The Cost of War
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What is the main question surrounding the U.S. conflict with Iran?
Quick note before we start the show, we are doing an AMA. That's an Ask Me, I'm the proverbial me in this, Ask Me Anything on the Search Engine subreddit. This is going to be Friday, April 24th at noon Eastern. Don't feel like you have to ask me anything. It's more like we've done a bunch of recent episodes that people have emailed a lot of questions about. There was our big series on driverless cars. There was our episode about GLP-1s. There was our episode about Anthropic, the company behind Quad. And these are just things that generated a lot of questions from people. And we wanted to say, if there's something that we've published recently that you wanted to know more about, or if you wanted to know why we did something or how we did something, or even if you just have general questions about how the show works, we're doing an Ask Me Anything.
I guess, yeah, anything. Anything you want. Again, April 24th, Friday. This will be in the Search Engine Podcast subreddit at noon Eastern time.
Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. I think almost any other time in American history, this would be a very naive thing for me to admit out loud. But genuinely, if you were to ask me, PJ, explain why the United States is currently at war with Iran, I would have to answer, I don't know. I do read the newspapers, so I know Trump said he wanted to hit Iran's nuclear program. I know Netanyahu was pushing for strikes. I also know that after quickly deposing Maduro in Venezuela, Trump seemed to walk away with the belief that regime change was just something you could do conveniently from home. Door dash, but with armed drones. But like, what is the case for the Iran strikes other than they're emotionally satisfying for the president?
What is the argument for why this is in the national interest? I genuinely don't know. I'm not alone. Two-thirds of Americans polled by CBS, YouGov said they don't understand the reason for our current war. They don't get it. Like, it's a too challenging David Lynch movie. The most disturbing possibility might be that there just is no underlying reason, that this is confusing because it actually doesn't make sense. But if the benefits of the war don't add up, the one thing we should still be able to understand are the costs. Obviously, war has an incalculable moral cost. The deaths of civilians, the deaths of soldiers, the cost to America's moral standing in the world. But that's not the part I wanted to understand this week.
I wanted to understand something much more literal. The price tag. So this week, Search Engine called someone who actually tries to put prices on American conflicts. So first off, can you just say your name and what you do?
My name is Linda Bilnes, and I am the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Chair in Public Policy and Public Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School.
And when you're at Thanksgiving and people ask you what you think about all day, like, what do you say?
Well, I spend my time thinking about how society allocates resources. I think about the roads in Fitchburg, I think about the composting in Somerville, and I also think about how we spend money on wars. I've been obsessed with the cost of war since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. And as I studied this for years and years and years, I mean, I've seen this real disconnect between the fact that we're talking about billions and even trillions of dollars on costs of war when we're talking about $6 for after-school basketball in a local community. I mean, it is this enormous disparity, and I think that partly because of the fact that the words millions, billions, and trillions rhymes in English, we don't even really fully grasp the scale of the spending on wars.
And trillions are order of magnitude bigger than billions. I always tell my students, like, a billion seconds ago is like you know, in the 90s when The Lion King came out, and trillions is woolly mammoth era. You know, you're talking about a long time ago.
So Professor Bilmes is saying part of the issue here is that we're just bad at imagining a trillion.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main question surrounding the U.S. conflict with Iran?
0:00–11:58
2
How does the government obscure the costs of war?
11:58–18:11
3
What insights does Professor Bilmes provide about war spending?
18:11–37:15
4
How are the costs of the current Iran conflict being calculated?
37:15–49:23