By Marc Jampole
Global Crisis by
British historian Geoffrey Parker presents the 17th century as a case history
of the devastation that climate change can wreck upon human societies.
The 1600s experienced an enormous number of droughts,
lengthy winters, floods, major earthquakes and other extreme weather phenomena
resulting from what scientists and historians call “The Little Ice Age.” The
Little Ice Age hit human societies hard, leading to famines, plagues and other
disasters in all the continents, which put pressure on the still forming nation
states throughout the world to go to war to gain or protect their resources. An
enormous number of civil wars also broke out, as nobles and/or peasants
resisted higher taxes and confiscation of grain and land. The world population
was much less in 1680 than it had been in 1600, with some regions losing
perhaps a third of their population.
Parker isn’t saying that the sudden cooling of the earth in
the 17th century caused all the mayhem of the period, but that sudden climate
change combined with and exacerbated political instability to push the world
into general disaster and decline. I’m only about a third through this 700+
page tome, but I’m already convinced that Parker gives us a roadmap to our
future if we don’t slow down global warming: resource shortages, natural
disasters and population displacements could plunge most of the world into a living
hell of poverty, warfare, epidemics, famine and environmental degradation.
The topic of today’s OpEdge article is not, however, Global Crisis, but one paragraph on page
34 of the book. The topic of the
paragraph is what Parker calls “indirect” or “opportunity” costs, which refers
to the lost opportunity to spend money on something because you have already
spent the money on something else. In the paragraph in question, Parker refers
to the many positive initiatives that 17th-century governments did not pursue
because they had already spent so much fighting wars:
·
Philip IV of Spain, who spent £30 million to
finance foreign wars between 1618 and 1648, claimed that he didn’t have the funds
to set up a national banking system.
·
Charles I of Great Britain, whose wars between
1625 and 1630 cost £6 million, decided he could not afford to create public
granaries for famine relief.
·
After Manchu raiders broke through the Great
Wall in 1629, the emperor’s drastic reductions in non-defense spending included
closure of one-third of all postal stations.
Parker suggests that these examples represent the tip of an
iceberg of societal needs that went unfilled in the 17th because rulers were
raising armies to grab or defend land.
La plus ça change,
as the French say: The more things change, the more they remain the same. The United States currently spends more than
$680 billion a year on the formal military budget, or about 19% of all federal
government spending and 28% of estimated tax revenue. That’s more than we spend
on education, highways and bridges, research, job creation, safety inspectors,
agencies such as the Center for Disease Control and the Federal Drug
Administration and all other discretionary goods and services. This enormous number—enough to build 340,000
new houses a year at $200,000 a pop or to cut the annual college tuition build
by $10,000 for about 6 million people—does not include what we spend to fight
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which for some reason Congress and the Bush
II Administration decided to keep out of budgetary and deficit
discussions.
By itself, the United States military budget accounts for
40% of global arms spending with a budget from 6-7 times that of China.
No wonder are roads are full of pot holes. No wonder federal
aid to higher education has been slashed. No wonder our space exploration
program is winding down instead of ratcheting up. No wonder there are more
outbreaks of food poisoning and food recalls, which safety inspections help to
prevent.
I’m not saying that we should do without military
expenditures, but I’m fairly confident that if we swore off hegemonic foreign
invasions, cut our nuclear force (which could destroy life as we know it on
Earth many times over), cut research on new military weapons and significantly
reduced our current armed forces, that we would be able to invest our tax
revenues in more productive means.
Of course the dirty little non-secret of a capitalist system
with few restraints on the market is that it needs war and military spending to
provide enough jobs. Of course, this
dirty little secret has its own dirty little secret, which is that we would not
harm a flourishing economy with a small military budget—but we would make a
tremendous shift in wealth from military suppliers to suppliers of alternative
energy and environmental protection equipment, social programs, highway
builders and engineers and other segments of the economy that do not have quote
as much lobbying clout as the military-industrial complex.