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puls comments on Fight Zero-Sum Bias - Less Wrong
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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.
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.