conflict narratives, 04 Oct 2024.txt

Economists have long known that different types of spending have different effects on an economy. On the level of an individual, they may talk about the "marginal propensity to consume" — how much of each dollar of new income gets spent, and how much gets saved. At the level of government actions, economists aggregate the available data into a single number for each possible action: the "fiscal multiplier", which shows how much the gross domestic product will go up if a certain amount of money is spent in that way.

The fiscal multiplier does not measure how many jobs are created through this spending, nor does it measure whether tax revenue from the increased GDP balances out the spending. But it's still a useful measure. To the surprise of almost no one, giving money to rich people through tax cuts has a small fiscal multiplier. Giving money to poor people has a large fiscal multiplier. Other types of spending, like military, are somewhere in between.

So it follows that taking military spending and turning it into money that goes to the poor (such as through programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit) would increase GDP. But how many people would actually want the government to make this change in spending?

The United States has the most powerful conventional military in the world. By mutual agreement with Russia in order to prevent an arms race, the US's nuclear forces are tied with Russia for most powerful. One cannot honestly say that the US is threatened by any other nation's military. And yet, people in the US like to think that the US is threatened. This narrative has two main purposes.

First, it provides an excuse to avoid government spending that some people think is harmful. This is basically welfare spending for people who have not shown a strong commitment to finding paid work, complicated by group dynamics and accusations of prejudice based on group membership.

Second, an external threat promotes internal unity. In a nation on a war footing, one thinks nothing of stopping to help a random stranger in the street (as long as the stranger does not display the characteristics of an enemy group). It helps the group, and that's enough.

But why do we need an excuse like war to act like good people? Why can't we be nice to everyone regardless?

The truth is more complicated than we'd like to admit. The Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion is superficially a story about giant robots piloted by adolescent children, that fight beings that are referred to as "angels" but look like monsters. But it has a peculiar concept of an "A.T. field" — something which can, at times, be used by the giant robots to protect themselves, or even by the angels the robots are fighting.

The show never explains what an A.T. field is. But the opening credits of every episode flashes a brief image that indicates that A.T. stands for Absolute Terror. At the end of the original show — spoilers for those who have not seen it — all of humanity is merged into a sea of pink goo, and people are seen trying to escape this fate. It's easy to infer that what people are terrified of is being hurt by becoming too close to other people.

But that's not what it is. In cultures where this "A.T. field" has a strong presence, it is really terror of hurting other people if they become too close to us. The show just hides this truth, because people don't want this truth to be known.

Let's suppose that this fear people have is justified: we really do risk hurting other people if they come too close. How might we explain this mechanism, in which we hurt people we don't want to hurt? Posit a world in which no one is really nice or mean; all interactions people have are supposed to be 'business transactions', in which both parties benefit, rather than interactions where one benefits while the other is harmed, even if the benefit to the one is greater than the harm to the other. Even in this world, people can be harmed when they make mistakes in estimating value. For example, one person promises 5 hours of fixing a car in exchange for 5 hours of labor worth of fruits. But it turns out the first person is much worse at fixing cars than they thought: they actually damage the car.

The general solution of reducing harm in this hypothetical world, in which no one is nice or mean — just profit-oriented businesspeople — is for people to be better at judging value.