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.
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.