On Feb 25, 12:52 pm, " wrote:
On Feb 25, 12:29 pm, Jeff Dougherty
wrote:



On Feb 23, 1:04 pm, " wrote:

On Feb 23, 12:45 pm, "Ken S. Tucker" wrote:

I think war is usually a business mistake, nowadays.
Ken

Right, and that is always the overriding concern that trumps the war
option, I suppose?

Certainly that was the case in 1861, 1914, and 1939 -- years devoid of
business interests.

Every time that argument comes up, I'm more and more tempted to go
digging through the college textbooks I have in storage until I find
one reading that mentions a very compelling book, written by a well-
respected economist, that was very popular in its time. It carefully
explained how, due to the interconnected nature of international
trade, widespread war was now impossible because it would call too
much economic damage to everyone involved.

Written in 1912.

-JTD

Messy divorces are proof that emotions trumps economic interest every
time.

Dan

Maybe not *every* time, but it only has to happen some of the time for
Bad Things to result.

It doesn't even have to be emotion, either- when you're leading a
country, the economic is just one of the dimensions you have to
contend with. Take the U.S. and Japan in the years just before WWII:
Japan imported much more from the U.S. than she exported, and from a
strictly economic point of view the best thing might have been to let
Japan's campaign of conquest in Asia go on. Most of the things Japan
was importing were manufactured goods as opposed to raw materials,
with the exception of a few things like bauxite that weren't really
present in the territories under attack anyway, so absent any U.S.
interference it's likely that trade deficit would have increased, if
anything, to feed Japan's war effort. From a strict making-money
point of view, the thing to do would be to let Japan grab what it
could- but the political consequence would have been accepting
Japanese hegemony in Eastern Asia, which was unacceptable to the U.S.
There are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in
economics texts.

-JTD