Anti-Climacus

LINK: Yglesias tries to beat the drum for Norman Angell again:

"It's important to distinguish Angell's normative thesis -- aggressive war is futile in the context of market economies -- from his descriptive one: therefore wars will not break out."*

Neither of which is especially true, unless you're of the belief that the only reason anyone ever fights a war is to attempt to gain resources*. And anyway, to try to avert a potential argumentative counterthrust, just as leaders sometimes hide their decisions behind moral rhetoric, doesn't it seem likely that leaders would hide some international outcomes behind arguments they were explicitly about economic or territorial or resource factors (particularly if those outcomes were losing efforts, and there was some ideological or moral or other factor the leader wished to preserve)?

*leaving aside the weirdness of the normative claim proceeding the descriptive one, this might also be wrong if it turns out to be the case (and it probably does) that economic actors in states will find other trading partners if they assume a war with a particular nation with which they trade is forthcoming

**It also, I think, gets undermined pretty quickly when one lets go of the assumption of complete information and unbounded rationality--even if there are optimal outcomes short of war it doesn't mean a. people will see them and b. people could see them, even if they knew they existed.