After a war, everyone is worse off, just some are more worse off than others.
At least in one point in history, it was possible to wage war as a strategic move, so that your country would gain more resources than you expended in war. This is probably not possible anymore, because of advances in weapon technology.
You can’t really conquer another country and turn a profit on it these days, but it seems as though civil war can still pay: you can overthrow a dictator and install yourself in his place as the new dictator, and then allocate the spoils to yourself and your supporters. This seems to work best if there are exploitable natural resources (such as diamonds or oil) that you can gain control of.
Well, coups work better, but civil war seems to pay off at least some of the time. (At least you can sometimes get de facto independence from a local dictator.)
Even in that case, the war as a whole is a negative sum. The sum of resources after a war is less than the sum of resources before a war. Net resources have been lost due to consumption in the war.
If you discount the value of resources owned by your opponent in war to zero (while your opponent owns them), but not when you own them after the war you can come up with something positive, but I see that as an accounting gimmick.
Then you’re missing the point. Historically, the kind of people who start wars of conquest tend to hold philosophies that value only their own in-group and its associated resources. When you don’t value the happiness or prosperity of your victims it’s quite easy to “win” a war. You just have to make sure the cost isn’t so astronomical that it wipes out the benifits your in-group can reap by exploiting your victims over the next few generations.
Even in that case, the war as a whole is a negative sum. The sum of resources after a war is less than the sum of resources before a war. Net resources have been lost due to consumption in the war.
This isn’t entirely clear, depending on how you look at resources. It’s possible that military training and research produced skills and expertise useful in peaceful arenas, yielding an overall gain. It’s also possible that a conquering nation can exploit the resources of the conquered nation in a way that the conquered nation couldn’t, yielding an overall gain of available resources. The mineral wealth of Afghanistan might be one real-world example; the resources were there, but undiscovered and unmined.
If you look at resources before and after the war with the same metric, then resources have been expended and lost. If you are using a different metric to measure resources before and after the war, then it is the metric that has changed, not the positive sum generation of resources.
Once you start killing people (as is an inherent part of war), then any talk of gains and losses goes out the window unless you attach a specific value to specific human lives before and after and are willing to compare those lives lost with material resources. Since victims usually attach a higher value to their lives than do perpetrators, mutually agreeable values for the gains and losses can not be achieved.
Compelling people to do something against their will (i.e. slavery) is a negative that can not be “balanced” by what ever positive things the slaves might generate. That is why slavery is wrong, no matter how “productive” the slave masters compel the slaves to be. You do not make slavery “less wrong” by compelling the slaves to be ever more productive.
Once you privilege the values that you attach to things, then so long as you have gains, then you will perceive every interaction to be positive-sum because you have gained even if everyone else loses.
I think that the original poster was meaning “zero-sum” in circumstances where all parties have equivalent knowledge, that a transaction with asymmetric information (such as where one party knows the flea-market painting is a rare masterpiece and worth millions and not the $10 sticker price) isn’t in the same class of transactions.
In other words the idea is that the transaction actually be positive sum and agreed to be positive sum before and after the transaction. A transaction with asymmetric information is more of (as I see it) a “gaming” the transaction and doesn’t really achieve a true positive-sum.
The Afghan war didn’t generate resources, those resources were always there. Buying the $10 masterpiece didn’t turn it into a masterpiece, it already was one.
If you look at resources before and after the war with the same metric, then resources have been expended and lost. If you are using a different metric to measure resources before and after the war, then it is the metric that has changed, not the positive sum generation of resources.
OK, we’ll stick to the same metric. Do you agree that human skills and abilities can be resources? Do you agree that the ability to exploit a resources is itself a resource?
Suppose country X has a functioning democracy, court system, banking system, and corporations, while country Y has none of those things. If country X invades country Y and sets up a functioning government and economic system, this could well be positive-sum. Country Y didn’t gain any material resources, but it now has a greater ability to exploit its natural resources as well as its human potential. This is a clear positive-sum situation.
Once you start killing people (as is an inherent part of war), then any talk of gains and losses goes out the window unless you attach a specific value to specific human lives before and after and are willing to compare those lives lost with material resources. Since victims usually attach a higher value to their lives than do perpetrators, mutually agreeable values for the gains and losses can not be achieved.
One study put a value of around $1.5 million on a human life. You’re right that people will be biased when they try to value their own life, so we should probably disregard any self-assessed value.
Of course we need to be able to value lives and trade them off against other resources; we do it all the time when we make policy or safety decisions.
Compelling people to do something against their will (i.e. slavery) is a negative that can not be “balanced” by what ever positive things the slaves might generate. That is why slavery is wrong, no matter how “productive” the slave masters compel the slaves to be.
Have you read the articles on this site about utilitarianism and deontology? This sounds like a deontological position; I think most of us on this site would disagree. Not about slavery being wrong, but about why it’s wrong: that the harm to humans outweighs the benefits.
Simply discounting self-bias in valuing a life doesn’t give you a correct value. The opposite of self-biased is not unbiased.
Human skills can be a positive resource. What ever skill are generated during a war, it does not take a war to generate those skills. Those skills could be developed in the absence of war. That those skills are not developed in the absence of war is not an argument I find persuasive that war has provided the benefit of the development of those skills.
I don’t consider that responses that people make to mitigate adverse circumstances can ever completely negate the adverse consequence. I think the idea that people have that a “silver lining” can completely mitigate an adverse event is part of the zero-sum bias the OP was talking about. Maybe if the war had not happened, then even better skills would have been developed and without all the damage the war brought.
Part of the issue is that different events and consequences are to some extent orthogonal and can’t be directly compared against each other. Part of that is that we can’t know the actual consequences of paths not taken. Maybe one of the victims of WWII would have gone on to invent something that would have triggered a phase change in space-time and destroyed the whole universe.
Simply discounting self-bias in valuing a life doesn’t give you a correct value. The opposite of self-biased is not unbiased.
I’m not sure it’s even meaningful to put a dollar value on your own life. And, yes, we’d want to correct for the biases of hating the person in question, as well, which might lead you to undervalue him.
Human skills can be a positive resource. What ever skill are generated during a war, it does not take a war to generate those skills. Those skills could be developed in the absence of war. That those skills are not developed in the absence of war is not an argument I find persuasive that war has provided the benefit of the development of those skills.
I’m not claiming that war is the optimal outcome, only that it could be positive-sum. There may be other choices with an even larger sum. However, maybe the only way to exploit country Y’s resources is with war; suppose all diplomatic attempts seem doomed to failure. Then, if the resources are valuable enough, war might be the best option (though we should also take into account how easy it is to underestimate the cost of war).
I don’t consider that responses that people make to mitigate adverse circumstances can ever completely negate the adverse consequence. I think the idea that people have that a “silver lining” can completely mitigate an adverse event is part of the zero-sum bias the OP was talking about.
No, the zero-sum bias consists of erroneously thinking that an adverse event is always mitigated by a silver lining. Adverse events are sometimes mitigated by a silver lining. For instance, if you would freely choose to get a papercut for $10, and someone gives you a papercut accidentally, couldn’t they mitigate the adverse event by giving you $10?
Of course we need to be able to value lives and trade them off against other resources; we do it all the time when we make policy or safety decisions.
I think the issue of lives in the context of “sums” is this: how many lives did “we” lose, compared to how many lives did “they” lose, in order to come to a conclusion of the conflict in and of itself. The sum is only self-referential....what happens afterwords is not relevant to the argument.
e.g. in a $10 zero sum experiment, the “winner” leaves with $9 and goes and buys crack on the street. The “loser” takes his/her $1 and buys a winning lottery ticket.
The long-term winning and losing after a war is not quantifiable, because there are no controls. Too many decisions, laws, random chance, weather events, could have taken things in one direction or another...who’s to say?
At least in one point in history, it was possible to wage war as a strategic move, so that your country would gain more resources than you expended in war. This is probably not possible anymore, because of advances in weapon technology.
You can’t really conquer another country and turn a profit on it these days, but it seems as though civil war can still pay: you can overthrow a dictator and install yourself in his place as the new dictator, and then allocate the spoils to yourself and your supporters. This seems to work best if there are exploitable natural resources (such as diamonds or oil) that you can gain control of.
Civil war or coup?
Well, coups work better, but civil war seems to pay off at least some of the time. (At least you can sometimes get de facto independence from a local dictator.)
Civil wars can be even better than a coup if you find external sponsorship.
Even in that case, the war as a whole is a negative sum. The sum of resources after a war is less than the sum of resources before a war. Net resources have been lost due to consumption in the war.
If you discount the value of resources owned by your opponent in war to zero (while your opponent owns them), but not when you own them after the war you can come up with something positive, but I see that as an accounting gimmick.
Then you’re missing the point. Historically, the kind of people who start wars of conquest tend to hold philosophies that value only their own in-group and its associated resources. When you don’t value the happiness or prosperity of your victims it’s quite easy to “win” a war. You just have to make sure the cost isn’t so astronomical that it wipes out the benifits your in-group can reap by exploiting your victims over the next few generations.
It may still be negative-sum, but at least it’s really win-lose instead of lose-lose.
This isn’t entirely clear, depending on how you look at resources. It’s possible that military training and research produced skills and expertise useful in peaceful arenas, yielding an overall gain. It’s also possible that a conquering nation can exploit the resources of the conquered nation in a way that the conquered nation couldn’t, yielding an overall gain of available resources. The mineral wealth of Afghanistan might be one real-world example; the resources were there, but undiscovered and unmined.
If you look at resources before and after the war with the same metric, then resources have been expended and lost. If you are using a different metric to measure resources before and after the war, then it is the metric that has changed, not the positive sum generation of resources.
Once you start killing people (as is an inherent part of war), then any talk of gains and losses goes out the window unless you attach a specific value to specific human lives before and after and are willing to compare those lives lost with material resources. Since victims usually attach a higher value to their lives than do perpetrators, mutually agreeable values for the gains and losses can not be achieved.
Compelling people to do something against their will (i.e. slavery) is a negative that can not be “balanced” by what ever positive things the slaves might generate. That is why slavery is wrong, no matter how “productive” the slave masters compel the slaves to be. You do not make slavery “less wrong” by compelling the slaves to be ever more productive.
Once you privilege the values that you attach to things, then so long as you have gains, then you will perceive every interaction to be positive-sum because you have gained even if everyone else loses.
I think that the original poster was meaning “zero-sum” in circumstances where all parties have equivalent knowledge, that a transaction with asymmetric information (such as where one party knows the flea-market painting is a rare masterpiece and worth millions and not the $10 sticker price) isn’t in the same class of transactions.
In other words the idea is that the transaction actually be positive sum and agreed to be positive sum before and after the transaction. A transaction with asymmetric information is more of (as I see it) a “gaming” the transaction and doesn’t really achieve a true positive-sum.
The Afghan war didn’t generate resources, those resources were always there. Buying the $10 masterpiece didn’t turn it into a masterpiece, it already was one.
OK, we’ll stick to the same metric. Do you agree that human skills and abilities can be resources? Do you agree that the ability to exploit a resources is itself a resource?
Suppose country X has a functioning democracy, court system, banking system, and corporations, while country Y has none of those things. If country X invades country Y and sets up a functioning government and economic system, this could well be positive-sum. Country Y didn’t gain any material resources, but it now has a greater ability to exploit its natural resources as well as its human potential. This is a clear positive-sum situation.
One study put a value of around $1.5 million on a human life. You’re right that people will be biased when they try to value their own life, so we should probably disregard any self-assessed value.
Of course we need to be able to value lives and trade them off against other resources; we do it all the time when we make policy or safety decisions.
Have you read the articles on this site about utilitarianism and deontology? This sounds like a deontological position; I think most of us on this site would disagree. Not about slavery being wrong, but about why it’s wrong: that the harm to humans outweighs the benefits.
Simply discounting self-bias in valuing a life doesn’t give you a correct value. The opposite of self-biased is not unbiased.
Human skills can be a positive resource. What ever skill are generated during a war, it does not take a war to generate those skills. Those skills could be developed in the absence of war. That those skills are not developed in the absence of war is not an argument I find persuasive that war has provided the benefit of the development of those skills.
I don’t consider that responses that people make to mitigate adverse circumstances can ever completely negate the adverse consequence. I think the idea that people have that a “silver lining” can completely mitigate an adverse event is part of the zero-sum bias the OP was talking about. Maybe if the war had not happened, then even better skills would have been developed and without all the damage the war brought.
Part of the issue is that different events and consequences are to some extent orthogonal and can’t be directly compared against each other. Part of that is that we can’t know the actual consequences of paths not taken. Maybe one of the victims of WWII would have gone on to invent something that would have triggered a phase change in space-time and destroyed the whole universe.
I’m not sure it’s even meaningful to put a dollar value on your own life. And, yes, we’d want to correct for the biases of hating the person in question, as well, which might lead you to undervalue him.
I’m not claiming that war is the optimal outcome, only that it could be positive-sum. There may be other choices with an even larger sum. However, maybe the only way to exploit country Y’s resources is with war; suppose all diplomatic attempts seem doomed to failure. Then, if the resources are valuable enough, war might be the best option (though we should also take into account how easy it is to underestimate the cost of war).
No, the zero-sum bias consists of erroneously thinking that an adverse event is always mitigated by a silver lining. Adverse events are sometimes mitigated by a silver lining. For instance, if you would freely choose to get a papercut for $10, and someone gives you a papercut accidentally, couldn’t they mitigate the adverse event by giving you $10?
I think the issue of lives in the context of “sums” is this: how many lives did “we” lose, compared to how many lives did “they” lose, in order to come to a conclusion of the conflict in and of itself. The sum is only self-referential....what happens afterwords is not relevant to the argument.
e.g. in a $10 zero sum experiment, the “winner” leaves with $9 and goes and buys crack on the street. The “loser” takes his/her $1 and buys a winning lottery ticket.
The long-term winning and losing after a war is not quantifiable, because there are no controls. Too many decisions, laws, random chance, weather events, could have taken things in one direction or another...who’s to say?