[extropy-chat] War and technological progress

[Technotranscendence]

On Tuesday, May 01, 2007 3:08 AM BillK pharos at gmail.com wrote:
> On 5/1/07, Thomas wrote:
> <snip>
>> Not completely off-topic since many of Bush's efforts have worked
>> against the extropian, especially funding war at the expense of
>> medical
>> and technological progress.
>
> Not true!
> I have supported the proposition before that war funding vastly
> increases technological and medical developments. Look at all the
> stuff DARPA is funding.
> WWII certainly generated a great leap forward in technology and
> medicine.
> (The downside, of course, is that war tends to kill a lot of people).
>
> Agreed that Bush has opposed funding some stem cell research, but that
> was on religious grounds, nothing to do with the war funding.

To fund the war, one must use one of three possible means: taxation,
inflation, or borrowing (i.e., deficit spending).  All of these mean
less wealth for other purposes.  Now it's true that some war spending
will go to research and development and some of that might lead to
progress in various fields.  (Even so, I suspect most such R&D spending
will be on new ways for the government to hurt or kill people, and that
is probably the least extropian use I can think of.)  However, it's
merely falling for the broken window fallacy to believe that this has an
overall benefit.  In other words, the benefit must be weighed against
the cost -- and the cost is not just people being killed or injured
(though, that alone, is the most serious cost of war).

Were this not so, then you should advocate a society constantly at war.
Such as society would have, by this view, the most technological and
economic progress over any alternatives.

Regards,

Dan