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Paying people to dig up holes in the physical and cultural infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan
I was thinking about war and prosperity and the many odd relationships between economics and power, between power and destruction and between destruction and war.
I recently met someone who had been to Iraq, having been there before Saddam Hussein was in power and while Saddam Hussein was in power. He was well placed to comment on the effects of the war in Iraq which Mr Blair has said has proved a net benefit to the Iraqi people. The person I met would disagree, and that person held no candle for Saddam, having grievously suffered as a result of the dictator’s activities.
I was told that the national infrastructure has been devastated. There is no reliable electricity, not much clean water, and a great deal of corruption. There is no rebuilding of Iraq, whose infrastructure was destroyed by our bombs and those of our allies. There is unemployment on a vast scale. The country seems without hope.
There is one theory of economics that if you want to stimulate economic activity you can do so by engaging in a war, which destroys stuff or by getting people to dig up holes and fill them up again, which shows the marginal utility of labour. Keynes has been misquoted about this concept but in fairness he did hold that paying people to do useless things is better than nothing.
By the same argument the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which have paid people to manufacture bullets, planes, bombs, guns, protective clothing, and all the other war paraphernalia, should have a positive economic effect, in that we are paying people to dig up holes in the infrastructure (be it physical or cultural) of Iraq and Afghanistan and we have dug plenty of holes, no doubt about that. Our attempts to pay people to fill up the holes have not proved successful in filling up the holes but the money has gone somewhere into someone’s coffers or vaults.
And we, the war makers have not benefited as a whole. Our economies are failing while those who did not participate in the wars seem to be growing. War may make a few rich but it impoverishes the majority (including the perceived victors)by destroying what they have created.
Probably Keynes was wrong about the marginal utility of labour. Labour, like most other things, can be a force for good in the world or a force for evil. Unfortunately humanity generally errs on the side of evil.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: afghanistan, economics, iraq, keynes, labour, marginal utility of labour, paying people to dig holes and fill them up again, war 
2012-09-05 04:40:33
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