US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

nearlynew

Degenerate wrote: »

. They were already impoverished, as this is the default state of non-developed nations, and all Britain did was take advantage of this to come in and exploit the material resources that these non-industrial societies were unable to utilise themselves..

I'm not arguing about the rights and wrongs of empire or asking you to feel guilty.

My point was that controlling resources requires conflict. We were not there as guests.

nearlynew

1echidna wrote: »

I accept a lot of what you say but feel the comment about every war being about resources is rather a sweeping generalisation, rather like saying all crime is about monetary gain. Some base emotions such as pride or religous bigotry may well have been the reason for some wars.

But to the victor goes the spoils of war.

And if you could control what people think and get them to conform would you not have harnessed the greatest resource of all?

1echidna

nearlynew wrote: »

But to the victor goes the spoils of war.

And if you could control what people think and get them to conform would you not have harnessed the greatest resource of all?

Oh dear, you do take the saying 'money is the root of all evil' more seriously than me.

Degenerate

nearlynew wrote: »

My point was that controlling resources requires conflict. We were not there as guests.

Actually, in quite a few cases, we were. Local leaders cottoned on the fact that by ceding sovereignty to the British, they could have the might of the world's greatest power on their side, while retaining local autonomy over the things that mattered to them. Quite handy if you're a small state under threat from other, less benign powers. Hence the "Protectorate" status. Many small arab states were aquired in this way, in preference to being absorbed by the Ottoman empire.

Count_Dante

War has an interesting effect on economies: for example, the German economy grew at an astonishing rate in WW2 even as it's cities were being bombed to dust. The military hardware that left factories to be blown up in France and the USSR was all counted as 'growth'.

dopester

nearlynew wrote: »

But wars over resources are nothing new. Every war has been about resources and, hence, the economy.

I would argue that the wealth that the empire brought allowed us to "fight above our weight" economically and the decline of the empire marked the beginning of the end of our way of life.
America, having taken over the baton, are themselves losing their grip on their "empire" and way of life

The end of every empire is charecterised by overexpansion, overindulgence and a mother country which has become lazy, greedy and decadent.
How will America respond to their plight?

The world has lots of resources - overcapacity. The only risk of war is if suppliers were unwilling to sell at rates which reflect market conditions... trying to hold countries ransom to old-world rates which are no longer.. affordable.

I can't see us choosing to spend yet more on wars and military power.... nor inflate our way out of it as that makes position worse and an advanced economy that loses trust of the credit-markets from who they borrow is doomed... unless choosing some extreme new political way forward (like Germany did).

We need to ease-down from all costly military involvement - try and reduce the scale of it, or make it cheaper in areas where we still need to protect our interests.

Military Power Required Sound Money

The influence of war and military spending on prices and production is also self-limiting. A level of military spending high enough to materially alter the price level will also undermine the economic capacity of a country to continue spending.

In the past, even the richest nations were too poor to sustain the costs of mobilisation for full-scale war on more than a temporary basis. Before the French Revolution, battles between states were mainly engagements of manoeuvre, often fought by mercenaries, and sometimes involving only small detachments of men. Wars may have been more frequent, but they were far less intense, what Gibbon described as "temperate and indecisive contests." They had to be. No government could afford to continually siphon off significant percentages of national wealth for military purposes without courting bankruptcy - and thus military weakness.

Neither could governments afford wild inflation. If they attempted to wipe away their "everlasting debt" with the printing press, they would have lost further access to the credit markets, greatly diminishing their strategic position. When nations lost the financial capacity to fight, they often lost wars.

In his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy emphasised the importance of financial stability, "sound money, secure credit, and regular repayment of debt" in producing military success. In one case after another, the leading powers were powers because they were rich. "Success in war depended upon the length of one's purse."

First Spain, then the Netherlands, and later England came to dominate much of the world because of their extraordinary financial capacity to wage war.

These nations failed when they reached the limits of their capacities to finance the costs of war. Spain was bankrupted in 1596, when interest on the national debt took a large fraction of the national revenues, variously reported as from 40 percent to 66 percent. The result was that Spain was forced to withdraw from wars it could no longer afford. The bankruptcy of Spain produced a period of peace known as "The Breathing Spell."

Dutch finance was the strongest in Europe even before the Dutch became militarily predominant. Dutch capital continued to play a major role in financing British wars. When Britain allowed its creditworthiness to decline during the time of the American Revolution, the Dutch withdrew their financial support, with unfavourable consequences from the British point of view.

Later, the end of British military hegemony occurred when the costs of maintaining the British Empire exhausted the fiscal resources available. Britain's economy was taxed at a disproportionately high level to meet the costs of maintaining world order. Because Britain was for many years spending at a higher portion of its national output for military purposes than the United States, British competitiveness was hampered. In time, British wealth was simply insufficient to support and ever more costly military mission. This ultimately left Britain dependent upon foreign borrowings to finance military measures. Appeasement during the deflationary 1930s was a fiscal and monetary policy, not a strategic vision.

The last depression was a period of widespread disarmament. In April 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed a strategic arms treaty that was to have "lifted the burden of militarism from the backs of mankind." Pacifism and isolationism were on the rise. Politicians who listened to the mood of their constituents made much of the virtues of international law, and treaties were forwarded as a civilised alternative to military vigilance.

julieq

Gorgeous_George wrote: »

I chose the word carefully despite spelling it incorrectly.

China's one child policy wasn't particularly popular - but it was right IMO. We live in a country where having children is rewarded with ever increasing state benefits. We want more people to support the pensions of the elderly. It is a huge pyramid scam that can only end in failure.

Well apart from the fact that we have an aging population here rather than a glut of children, and the fact that in the developing world there are no state benefits for increased family sizes, it's a nice theory.

There is also the question of personal choice and whether it's right to have governmental control in developing countries designed around the convenience of people in the west who want to maintain a certain quality of life - female children were killed as a result of this policy, it's not an anodine debating point.

But also Malthusian (I believe) economics suggests that you don't extrapolate straight lines in (say) population growth, because people put up with a certain level of inconvenience and pain and then stop doing the thing that increases the pain. I.e. if you can't feed your children and the ones you have die, you stop having them.

It's very easy to call pension provision pyramid scams, and frequently done, but it's nonsense. There are a small number of pensioners relative to the working population in any given country, and the amount they need to live is relatively low. There are a few people with disproportionately good pensions, most are essentially on benefit levels, and of the people with good pensions most have significant savings and assets. You get issues of affordability if there are less people in the working population than retired, but the money is there. In a pyramid scheme it isn't.

penguine

julieq wrote: »

But also Malthusian (I believe) economics suggests that you don't extrapolate straight lines in (say) population growth, because people put up with a certain level of inconvenience and pain and then stop doing the thing that increases the pain. I.e. if you can't feed your children and the ones you have die, you stop having them.

I don't think it actually works this way. People in very impoverished situations with high child mortality rates tend to have more children, because it increases the likelihood that one or two will survive to adulthood. What's more, as children can often begin earning money at a young age, the more children you have the better chance of increasing the household income.

One of the few non-coercive things that actually helps to reduce reduce birth rates is to increase the level of education amongst girls and women, and thus their ability to earn money and have more control over their own fertility.

penguine

Count_Dante wrote: »

The expression 'post-apocalyptic' seems to crop up when Detroit is mentioned. These photos are spectacular:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html

Thanks for that link. Those photos are really amazing -- like a city after a nuclear war.

DKLS

Can I volunteer Huddersfield as the first town to be bull dozed?

That place would look good with a mushroom cloud over it.