Saddam Hussein's ample oil revenues would be a temptation the North Koreans could not resist. Thus, the choice for war must be balanced against the choice for inaction. To use another example, if the US had intervened in Rwanda in 1994, some American soliders would have died. Say somewhere between 10 and 2,000. That would have to be balanced against the numbers of lives that would be saved, would it not? Or is the fact that the choice for war in Rwanda would always have resulted in the deaths of US soldiers who would not otherwise have died always to be an incalculable cost ruling against any decision to go to war? >Parents watching their kids grow up without opportunities because of a lack of >health care, education, etc., doesn't come far behind, in terms of >immeasurable costs. And there are all the violence and other social problems >that go with poverty and injustice (one of which is war itself, I'd argue). This is not a cost of going to war. If you have a proposal for a health care or education program whose benefits outweight its costs, then you should propose it. It would be economically sensible for the US to adopt most policies where the benefits outweigh the costs. >I really don't mean to inflame things by asking, but would you apply cost- >benefit analysis to abortion? Is war really so different? No, as cost-benefit-analysis can never be used to justify an intrinsicly evil action. For example, if cost-benefit-analysis showed that our civilization would be better off by rounding up and euthanizing the homeless, I would be opposed to that policy. Since I don't consider war to be intrinsically evil - that is I believe that a "just war" exists, cost-benefit-analysis becomes an appropriate consideration in recommending for or against a war. JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
