"If wars really helped the economy, don’t you think things would have improved by now?"

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: “War Is Widely Thought To Be Linked To Economic Good Times … NONSENSE”

Washington’s Blog

Contrary to a Common Myth, War is Bad for the Economy

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday:

Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups.

(Mr. Krugman has said the same thing many times in the past. And many other influential people havesaid the same thing.)

I am not a Nobel prize winning economist … but Joseph Stiglitz is.

Stiglitz wrote in 2003:

War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.

Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.

Stiglitz has also said that this decade’s Iraq war has been very bad for the economy. See this, this andthis.
A No-Brainer

This is a no-brainer, if you think about it.

We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost twice as long as World War II. We’ve been in Iraq for years longer than WWII. We’ve been involved in 7 or 8 wars in the last decade. And yet still in a depression. (And see this).

If wars really helped the economy, don’t you think things would have improved by now?

Indeed, the Iraq war alone could end up costing more than World War II. And given the other wars we’ve been involved in this decade, I believe that the total price tag for the so-called “War on Terror” will definitely support that of the “Greatest War”.
Additional Reasons War Is Bad for the Economy

The New Republic noted in 2009:

Conservative Harvard economist Robert Barro has argued that increased military spending during WWII actually depressed other parts of the economy.

Also from the right, Robert Higgs has done good work showing that military spendingwasn’t the primary source of the recovery and that GDP growth during WWII has been “greatly exaggerated.”

And from the left, Larry Summers and Brad Delong argued back in 1988 that “five-sixths of the decline in output relative to the trend that occurred during the Depression had been made up before 1942.”

Economist James Galbraith has shown that war always causes inflation, which hurts the average American:

Inflation applies the law of the jungle to war finance. Prices and profits rise, wages and their purchasing power fall. Thugs, profiteers and the well connected get rich. Working people and the poor make out as they can. Savings erode, through the unseen mechanism of the “inflation tax” — meaning that the government runs a big deficit in nominal terms, but a smaller one when inflation is factored in.

(Ben Bernanke says that inflation is a tax, and Dylan Grice notes that inflation causes societies to prosecute minorities. And – sorry – but we can’t inflate our way out of our debt trap.)

As I noted last year:

All of the spending on unnecessary wars adds up.

The U.S. is adding trillions to its debt burden to finance its multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.

Two top American economists – Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – show that the more indebted a country is, with a government debt/GDP ratio of 0.9, and external debt/GDP of 0.6 being critical thresholds, the more GDP growth drops materially.

Specifically, Reinhart and Rogoff write:

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies…

Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that deficits do matter.

A PhD economist [Michel Chossudovsky] told me:

War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy.

You know about America’s unemployment problem. You may have even heard that the U.S. may very well have suffered a permanent destruction of jobs.

But did you know that the defense employment sector is booming?

As I pointed out in August, public sector spending – and mainly defense spending – has accounted for virtually all of the new job creation in the past 10 years...

Read more:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/nobel-prize-winning-economist-war-is-widely-thought-to-be-linked-to-economic-good-times-nonsense.html