Is War Or Aggression Always Economically Unprofitable?

[John Kilduff]

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Actually the vikings started out as raiders in the British isles but eventually decided that endless war wasn't really very profitable after all and began to settle down and intermarry among the British natives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age
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Ireland

The Vikings conducted extensive raids in Ireland and founded a few towns, including Dublin. At some points, they seemingly came close to taking over the whole isle[citation needed]; however, the Vikings and Scandinavians settled down and intermixed with the Irish. Literature, crafts, and decorative styles in Ireland and Britain reflected Scandinavian culture. Vikings traded at Irish markets in Dublin. Excavations found imported fabrics from England, Byzantium, Persia, and central Asia. Dublin became so crowded by the 11th Century that houses were constructed outside the town walls.

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Also even while they were raiding and plundering it still wasn't +EV. Many many died and were maimed in the continuous battling. Sure a few kings and chieftains got some more amenities, jewels and relics but that's exactly the point (see bush haliburton). If the Viking leaders hadn't been able to force their warriors into battle do you think the average viking would have been better off fighting and plundering or staying at home farming and trading?

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Upon a very quick cursory reading, I didn't see anything in that article to indicate the Vikings stopped raiding due to deciding it was unprofitable, as you say they did. Maybe I missed that part. Would you care to point it out?

What I did see while reading that article, was that the Viking raiding age started with the beginning of the Warm Medieval Period (800-1300 A.D.) and stopped with the advent of the Little Ice Age (+- 1250 A.D.) It says that the lack of ice-pack would have allowed the Vikings to go raiding. It also mentions that eventually, after the later establishment of Viking outposts on the British Isles, some Vikings began to intermarry with British Islanders.

As for what the average Viking would have been better off doing: this is actually what bothers me about the ACists' typical approach to these matters: you appear to be just assuming that they would have been better off staying home and farming and trading, right? But the article you linked says that one theory is that the Vikings planted crops after winter, went raiding as soon as the frozen ice on the sea melted, and then returned home in time to harvest the crops after the summer. That sounds like a very efficient use of time to me, if they could manage to fit it all in.

Anyway, I've got to go out for the evening. Maybe we should both read the article more closely: I only scanned it, as you probably did. Thanks for your contributions thus far to this thread.

[SNOWBALL]

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As for slavery, I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that the longest empire on record was the ancient Egyptian empire, and it lasted 3000 years and practiced slavery.


[/ QUOTE ] The great pyramids were built on the backs of slave labor.

Wrong. You're probably getting your history from a charlton heston movie. The reality was that egyptian farmers worked on the pyramids voluntarily in their free time. It was a religious, recreational activity for them. Jews were never slaves in egypt. Go see the thread that Sklansky made on the story of exodus if you want to dispute that.

[natedogg]

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Since slave productivity is so low, a firm employing slaves would likely fall behind competitors who did not.

Also, remember that in an AC world, the theory is that massive third party associations would arise and these associations would act as defacto regulation to accomplish a similar outcome to most of the regulations we actually value today. For example, the AC version of the FDA would certainly be as effective if not ten times more so. But the FDA is an easy one. Slavery is harder.

In the end, I don't think many firms would get away with utilizing slave labor because of the low productivity, and because of the business associations they are part of which would probably ban such practices.

I know it's hard to imagine but it even happens now in the media, where certain outlets will drop content providers or advertisers merely based on a negative public reaction to that person. Ann Coulter was recently dropped by several outlets because she used a gay slur in an entirely different context from her column! Advertisers are often dropped from radio and print and t.v. because the outlet's consumers find the company objectionable.

A similar thing occurs with endorsements. Athletes and celebrities who are caught with child porn or accused of rape and such are immediately dropped. There's no law forcing this to occur. It's just that the public finds these people so objectionable the firm cannot profit from paying them to endorse their product anymore.

And don't forget the brouhaha that plagued Martha Stewart (?) or was it Katie Couric (?) or somebody like that, over mere ALLEGATIONS that her clothing line was being manufactured by factories employing children. These children were actually getting paid you know. I highly doubt that any firm which was using outright slaves could survive the public outcry.

Note that many consumers wouldn't care if slave labor were part of the product they wanted, but that doesn't matter. If the use of slave labor would hurt you in the marketplace, you're better off not using it.

It's not guaranteed that slavery wouldn't happen, but it's also certain that firms which had slaves would have limited advertising opportunities, limited business associations, and would have to fight an uphill battle to profit from slave labor more than from paid labor. This would drive slavery into a dark corner of the market, if it could survive at all. Anyone who thinks that AC would lead to massive slavery by corporations is deluded.

I think the bigger concern in AC would be the case of individuals or small communities practicing slavery.

natedogg

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Yeah, i kind of touched on that, but not with much detail. I agree that current public opinion sways that way, but then id imagine in 1920s Germany no one thought mass slavery would exist in its borders within two decades.


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Well, Nazi Germany is nearly the antithesis of AC, so I'm not sure if the turn of events in that society should server as a warning to the possible negative outcomes of AC.

In Nazi Germany we have a population where information is under tight control, where propoganda brainwashes the citizens, where their children are dragged off to be raised as Hitler yout, and where the people live in fear of a secret police. That is not AC.

By the way, I'm not an ACist, and Nazi Germany is one example of why I am not, but for different reasons that have nothing to do with the camps.

The camps are actually one of the strongest reasons to support an AC world. For myriad reasons, death camps are nearly impossible in an AC world.

One thing to keep in mind about AC is idealism vs. reality. Ideally, many statists suppose that in an AC world child sex exploitation would occur, or animal cruelty, or other terrible things we rely on the state to enforce. Those STILL OCCUR NOW with a state. So the real question about AC should be, will the overall cons outweight the pros, compared to the pros and cons of a state. And a realistic view of what the state actually accomplishes is only fair when evaluating the two systems. Just something to keep in mind.

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Can you explain the 3rd party associations. Are we talking workers unions, regulatory commissions (by any other name) or something else? Sort of like being FSA certified to prove you are trustworthy? Soemthing like that?

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AC enthusiasts can do a better job than I on this one. It's actually pretty straightforward and anyone who thinks, for instance, that airlines in an AC world would routinely lock up passengers for days at a time on the tarmac are simply confused about AC. And reality.

natedogg

[Skidoo]

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Another development of recent history is the widespread adoption of the centralized nation state.

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By "recent history" you must mean the last 5 millenia.

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Actually, no. I mean the nation-state that writers of history books refer to as coming into existence from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) to the early 20th century.

[AWoodside]

It's seems like we can take the principle that war is always unprofitable as axiomatic (by this I mean always true) if we are willing to grant two assumptions.

(1) Resources that are employed in defense are not ‘lootable’
(2) The ‘lootable’ resources of a society are liquid

As you relax these assumptions there will be cases where profitable wars are possible, and I'll talk about that later. And of course, the validity of those assumptions will need to be discussed, but first a rough proof of how those assumptions lead to the impossibility of profit.

For a war to be profitable the costs must exceed the gains, or the "loot". Let 'L' be the loot and 'C' be the cost.

L - C > 0 is required for a war to occur (profitably)

Now, what are these variables and how are they related? The cost of conducting war, 'C', will be a function of how many resources are devoted to defending against it. Let this amount be 'x'. Now the inequality takes the form

L - C(x) > 0

Nothing needs to be assumed about the function C(x) except that it is positive and increasing with x, an assumption that I doubt any sane person would argue with. Now, because of assumption (1), the more resources that are used to defend against aggression, the less total resources there are which can be looted. 'L' becomes a function of total wealth, 'w', less what is spent on defense. This leads to

w - x - C(x) > 0 as the necessary condition for profitable war.

Here is where assumption (2) comes in. What the lootable resources ('w') being liquid means is that the valid values for defense expenditure are x = [0,w]. In other words, a society can spend all of its lootable resources on defense if it chooses to do so. With this in mind it is clear that the defending party is capable of choosing a value for 'x' that is less than 'w' for which war will never be profitable. Whatever this value of 'x' it will be +EV for a society to behave this way because otherwise their wealth will be 0. (things like probability of attack can be factored in to the variables above)

Obviously this is very simplistic but I think it can be made to be fairly robust. While assumption (1) isn’t exactly true in real life, I think most people would agree it's approximately true. For one, a lot of the stuff used for defense explodes, rendering it un-lootable. Additionally, a lot of the cost is tied up in training and other personel costs. I suppose these costs could be looted in some sense in the form of slavery, but this seems minimal because most of the personel would be dead by the time the aggressor was successful anyway and I can't imagine recovering resources in this way would be efficient. Take into account the damage to defense resources that occurs during a war that would have to be repaired by the aggressor and it seems like (1) is a pretty fair assumption.

Assumption (2) seems like it could be more problematic, but I can’t get a handle on why I think so. For example, if one of the major lootable resources of a people is their land, which arguably can't be spent on defense, then the highest possible value for 'x' will be less than 'w', and the inequality does not necessarily hold. In the modern era though, things seem to be increasingly liquid. In the land example, just rent out your land for money and then spend the money on defense. I can't think of any major resources to refute assumption (2) but I wouldn't be shocked if somebody else could.

Of course, a group of people could do this ineffectively and not allocate enough resources to defense to adequately protect themselves, but here we have the case (which seems fairly common in AC-land) where the worst case AC scenario is the current status quo.

Anyway, this is definitely tl;dr, but hopefully provides some fodder for thought.

[Girchuck]

Rent out your land to pay for defence?
Who is going to be paying good money to rent land threatened by attack?
Land ofcourse used to be the main spoil of any really profitable campaign.
American settlers took land very profitably.
The British took more land than they could hold at minimal expense, and their empire only became unprofitable when there was no more land for them to conquer to pay for the Empire.
The Romans were faced with a choice between expansion and collapse, and they too collapsed when they could expand no more.
Land is the ultimate illiquid asset. It cannot be blown up, it cannot be expended, it is difficult to defend and difficult to trade. People depend on land for their very lives, for their food. You take someone's land, and he will do your bidding in exchange for sustenance and security which is now in your control.

[Girchuck]

A particular act of war seems very profitable to me:
Kidnapping for ransom. It takes a small trained crew, and can be planned against multiple targets, and it is difficult to stop because the kidnappers almost always have the advantage of first move. Kidnapping for ransom destroys very little wealth, generates only few casualties, and is repeatable. Kidnappers have a chance to amass a fortune if successful, and if well-trained, remain anonymous for a long time.

[SNOWBALL]

Of course violence is profitable. It's MORE profitable though when your group had overwhelming force. In today's military conflicts, overwhelming force = access to high tech weaponry. I suppose in an AC world, there wouldn't be national monopolies over high tech weaponry, and therefore it would be harder to find profitable situations to use violence.

[tolbiny]

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Your point about aggression needing to be profitable on average is good, but it also points up the value for potential raiders to carefully select their targets. If they do so very carefully, aggression might then usually be profitable.

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The more rare war is the harder it will be to find profitable areas since experience is of enormous value in such endevours. The Marines currently in Iraq wouldn't be the world's elite units if it wasn't for the lessons learned in the previous wars. A look at the 20th century shows how fast and dramatically war can change, the British were still using bayonet charges during WW1, 60 years later the US is using helicopters to fly into remote jungle and carpet bombing the crap out of the entire forest. Another 30 years and we have a war that starts out with tanks firing hot lead with pinpoint accuracy but ends up a block by block clearing out of enemy nests.

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edited: predators of the animal kingdom survive in the wilds. It is a viable model for many carnivores, some of whom operate in groups or packs. Why wouldn't the predatorial model, in packs or groups, work for humans too? The predator carefully selects as prey those who look weak or isolated, then attack with full force and strip them of everything. Killing is a means not an end. If it works for wolves, why shouldn't it work for humans, so to speak?


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Those lions and wolves don't have the options of striking a mutually beneficial bargin with their prey. In the human world when you attack you are in competition with those who are using mutually beneficial exchange to build their wealth.

[John Kilduff]

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Your point about aggression needing to be profitable on average is good, but it also points up the value for potential raiders to carefully select their targets. If they do so very carefully, aggression might then usually be profitable.

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The more rare war is the harder it will be to find profitable areas since experience is of enormous value in such endevours. The Marines currently in Iraq wouldn't be the world's elite units if it wasn't for the lessons learned in the previous wars. A look at the 20th century shows how fast and dramatically war can change, the British were still using bayonet charges during WW1, 60 years later the US is using helicopters to fly into remote jungle and carpet bombing the crap out of the entire forest. Another 30 years and we have a war that starts out with tanks firing hot lead with pinpoint accuracy but ends up a block by block clearing out of enemy nests.

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edited: predators of the animal kingdom survive in the wilds. It is a viable model for many carnivores, some of whom operate in groups or packs. Why wouldn't the predatorial model, in packs or groups, work for humans too? The predator carefully selects as prey those who look weak or isolated, then attack with full force and strip them of everything. Killing is a means not an end. If it works for wolves, why shouldn't it work for humans, so to speak?


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Those lions and wolves don't have the options of striking a mutually beneficial bargin with their prey. In the human world when you attack you are in competition with those who are using mutually beneficial exchange to build their wealth.

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Good points and food for thought.