The thing is without force your stuff gets taken. We haven't got a good way around this. Our current peace is heavily based on nuclear weapons and the implied threat of force.
Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it.
Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way.
We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do what you like, but I am above using force".
They can say that because their existence is secured by the force of others. There are enough people willing to take by force that if you have no force your stuff and land get taken.
This was how the world worked for all of human history until 1945. The only thing that changed it was nukes, the ultimate force.
In theory you could have a global government with a monopoly on force that enforced no more war. But that still depends on force.
Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?
Consider it an economic problem. War costs money, therefore war will be conducted when its benefits exceed its costs. What makes war profitable? For that you need to know the benefits of war. The most obvious benefit is the changing of borders and conquering of new land. Now you might say that it always makes sense for a country to try to conquer the enire world, because having the land grants you access to its riches for free, but then you have to consider the costs of war too.
The cost of conquering land and managing it yourself must be cheaper than letting the other country manage the land and production process and then importing the goods you want.
The cost of conquering the land can be split into two parts. First, the initial offensive representing capex and the ongoing defense costs against attackers represent opex. If it turns out that the foreign country is both fleecing you on imports and is spending less in defense per acre than you would, if you managed the land, it would be profitable for you to conquer the land and install a defense force that spends more to protect the same plot of land. Since your spending budget is higher per acre, the original country would lose if they tried to recover the territory.
Now consider the opposite scenario. The original country does not fleece you on imports and has a lean army. Then it would not be profitable for you to conquer the land, since you have higher opex and the benefit is insignificant.
Of course none of this stops crazy dictators from attempting world domination, but it can tell you that on average, people should be uninterested in war.
I think one of the most obvious, major benefits of war is the trillions of dollars that's put into the military-industrial complex every year. Whether war actually breaks out is irrelevant, if the interests involved can make people believe it's always inevitable, so let's keep pumping money into it.
Europe stopped believing in it and "interests involved" couldn't do anything about it. As a result their military-industrial complex has atrophied to a point where without US goodwill they would not be able to protect themselves against the belligerent neighbor with much smaller economy.
I don't believe I made any implications about how the world should act, or whether peace is possible. I made a point about a major motivating factor. That isn't to say it's the only one.
Sure that calculation might have worked when it was purely about the land. But now the land itself is only one small part of the value production. Even for agriculture, there's all that infrastructure, and the knowledge workers to make it viable and competitive. War destroys those, and a war of attrition like the one in Ukraine also has a destructive effect on the land itself.
Internal strife shows this. In Africa where farms were taken with force with no planning on what happened next the agricultural economy collapsed.
It’s interesting that the relative costs of offense vs. defense vary with technological development. In the middle ages when castles existed but guns did not, and societal structure was such that mounting enormous besieging armies of antiquity was not possible, the borders mostly stayed intact. It’s possible we’re entering something similar judging by the drone war in Ukraine which seems to heavily favor defense.
I said the end of _artificial_ scarcity, which much of our current world, and most of it's economic system is based on. As you've flagged, the fact that entropy exists means scarcity itself will be with us until the end of time.
No. I go to the grocery store. Where an army of robots controlled by farmers has already done it for me. We're so good at this more than 1/3 of it goes to waste. We export so much food it literally disrupts world markets.
The question you want to ask is there ever a point where population's psychical space demands overcome the space required to feed those people? We are nowhere near this limit.
Right, so you are claiming you are entitled to the productivity of land worked by the labor of someone else, managed by someone else. What are you contributing to the process?
Artificial scarcity, the proposal is for the elimination of the ability of owning classes to restrict supply of a given good through various means.
That said, >100 years in the future it could be possible to make more land with rotating habitats in space, which would functionally eliminate land scarcity.
It's much more economically viable, but it comes with a lot of ecological and environmental risk that we care about a lot more now (which is right and good). Same with preserving Antarctica, the other one people always bring up. The fact is we care hugely about the environment in the modern day, people who don't care about the environment are a loud minority, so in terms of making new habitable land on a large scale space is the most realistic even though it's more difficult in an economic and engineering sense.
Terraforming takes centuries and trillions.
Depopulation is super easy. Just provide a minimum level of education, opportunity and contraception and significantly more people choose not to have kids.
Not sure if our economies can survive that way though.
And people are slowly testing the limits of the nuke deterrent. Turns out everyone is really hesitant to use them especially when the aggressor has nukes too.
Not the nukes. The Bretton Woods principles. It was not a kumbayah exchange of platitudes. It was an agreement to let things be settled in the free market.
Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers.
Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money.
Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea.
This was the brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, not Ayn Rand. It was not a matter of market fetishism. It was based on the sensible idea that the market place is a better way to settle these things than the battlefield, something even a Marxist should be willing to admit.
That could have brought us to a world wide peace in 1945, but only the First World went along with this idea. The Second World rallied around endless revolution and war until we get a worker's paradise. And the Third World tried to stay out altogether. (Reminder: by the original definition, Switzerland was in the Third World).
This is very naive. The reason the "first world" is peaceful is only because of two things - nukes and American hegemony.
You need a hegemon for peace. Are you familiar with Japanese history? It was not until unification that the wars stopped. Finally there was a hegemon who brought peace by acting as the ultimate arbiter of power. The same thing happened to the "first world". A dominant hegemon emerged in the form of the US. This hegemon set the rules and made it so nobody needed to worry about their neighbors. A hegemon is the only way you can get peace in an environment that is otherwise anarchic.
> That could have brought us to a world wide peace in 1945, but only the First World went along with this idea. The Second World rallied around endless revolution and war until we get a worker's paradise. And the Third World tried to stay out altogether. (Reminder: by the original definition, Switzerland was in the Third World).
How does your thesis explain the countless violent coups orchestrated and death squads funded by the First World, for example Guatemala 1954?
> Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers.
How about I offer them some lead to sweeten the deal? As in, take my lower offer or else?
> Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money.
Or I'll just go fishing because what ever Tuvalu can do to me?
> Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea.
The idea works when the players have no better choice than to play by the market rules, win or lose. At small scale, most people figure it's better to lose the deal than be thrown into jail for being extra convincing - but this is only possible because of a legal and enforcement system that's stronger than any individual or group. At larger, international scale, nukes provide a backstop that keeps everyone in check, by keeping total war absurdly expensive for everyone.
> It was based on the sensible idea that the market place is a better way to settle these things than the battlefield, something even a Marxist should be willing to admit.
The market will tell you that peaceful solution is only better if the war is really expensive. Large power imbalance can easily make war the cheaper option.
In general, any solution that requires people to just go along with it is doomed to failure - someone eventually will figure it's in their benefit to defect. Stable solutions are ones that, by design, align with default human behavior. Like MAD.
Worth also mentioning that there isn't just "war" and "peace", except in international laws. Soldiers on the ground are just the realization of threats of use of force, which themselves are a last-ditch diplomatic technique. There are other such techniques - sanctions, for example, are just as brutal as war. All that is implied in international negotiations, not invoked explicitly unless parties can't reach a reasonable agreement without threats of violence.
> In general, any solution that requires people to just go along with it is doomed to failure - someone eventually will figure it's in their benefit to defect. Stable solutions are ones that, by design, align with default human behavior. Like MAD.
The problem with MAD is that it is human nature not to assume that your own destruction will occur. Which ends up meaning that these gentlemen's agreements like open skies and free inspections are more necessary than you'd intuitively assume. MAD only works if the human on the other side truly believes that he will be destroyed.
Right. There's plenty of such non-obvious aspects of MAD. Counterintuitively to any other matter in the military, it's beneficial to you to let your enemy know the extent of your arsenal (or at least the lower bound), and the technologies used - like you explained above. And the corollary to that is, any defense or recon technology that makes it easier for you to defend against enemy nuclear attack, risks causing a war[0]. Same with offense upgrades that make first-strike weapons significantly better. For the balance to work, destruction must be mutually assured, and all sides must believe that.
--
[0] - Which is why I'm worried about recent developments in detecting underwater objects by gravity or whatnot. A critical part of MAD is nuclear SLBM-carrying submarines. Those subs, lurking in the darkness, are what guarantees that no matter how fast and effective your first strike is, you'll still get glassed in retaliation. Being able to detect those subs breaks MAD.
"> Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money.
Or I'll just go fishing because what ever Tuvalu can do to me?
"
If you can thug your way into Tuvaluan waters, so can anyone.
At that point you get into a conventional arms race with everyone else who
wants to get into a race for empire in the Pacific.
Much cheaper to agree to buy the fishing rights at auction.
> If you can thug your way into Tuvaluan waters, so can anyone. At that point you get into a conventional arms race with everyone else who wants to get into a race for empire in the Pacific.
Yes, that's history of mankind in a nutshell. That's what nukes put a stop to, at least between the nuclear powers themselves[0].
Ironically, auctions are a non-market solution to the same problem you mention: tragedy of the commons and arms race are fundamentally the same thing; they're solved by having an external entity that's more powerful than the players involved set the rules and enforce them. If you follow the recursion, the buck always stops at threats of violence.
Also worth remembering that for any set of rules you want everyone to follow, the rules tend to benefit the winners, and the losers have a lot of incentive to tear the whole game down.
Ultima ratio regum, and all.
--
[0] - In my books, only nuclear powers are truly sovereign nations; everyone else is at their mercy. For politicians and diplomats, it's not something you bring up in a polite company, but the implied threat and order of things is always there in the background.
...You're assuming the seller doesn't simply take your money then sell them to the next person. Or that anyone else will care to recognize any claim of exclusivity as a result of your purchase. Or that they're for sale at all.
In point of fact, any guarantees against any of the above are typically based on a threat of violence at some level.
You have a nice theory there, would be a shame if something happened to it.
I played this older computer civilization-like space game. In it, there was an hyperaggressive race that always went to war with everybody. They always died out first.
I think conflict will always exist, but violence? I am not sure. I think it comes down to availability of information. People don't like a*holes. Once world becomes a global village, and almost everyone will run a SW on their phone that keeps tabs on other 8 billion people, starting a war will become nearly impossible.
If Rebel Moon and the Demolition Man taught us anything, is that even when 8bn people will be spied upon, there will be some that will object this and fight it tooth and nail.
Because we prefer to attribute big deeds (both positive and negative) to a single person rather than a collective. CEOs (and other "leaders") are good at spinning their good deeds as their achievements, while attributing their bad deeds to something else. This is because are brains are not large enough to track misbehaviour in large, anonymous groups, so we cannot prevent hierarchy forming as a sort of simplified model.
Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it.
Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way.
We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do what you like, but I am above using force".
They can say that because their existence is secured by the force of others. There are enough people willing to take by force that if you have no force your stuff and land get taken.
This was how the world worked for all of human history until 1945. The only thing that changed it was nukes, the ultimate force.
In theory you could have a global government with a monopoly on force that enforced no more war. But that still depends on force.
Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?