www.csua.org/u/j9i -> economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/08/predictions-on-.html
headline from yesterday's news: Taxpayers Could Face $1 Trillion War Tab: Congressional Budget Office Publishes New Findings The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost American taxpayers $1 trillion, according to the most recent projections made by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Download Full CBO Report Let's go back and look at estimates of the war's cost from before it started. An email notes this video of a Jim Lehrer News Hour report from March 5, 2003, about two weeks before the March 20 invasion, showing William Nordhaus and others predicting the costs of the Iraq war. At the end of the video, Donald Kagan accuses Nordhaus of political bias even though Nordhaus presents a range of estimates based upon both optimistic and pessimistic outcomes. I assume Kagan was afraid that Norhaus's estimates for the pessimistic case might cause opposition to the invasion, hence the charge of political bias. Given the number of Kagans who argued for the war, the relationships can get confusing.
Looking back, Nordhaus, who took a lot of gruff over his estimates, doesn't get every detail correct but he's far more credible and accurate than anyone else interviewed in the report.
link to the entire segment in Real Video and Windows Media formats). Paul Solman: But Kagan, a Yale historian of ancient warfare, is skeptical of any economic analysis of war. Donald Kagan: It's remarkable to me how these very difficult and mathematical and very scientific observations and calculations almost always end up with a recommendation that accords with the political position that the economist had before he ever looked into the question. Nordhaus, who hasn't taken a position on it, bristles at the idea his results are political. William Nordhaus: I'll just tell you my own experience with this was that I started on it because I was kind of curious. I said, "Well, nobody's done an analysis of this," so I figured, well, let's give it a shot. I actually was very surprised at the answer, and the thing that most surprised me about doing this work was that the non-military side, the collateral costs, if you like, were so much bigger than the military cost. Paul Solman: Kagan's main problem, however, is not what Nordhaus does count, but what he doesn't; that economic analysis is simply too narrow to capture the larger costs and benefits of war. Honor can mean prestige, it can mean esteem, it can mean respect. The opposite of it is dishonor, and that's very important to remember -- humiliation, resentment. To my mind, these are the major forces in bringing about wars forever, as I have studied them. And that I think is one of the things that is a problem when you try to bring cost-benefit analysis, if all you mean by that is economic costs and economic benefits, because that's not what's in the minds of the folks who are making these decisions most of the time. Paul Solman: Professor Nordhaus, however, emphasizes that his was not a cost-benefit analysis. So when you look at your automobile, you look at the sticker and you say, "This is what it's going to cost me." Paul Solman: Think of the old gag, "An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." William Nordhaus: The way I usually think of it is "an economist is a scoundrel who tells you the way things really are rather than the way you'd like them to be."
estimating the cost estimating the cost of the war around that time. David Warsh notes: As it happened, a trio of University of Chicago economists also produced in 2003 an estimate of the costs of the war, which came to very different conclusions... Steven J Davis, Kevin M Murphy and Robert Topel of the Graduate School of Business circulated a working paper dated the day the battle began... "At first, it may seem surprising that war can lead to a huge improvement in human welfare. But, in fact, this conclusion is hard to escape so long as regime change even partly undoes the collapse in living standards under Saddam"... Last week the Chicagoans were back, with a revised and considerably expanded rewrite of their 2003 paper, presented by Davis to the NBER's Summer Institute. In his role as discussant, Yale's Nordhaus underscored the disparity. For his part, Davis took the discussion with good grace. The Chicagoans' paper, he explained, had been the result of conversations around the business school lunch table in the run-up to the war, resulting in ... It may be that, if an American president really wants to go to war, as did Bush, and if he is willing to exaggerate the threat of terrorism, then it will happen. never again can war begin with so flimsy an accounting of the expected cost of achieving its objectives... The words with which Nordhaus closed his 2002 discussion of the economic consequences of a war with Iraq suggest just how imaginative a before-the-fact analysis must be in the future if it is to be persuasive. "The cost of a war may turn out to be low, but the cost of a successful peace looks very steep. If American taxpayers decline to pay the bills for ensuring the long-term health of Iraq, America would leave behind mountains of rubble and mobs of angry people. As the world learned from the Carthaginian peace that settled World War I, the cost of a botched peace may be even higher than the price of a bloody war."
Predictions on the Cost of the War: Comments anne says... "At first, it may seem surprising that war can lead to a huge improvement in human welfare. But, in fact, this conclusion is hard to escape so long as regime change even partly undoes the collapse in living standards under Saddam" ... org/newsandpublications/press_releases/nearly- a-third-of-iraqis-need-immediate-emergency-help July 30, 2007 Eight Million Iraqis in Need of Urgent Aid Four million Iraqis - 15 percent - cannot buy enough to eat. More than two million people have been displaced inside Iraq. A further two million Iraqis have become refugees, mainly in Syria and Jordan.
If we ever faced the true costs of war, we would never have one. That is why the costs must be hidden, disguised, and refuted at every opportunity by those desiring one.
com/s/ap/20070802/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq Water taps run dry in Baghdad By STEVEN R HURST, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 4 minutes ago BAGHDAD - Much of the Iraqi capital was without running water Thursday and had been for at least 24 hours, compounding the urban misery in a war zone and the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer. Residents and city officials said large sections in the west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days because the already strained electricity grid cannot provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations. Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the US-led invasion. Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house has been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled. "We'll have to continue drinking it, because we don't have money to buy bottled water," he said. Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity "it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. We just don't have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing." Noah Miller, spokesman for the US reconstruction program in Baghdad, said that water treatment plants were working "as far as we know." If there's not enough pressure to cancel out that leakage, that's when the water could fail to reach the household," Miller said. He said that there had been a nationwide power blackout for a few hours Wednesday night that might be causi...
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