Wartime Economics

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the effect of war on the U.S. economy, looking at the relationship between military action and economic activity in World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. It shows how each of these wars was different in scale, different in historical impetus, different in motivation and different in cultural and social meanings and whether such important differences override any tendency for a nation to react in economic terms in the same way to each war. It looks at how cutting spending and diverting money from schools, for example, to the army can have long-term consequences in terms of a nation's overall prosperity and that given that government cuts are often in programs with long-term pay-offs (like public health and education), the effect of these cuts continues to mount after a war is over.

Increasing the money supply seems to solve these problems, but this is of course a dangerous strategy because it tends to raise inflation.

From the Paper:

"These technological changes offered great promises for the future, but they also came with economic costs: People found that new technologies were making them obsolete at the jobs that they had always worked at. Moreover, much of the vaunted prosperity of the workplace come on the backs of average workers, who often found themselves working long hours at poor pay in dangerous conditions. The uprising of populism as a significant political force in the 1920s and the unionization of many American workers bespeak the economic burdens that the post World War I "prosperity" laid on the common worker."

More papers on Wartime Economics:

• Book Review # 49514 : "Wartime America"
• Cause and Effect Essay # 94509 : "Economic Impact of the War in Iraq"
• Cause and Effect Essay # 35748 : "Ramificatioons of 9/11"

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