You forget Jed that WWII was not a stimulus to the rest of the world
and we gained only because we sold the items that were destroyed for
gold. After WWII we were the only country that could manufacture much
of anything for a long time. I don't think the approach you suggest
would work now.
Ed
On Feb 26, 2009, at 4:51 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Rick Monteverde wrote:
I just correctly pointed out that environmental monitoring, good or
otherwise, is a great example of NOT-STIMULUS . . .
This is a different issue entirely. According to Keynsians, spending
money for any purpose is a stimulus. I wouldn't know about that. I
know practically nothing about economics, so perhaps you are right.
But I note that spending on WWII was the largest economic stimulus
in history, and every dollar of that was wasted. Deliberately
wasted: it was used to drop bombs and fire off shells, and to build
thousands of warships that were scrapped soon after the fighting
ended.
If we are going to spend money it is better to spend it on things we
need such as volcano monitoring. But based on the experience of
World War II we might get an economic stimulus by absurd economic
waste such as digging holes and filling them in. It worked even in
the extreme case in which we dug holes and filled them in with
hundreds of thousands of our dead soldiers.
- Jed
