You have neglected the negative-sum lose-lose situation being mislabled as win-lose.
War is the classic lose-lose situation that is mislabeled as win-lose. No one “wins” a war. After a war, everyone is worse off, just some are more worse off than others.
I think the problem is that the zero-point shifts, where if you survive a war, you feel like you have won something where in reality you just didn’t lose your life.
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?
It depends on what one assumes the motives for war are. If they are economic then I think a case can be made everyone ends up worse off. But if power is at stake, then war can indeed leave the nominal victor better off (from the perspective of motive).
By the way, attempts to characterize human psychological based on what life was like in the Savanna (or whatever environment humans are supposed to be designed by Darwinian forces for) need serious qualification, at best. Speaking metaphorically, evolution is an accident; where “successful”, a fortuitous coincidence.In some cases an organism ends up with a set of traits that work out for it in a given environment and it lives long enough to reproduce (even if living in a great deal of pain). Obviously the given environment will impose certain limits, and these limits may lead to certain “modifications” if not extinction. But the assumption the organism is well designed (well adapted, if one prefers secular terminology) for environment X therefore automatically poorly (or less well) designed for environment Y, where X precedes Y, is misleading. Logically, we may be better adapted for our present environment than any previous one we’ve inhabited (and one can come up with imaginary environments that are far superior than any we’ve experienced)--it’s question we can only answer by looking at X and Y and the organism’s traits very carefully, and then perhaps only with a great deal of uncertainty. No one talks about the hand being well adapted to the Savanna and ill adapted the modern city yet analogous arguments re: psychology crop up constantly—esp. re: politics and economics, where extreme irrational prejudices operate.
How about WWII? At the end of WWII, the USA was certainly better off. The economic boom we experienced following the war was quite large, not to mention the baby boom.
I still think that counts as lose-lose, though not for the reason daedulus2u gives in the sibling comment. WWII destroyed the productive capacity of several nations and diverted huge amounts of resources to swords instead of plowshares.
Had there been no war, these resources could have been committed to making more plowshares, including for the people of the US. Don’t mistake a recovery in plowshare production capability, for a higher absolute capability.
Ah, okay. I must admit that the depth of my knowledge on the economic history of my country is rather skin-deep. I do know, however, that we squander unbelievable amounts of money on war, so I think you may easily have a point.
That’s irrelevant. Of course you can always cherry-pick people whom some event made worse off. The question was whether the war made the country better as a whole, not whether any individuals suffered.
Actually, what you consider and what you don’t in this sort of calculation is an interesting question.
Was a particular country better off? Did it work out differently in different regions? How about the whole world?
Getting back to the US, was there a cost to the belief that war is good for the economy? Was there a cost to smugness from winning the Civil War and being on the winning side in WWI and WWII?
You’re getting into much deeper water here. “What does it mean that some scenario is good/better/best?” is the ultimate, fundamental value judgment.
Giving a thorough answer to that question goes a long way towards explaining/understanding yourself, and it’s an exercise everybody should do as soon and as often as possible, even though it is by no means easy or quick.
There’s no way I’m putting it down in a comment, unfortunately—if I do go through the effort of writing down my moral system in a linear form that is understandable to other people, it’ll be a several-pages-long essay (possibly a LW post, though). Step zero, for what it’s worth, starts with asking “why do I want X?”, and recursing that question until you hit an answer you can neither question (without questioning reality itself) nor alter.
You have neglected the negative-sum lose-lose situation being mislabled as win-lose.
War is the classic lose-lose situation that is mislabeled as win-lose. No one “wins” a war. After a war, everyone is worse off, just some are more worse off than others.
I think the problem is that the zero-point shifts, where if you survive a war, you feel like you have won something where in reality you just didn’t lose your life.
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?
It depends on what one assumes the motives for war are. If they are economic then I think a case can be made everyone ends up worse off. But if power is at stake, then war can indeed leave the nominal victor better off (from the perspective of motive).
By the way, attempts to characterize human psychological based on what life was like in the Savanna (or whatever environment humans are supposed to be designed by Darwinian forces for) need serious qualification, at best. Speaking metaphorically, evolution is an accident; where “successful”, a fortuitous coincidence.In some cases an organism ends up with a set of traits that work out for it in a given environment and it lives long enough to reproduce (even if living in a great deal of pain). Obviously the given environment will impose certain limits, and these limits may lead to certain “modifications” if not extinction. But the assumption the organism is well designed (well adapted, if one prefers secular terminology) for environment X therefore automatically poorly (or less well) designed for environment Y, where X precedes Y, is misleading. Logically, we may be better adapted for our present environment than any previous one we’ve inhabited (and one can come up with imaginary environments that are far superior than any we’ve experienced)--it’s question we can only answer by looking at X and Y and the organism’s traits very carefully, and then perhaps only with a great deal of uncertainty. No one talks about the hand being well adapted to the Savanna and ill adapted the modern city yet analogous arguments re: psychology crop up constantly—esp. re: politics and economics, where extreme irrational prejudices operate.
One more case to consider—if a country is invaded, it may be less badly off after successful resistance than if it surrendered.
How about WWII? At the end of WWII, the USA was certainly better off. The economic boom we experienced following the war was quite large, not to mention the baby boom.
I still think that counts as lose-lose, though not for the reason daedulus2u gives in the sibling comment. WWII destroyed the productive capacity of several nations and diverted huge amounts of resources to swords instead of plowshares.
Had there been no war, these resources could have been committed to making more plowshares, including for the people of the US. Don’t mistake a recovery in plowshare production capability, for a higher absolute capability.
Ah, okay. I must admit that the depth of my knowledge on the economic history of my country is rather skin-deep. I do know, however, that we squander unbelievable amounts of money on war, so I think you may easily have a point.
I think people have an amazing ability to leave the costs of war out of their bookkeeping.
That’s what the U.S. government does.
I think the 416,000 US military dead and their families would disagree that the war made them better off.
That’s irrelevant. Of course you can always cherry-pick people whom some event made worse off. The question was whether the war made the country better as a whole, not whether any individuals suffered.
Actually, what you consider and what you don’t in this sort of calculation is an interesting question.
Was a particular country better off? Did it work out differently in different regions? How about the whole world?
Getting back to the US, was there a cost to the belief that war is good for the economy? Was there a cost to smugness from winning the Civil War and being on the winning side in WWI and WWII?
You’re getting into much deeper water here. “What does it mean that some scenario is good/better/best?” is the ultimate, fundamental value judgment.
Giving a thorough answer to that question goes a long way towards explaining/understanding yourself, and it’s an exercise everybody should do as soon and as often as possible, even though it is by no means easy or quick.
This sounds as though you’ve worked with that question yourself. What have you learned from it?
There’s no way I’m putting it down in a comment, unfortunately—if I do go through the effort of writing down my moral system in a linear form that is understandable to other people, it’ll be a several-pages-long essay (possibly a LW post, though). Step zero, for what it’s worth, starts with asking “why do I want X?”, and recursing that question until you hit an answer you can neither question (without questioning reality itself) nor alter.
Of course I agree with you. I am merely thinking in dollars and cents here, since that is the primary measure of value in the “civilized” world.