Situations where people make conflicting plans tend to result in net harm for all as the plans collide and fail, and stupid things happen, instead of any of the plans.
This doesn’t require scarcity, it’s orthogonal to it, you could have war without scarcity (WW2, the contest over Taiwan), or peace despite it (Witness a community in crisis, look around for cannibalism, you mostly wont see any of it), war just requires coordination failure, which often correlates with scarcity, as a society with no trust or rule of law will have difficulty gathering investment for large projects and growing wealth, and a society with great wealth will tend to have stronger information workers, journalists, accountants and legal systems. But the direct causal factor is not the wealth.
I want to agree that conflict in that sense, the waste, is just always bad. But, we don’t have to be idealistic about it. Sometimes we really do lack coordination infrastructure, in which case we have to accept that there’s going to be conflict.
Situations where people make conflicting plans tend to result in net harm for all as the plans collide and fail, and stupid things happen, instead of any of the plans.
This doesn’t require scarcity, it’s orthogonal to it, you could have war without scarcity (WW2, the contest over Taiwan), or peace despite it (Witness a community in crisis, look around for cannibalism, you mostly wont see any of it), war just requires coordination failure, which often correlates with scarcity, as a society with no trust or rule of law will have difficulty gathering investment for large projects and growing wealth, and a society with great wealth will tend to have stronger information workers, journalists, accountants and legal systems. But the direct causal factor is not the wealth.
I want to agree that conflict in that sense, the waste, is just always bad. But, we don’t have to be idealistic about it. Sometimes we really do lack coordination infrastructure, in which case we have to accept that there’s going to be conflict.