On 4/26/05, Keith Henson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 07:53 PM 26/04/05 -0400, Maru wrote:
snip
> >US- just about any war. See the Civil War. Was the enthusiasm on > >both sides for a blood bath a result of disastrous, prolonged > >depression? > > That one I have researched. The south was anticipating an economic > disaster because it was clear that one way or another slavery was going to > go. Directly or indirectly slavery was a large factor in the income of the > white population in the south. The war didn't do that much damage to the > south, but the economy took better than 100 years to recover from the loss > of slaves and it could be said it never has.
Really? I had always been told that it was the brutality of war, destruction of land, evsiceration of finances, loss of life etc which caused the South's malaise. That and backward gov.'t policy. Huh. Learn something everyday.
I should have taken notes as to where I got this, but according to a study, the main damage was to small farms from lack of maintenance during the time so many of the men were off fighting. That could be repaired and mostly was. The problem was a serious labor shortage for high labor crops because the blacks withdrew a high fraction of their labor from the market. In many ways this could be expected since when they became small households far more labor was required for things like cooking compared to being fed in mass by specialists.
> Of course the evolutionary *point* of wars was to kill a lot of the > population to get it back into ecological balance. Wars in the last > century or so don't hold a patch on biblical wars where they killed all the > loosers except the young virgins (and sometimes even them). > > >What about the French Revolution? Historians agree that at the time, > >everybody, peasants included, were doing economically better than > >previously (Although it is true the vast bulk of gains were going to > >the upper classes. But the lower people did gain). What unleashed the > >Terror? Not the expectation of a deep depression. > > I have not looked into the details of the run up in that instance. Perhaps > someone on this news group can suggest some pointers? The number to plot > would be projected income per capita. A sharp drop after an extended run > up is perhaps the most likely to set off social disruptions.
I got that from Crane Brinton's 'Anatomy of Revolution' if that helps at all.
Will take a look, but this kind of research really requires armies of historians, particularly those in cleometrics.
> If the economic growth (particularly in food) is below the population > growth, a country is headed for trouble. You already knew that. It is > instructive that some 30 years before the steam went out of the IRA, the > Irish birth rate dropped by almost half to near replacement. After a long > delay, economic growth got ahead of population growth and support for the > IRA dwindled.
And equally instructive that the crime rate in New York City dropped 20-30 years after Roe vs Wade.
Yep.
> I really don't know if war is the norm and it is inhibited by opportunity > to do other things, or if war is the exceptional case when a population is > under stress.
I, and most here would like to believe the latter. I think that the relative peacability of First world nations is suggestive evidence, anyways.
It could be that the human behavioral switch involved has no more preferred state than a light switch. If so, people who want peace should look into the future and seek ways to keep income per capita from falling. Those who want wars should oppose birth control, but then you knew that.
BTW, a prediction I have not checked out is that there would have been far fewer wars than average in Europe in the decades following the Black Death.
Keith Henson
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