Political economy and old calamities: the will to ignore the cost of life in wars, famines and epidemies

Now that we are facing the global Covid pandemic, perhaps the most mortal event involving multiple nations since the World War II, I remembered some books that I had read on the political economy and its relationship to ignore the distribution costs of mankind's biggest calamities.

One such book is Amartya Sen's "Development as Freedom" (1999). Amartya Sen develops his framework that human rights are important both as an end result (developed nations have higher levels of human development), but also as part of the process (human societies gain welfare from deciding their projects collectively in peace, reason and in democracy, giving every individual and group the right to participate). Sen also summarizes his research on famines as a tragedy of political will. His analysis finds that in modern times no democratic country (no matter how poor) ever suffered a large loss of human life as a result of an agricultural disaster or a famine, because democratic countries always find a way to import some food resources from abroad and redistribute such resources in a way to prevent a large fatality from famine. However, dictatorships and countries riddled by ethnic conflicts often show a lack of compassion towards the poor and the groups affected by famine, therefore allowing the disaster to take its full toll due to a lack of political will. I remember well reading this book when I was 19. Freedom and human rights must be seen as a process of expanding the opportunities and possibilities of individual and collective lives.

Of course, the most clear example of politicians' will to let a large loss of human life happen is their willingness to go to start large military conflicts. This was more common in agricultural societies fighting for limited soil. The Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage represented a conflict with such a large number of military and civillian casualties that it probably surpassed the impact of World War I and II in terms of the population of the time. The leaders of those ancient societies were quite willing to risk everything and fight until the end to win the conflict.

An example of such a disaster was World War II. Just a few years ago, I read Richard Evans' "The Third Reich at War" (2008). The book has a large amount of detail about the military operations in World War II and their cost for the economy. I was surprised to see in the book a lot of evidence that German strategists always knew that the outcome of the war would probably be an astounding defeat for Germany. Germany's war was pushing a great deal more of sacrifice on its population that the suffering in the UK and USA. Several military commanders warned Hitler that the industrial might of the UK and its Empire was much larger than Germany's and they would lose the war over time once the UK and its Allies would transform their manufacturing from peacetime civillian needs to war purposes. Germany had a head start because they specialized in the war economy a few years earlier, but that head start would be lost after 3 years and then the UK - even without the USA as an ally - would slowly win the conflict out of sheer manufacturing power. The same could be said of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union started the war with worse technology and organization leadership, in great part due to the incompetence of Stalin, but it could override Germany in a prolongued war, due to its greater resources and industrial capacity, especially once Hitler's forces were unable to reach and control the Caucasus' oil reserves.

I was even more surprised that this evidence was so obvious that it was behind the lack of international support for Germany from some of its "ideological" allies, such as fascist Spain. Phone tapes' evidence reveals that fascist dictator Franco resolutely communicated to Hitler that he was unwilling to declare war on the UK. His reasoning was that the UK was far from being defeated and would eventually win the war, even after the German successes in France and the Soviet Union, due to the UK's larger industrial capacity. Franco was even farsighted enough to tell Hitler and his strategists that they would lose the conflict, even if they managed to invade the British Isles, since the UK would simply persist on the war using Canada as a base. These were conversations between Spain and Germany before the USA joined the war and revealed that even for a fascist ally the war was seen as a losing project.

Fortunately, the current democracies and even some authoritarian regimes are reacting more positively towards the loss of life implied by the Covid pandemic. Several commentators have observed that countries with a female leader as president or chancellor/prime minister, such as Finland, New Zealand, Taiwan or Germany, reacted earlier and with more respect towards the loss of life from the pandemic. Again, as observed in Amartya Sen but also in other thinkers such as Harvard's psychologist Steven Pinker, this leads us to the great value induced by mutigroup, multiethnic plus female participation in society and leadership, since female and multigroup participation in decisions leads to more conservative positions and life preserving outcomes.

It is still a sanitary war going on... And perhaps, due to the rise of China as a second world power, there is also the menace of the "Thucydides' Trap" in which a change in the roles of the first and second world powers can lead to conflict. I am confident, however, that the 21st century's multinational institutions can avoid this disastrous outcome.