Davos

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Thu Jan 27 23:20:58 PST 2000


War: outcome, 60 million dead. Imperial German regime gone. Nazi German regime gone. North Vietnamese regime a gang labor boss for Nike. North Korean regime combines all the delights of hereditary monarchy with those of high Stalinism.

Economic Growth: Annual world GDP today: $30 trillion; annual world GDP (2000 prices) in 1900: $3 trillion.

Net effect of war? 60 million people dead. No utopias created.

Net effect of economic growth? A much richer (albeit more unequally distributed) world with higher levels of education, less hunger, and longer life expectancies.

===== 2 large holes in the ozone layer: estimated cost of repair unknown due to lack of technological/ecological knowhow. So the cost exceeds the capital value of all known technologies. Easily in the trillions of $$. 60 million lives to war? Lets see, at current medical value of anywhere between 250,000 and 250,000 $ per person...you do the math. Deforestation over the last century; a couple of trillion there easy. Weapons of mass destruction; the US spent 9 trillion $$ on the cold war and the Repubs are shaping up to have us all hate the Chinese so as to maintain that level of "investment" so there's another few trillion every decade. Medical costs due to industrially related diseases [I'll include all those who should be treated but aren't] another trillion $$. Loss of biodiversity/species; there's easily 5-10 trillion bucks a year using contingent valuation methods. Cost of unnecessary use of chemicals in agricultural ecologies; another trillion every 2-3 years. Cost of soil lost due to industrial agriculture; probably a couple of trillion a decade. Cost of returning earth's surface to 1900 levels of forest canopy cover another 1 trillion [excluding labor costs of course]... Oh yeah don't forget to deduct the costs of financing those wars from your balance sheet.

Take Daly's advice; quit counting the destruction of the planet's ecological services as "income" .

Non-luddicly yours,

Ian



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list