“I probably would have hit 40 each year.” Those are the words of the late, great Willie Mays. He was talking about the 80 home runs he believed he would have hit if service in the Army during the Korean War hadn’t deprived him of most of the two seasons following the one in which he won Rookie of the Year.
There’s an economic angle to what happened with Mays. As in his story is a useful rebuke to the popular view among economists that war stimulates economic growth. About this view, it would be difficult to find a more dangerous, at odds with reality belief than the one that says war brings with it a growth upside.
It’s rooted in the horrid notion that in powering consumption on armaments, ships, planes, along with the mass employment of humans, war stimulates consumption as government spends with abandon. Of course, lost on economists (including, sadly, “supply siders” of modern vintage) is that governments don’t extract resources from Mars, rather the spending power they redistribute comes from the people. All demand is an effect of production, and since governments produce nothing, the demand they “stimulate” is a function of reduced “demand” elsewhere. Only for the story to get sillier.
Underlying the dangerous notion that war lifts economic health is the idea that we can grow our economy by killing and maiming the people in enemy countries, and by extension, their economies. Translated, economists believe growth is borne of killing one’s best customers worldwide.
Only for the story to get even worse. Conservatives from the American Enterprise Institute (Yuval Levin and Edward Conard to name but two) have long promoted the fiction that the U.S.’s avoidance of the worst aspects of WWII set it up for soaring economic growth and dominance once the war ended, and much of the rest of the world was on its proverbial back. Such a horrifying view ignores that the only closed economy is the world economy, at which point the war that economists point to as having had a growth upside (WWII) can hopefully be seen for what it was: disastrous for the American economy precisely because our best customers were so impoverished, and worse, immobilized by death, maiming and wealth destruction in such a way that they couldn’t divide up work with us Americans, and in doing so, powerfully lifting the U.S. economy.
War by its very name signals economic contraction as wealth creation takes a back to seat to armaments creation meant to destroy wealth. And then war most of all signals tragic economic reversal as the people who drive all progress are removed from productive work to either kill, be killed, or aid in all the extinguishment of human capital.
Which brings us back to Mays. He wasn’t sent over to Korea. Instead, he played on a military team in Newport News, VA. So while he wasn’t put in harm’s way in the killing sense, it’s clear that the Army’s extraction of him from productive work for the military laid a wet blanket on the early years of his career, and arguably deprived him of the chance to break Babe Ruth’s home run record while he was a player.
Put bluntly, the removal of Mays from productive work didn’t deprive him of a baseball career, but it surely truncated it. This is important simply because economies aren’t blobs, they’re just individuals. Not only does war exterminate and maim individuals, it removes them from production, and frequently their most productive pursuits borne of specialization.
Extrapolate Mays over hundreds of thousands of men during WWI, II, Korea and others who, instead of producing, were removed from it. It’s just a reminder of how debased the economics profession has become. War is economic contraction. The fact that economists believe otherwise rebukes their profession like few fallacies do.
