We, the people of the world, can make peace. You, superpowers, have run the military show for a century – doing World Wars, Cold Wars, death and destruction everywhere. You have had your turn and it does not work. Move over.

We see through winning wars, threats, scares, massive destruction, new weapons, fear and needing enemies. We back friendship, law, proper democracy and peace. You promise peace with nuclear weapons. You arm dictators and we lose democracy. You waste 5% of the world economy on weapons and war. You push up world CO2 by 5%. We cannot afford you any more. Your way is crap. We quite like other countries, see human life as sacred, and know the way of war does not work.

We are determined democratically – if necessarily against governments, dictators, the militaries and arms firms – to take the world to peace. We show this by having at least four billion people agree to it, across the world. Then, we require governments to disarm, 20% a year for five years, fully policed, rooting out avoiders, until this silly military machine is eradicated from the earth. As citizens have no arms within most states, so multilaterally we fully disarm. Disarming is easier than the arming. It is cheaper, does not destroy, builds trust, ends poverty and refugees and frees up science, technology  and fifty million soldiers. So, we do it across the world through the UN.

We will love supposed enemies, co-operate, and save the planet from the way of death you have charted for us. Making peace costs nothing. Loving one another is a good deal, and the planet needs this blessing. We will disarm the world in five years.

I vote for this as one person of peace.

TALKING UP is a vast cultural move. Lots of people do it and believe in it. That is understandable because advertising is the biggest cultural force on the planet, apart from Christianity, and it is still growing. We are taught to believe in things – toothpaste, cars, shoes, baths and chairs because they are all talked up and pictured up. The picturing is part of the picture – bright colours, exotic, fast moving, tapping “iconic” (that dreadful word as it is now used. Icon painters mean it) and zooming in and zooming out. So, everything is talked up and pictured up.

But, of course, persons are talked up, or more accurately, “personalities” are. We are talking (up) game show hosts, sportspeople, pundits, business-people, politicians and they become “celebrities”. You may blank celebrities and not know the Cardigans. Celebrities are normally a waste of time listening to, because the focus is on them. The idea that billions are spent promoting these cretins around the world shows how big the problem is.

Third, enterprises are talked up. There is corporate advertising which makes every company the best thing since sliced bread. Companies fly you there, give you the best car, make you a personality, make you a success, make you beautiful (Stay with that and understand the self-contradiction), make you relax, keep your family together and give you a cosmic experience. You are so used to being offered all these ultimates, that you no longer analyse them. But stop. “You give me this toothpaste which gives me the girl/bloke who will make my life ecstatic.” There are a few non-sequiturs in that presentation.  Everything is talked up.

So much so, that it is part of the system, the vast capitalist system. You borrow to make money. Note the phrase “make money”. Now I am an economist. The Government used to print notes. Now banks create electronic money. They lend to people – we are talking trillions, and they do things which they hope will make them more money, and the vast edifice grows. Of course, people still grow, make things and serve one another; that is the real part of the system, but alongside that is the West Ham syndrome. We’re for ever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air. Making money is talked up all over the place. And then West Ham loses. It might as well be East Ham. Not that West Ham is out to make money. They are just trying to score goals. But our economic bubbles are vast and we face four big pins – Covid 19, Global Warming, World Population and World Destabilisation.  

Here, we take time out to consider Boris, or Donald, and politicians talking things up. Boris talks things up all the time. “This great nation of ours, Make Britain Great Again. We will go forward. A New Dawn. We lead the world. Our magnificent this or that. Brexit is the great leap forward and so on.” Now we need to be slightly canny. Boris does not necessarily believe what he says. It is a useful form of self-promotion. It makes people feel good and therefore vote for him.  We talk about a post-truth society, but so far it has worked. Boris will get Brexit done and it is nearly done. We will bounce back from Covid 19, and the ball has nearly left the ground. People in the North have been promised a new economy and are still waiting. So, politicians talking things up works. People like Boris, even when he locks himself in a fridge or wrecks the constitution. People feel good about talking things up, because it is what the culture does.

Trump is the same. He will make America Great Again. What is great? Is it starting wars, having the greatest Government debt ever, policemen killing blacks, shitting on other states and using up the earth’s resources? Nobody cares as long as we feel good. He even goes for the big one. He is chosen by God. All negativity is banished in a universal peon of praise for the great Trump and all the wonderful things he has done for America. So, both Boris and Trump ride the wave of poor performances on the pandemic, killing thousands, talking it up with their arms spread waiting for the promotional photo. We are on top of this. We have this, or that solution – injecting bleach. I will lead you out of this. We Brits or Americans do not need masks.  

So, in the greater scheme of things talking it up has won, while good people are demoted. It governs in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in different forms in Russia, Turkey, Brazil and other parts of the world. The politics of talking it up has won and the self-promoters are in charge, just as they are losing.

Boris is losing. Are we going to have a “great national economy” when a quarter of our business is overseas owned, the financial centre of London is under challenge, we face unaddressed crises in personal credit, government debt, trade and poverty and Brexit will founder? Trade deals will grind. Businesses will close down. Subsidies will dry up and recession will grip. “We will do whatever it takes”, the Chancellor’s talk it up moniker, will go down the plughole of events. Boris will be merely sounding off, empty, talked up.

Trump is worse even than this He is not just losing, but he is losing it. He talks up his handling of Covid while millions are infected, Government debt mounts, the unsustainability of the US economy becomes evident, racial injustice festers and the US loses international friends and allies and while states begin to desert the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. He is standing on the people he has sacked and he might not accept the election result. So, the whole world has to face the end of talking it up. How do we do that.?

Maybe Shakespeare and God can help. Shakespeare does tragedies and this is the normal stuff of Tragedies. Pride, self-belief, delusions of greatness founder because the self-belief is false and because pride produces wrongs and evil. Even Macbeth knows vaulting ambition to kill the King will o’erleap and fall on the other side. Trump saw off Clinton. Johnson saw off May, but then the judgment. So, this is no new problem.

But still we all have to face this vast talking it up culture and system. It inhabits most of us and it is big. Jesus alone charts the way. It is a return to a truth society where your “yes is yes and your no is no. It is Jesus before Pilate explaining that his politics was a politics of truth rather than power, and it is a regrasping of the Beatitude, the source of blessing, found in the promise, “Blessed are the meek for they stall inherit the earth” How so? If we do not grasp, demand, self-promote, talk it up, then we can inherit the earth, all inherit the earth with enough, all be blessed without fighting, calamity and vast disasters. It hangs on the word, meek. But this turnaround, out of expansive demands and talking it up into meekness, humility and truthfulness is a vast spiritual transformation in world culture. The 2.3 billion Christians must see it, and the rest of us too. Some, incorrigible, will be hung out to dry. We all will have to talk it down. The muffled warners and prophets can be heard, and the blusterers may listen. Talking it up is ending, badly or well and, as Jesus insists to all of us, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.”   

We call ourselves Great and see much of our history as glorious, but this rethinking of slavery and colonialism may cast us in a very different light. Perhaps, even, the United Kingdom needs to repent before God of its national arrogance on a global scale. We have been, and are, one of the world’s biggest problems, even while we congratulate ourselves on civilising and leading the world. “Oh, that’s a bit extreme” you say, but come on a bit of the journey I’ve had to go over the last few months.

I’m a PhD economist, am supposed to be able to think and am prepared to be nonconformist, but only now, with the help of my dear friend, Jay Bhattachajee, have I thought properly about the Indian economy, and discover I am an unthinking smug British nationalist.

I love India and Indians. It is a rich culture and the immigrant community have added to British culture in all kinds of ways. But India is poor, with a vast population to feed and look after, and it seems less successful than the other world mass population country, China. It has a per capita GDP less than half that of China. Global warming with sea rise, food, water and other problems will hit it hard. It is a struggling economy.

Great Britain, of course, had an early industrial revolution, led in world trade and brought democracy and modern economics to India, but still that did not help much in development, and there are various theories in development economics as to why Indian development has been slow. Tacitly, the understanding is that without us, Brits, its development has not been as fast as it could have been.

Of course, recently, we have faced the challenge that  much British industrialisation was based on slave wealth. Getting the slave labour of millions free gave us wealth to develop. But slavery was Africa, North and Central America and not India… And then I read this.

“Eminent Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938. However, it is estimated that if India had remained free with 24% of world GDP as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been $232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950). Deprivation kills and it is estimated that 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British (1757-1947). The deadly impact of British occupation of India lingers today 71 years after Independence, with 4 million people dying avoidably from deprivation each year in capitalist India as compared to zero (0) in China.”

Now you assess conclusions like this. First, $45 trillion is big – some 15 years of total Indian and UK GDP – they now have similar total GDPs. Second, the long-term trajectory figure is conjectural, but the flat growth rate during the East India Company era and the Empire needs explaining. The Brits did not seem to do much good. But then the realities stack up. India’s share of global industrial output declined from 25% in 1750 down to 2% in 1900. We deindustrialised them so that they would buy our stuff. It was worse than that. British goods came in without tariffs and Indian manufactures faced heavy taxes; the system was stacked against them. Then, of course, we fixed the cotton market; cheap cotton went to Lancashire and cotton manufactures back to India. We kept Indians in villages. There were a few million who were looking after the rather leisured Brits. There would be little interest in rural or local industrial development. So probably the conclusion is substantially true. Of course, we built the railways, probably with a lot of local help, as the Romans built roads in Britain, to help run the empire, but we must have cost the Indian economy dearly. $232 trillion is too big to think. But what about the underlying reality?

I, of course, like all of us Brits, have an underlying model that British colonialism was benign bringing civilisation and democracy to the world. Now I’ve seen through most of the democracy bit. In Africa we ruled by force, trained native armies, gave colonies independence, sold them arms and soon military dictators were in place. “Democracy” was for the fairies. “Democracy” in India has stayed, but the economy was probably a “servant economy”. They did what we told them. They grew Yorkshire tea. They grew opium to sell to the Chinese. They produced saltpetre for gunpowder and a range of English luxuries. All of the developments which would probably have occurred without a colonial power were ruled out. Control was patronizing. We “gave them” the English language and they did what suited the colonial power, on the East India Company model. So, this conclusion is more than plausible. Of course, I have not even read the book and it is a big topic, but the evidence points one way..

So the conclusion that we were good for the world, good for India, Africa, China, the Middle East, the great benign British white self-congratulation, faces a massive and necessary challenge. We probably robbed India on a scale we cannot easily face. Of course, the picture is mixed, and perhaps the missionary movements, learning the local languages, building hospitals and schools and teaching the ways of Christ did real good, often against the Colonialists, but that is another debate. The main point is that British imperialism, fuelled by Public School arrogance and the elitism of people like Churchill, the “greatest Britain”, is up for deep judgment. We have been, in a full economic sense, a liability, a drain on the world economy for much of our modern history. Remorse does not come quickly. It needs to grow and requires humiliation. Dropping “Send Her Victorious” from the national anthem would be a start. But remorse and repentance, as deep as that of Germany, may be needed if we are not to be hollow, but healed.

Sometimes War Costs are calculated by trying to add up figures of national income but they rarely see the full picture, because the real changes are so complex. A big danger is that GDP figures might make an American person’s income twenty times more important than an African person’s, which would obviously be false. This study uses a number of important economic indicators – economic disruption, working years, deaths and injuries, property destruction and market failure to guesstimate the overall costs. All assessments need sober judgements and will be approximate but they give us some idea of the full costs of war, something that is actually not much considered. The topic is far bigger than this study. We have estimates of the cost to the US of its Middle East Wars of $6 trillion or more, but no-one to my knowledge has attempted to estimate the cost to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc of the wars they have had visited on them. The real costs are almost impossible to value. So here is an attempt to weigh the WW2 costs through these intermediaries

ECONOMIC DISRUPTION.

The Second World War lasted six years, though states entered and left it at different times. But six years of disruption is quite a reasonable figure. The USSR and the US were preparing long before they entered and for a year or two afterwards several countries were completely stunned by the destruction. Japan was attacking China from 1937. Assessing disruption is difficult. Many people work and produce mainly to live, but for a long time trade, housing, property, towns, cities, arts, education, culture, sport, holidays, clothes, furniture, literature, much media and other areas of normal life partly mainly shut down through War. There are two caveats. First the United States was less dominated by the War than the main other belligerents, and it depends on whether you focus on population or GDP as to the weight you give it. I prefer population. Second, South America and Africa (away from North Africa) were possibly les affected by the War initially.  Moreover, the big recession in world trade had started with the Great Depression, so the cutting of trade was not a simple consequence either. The public figures on this are not very helpful either. They are poorly collected in most countries. Many would feel their lives were on hold for much of the War. Others would get on with life in the circumstances, doing different things.

The guesstimate here, taking into account the things that ceased, the diversion of resources to the War, the things that were not possible because of War and the closing down of economic and wider activities that went on, is that 60% of the normal economies of the world were disrupted for six years. This figure is chosen because of the vast areas of ordinary life which were closed down, the populations of the USSR and eastern Europe, China, India and East Asia who were made homeless, on the move, facing fairly total disruption, famine and forced labour, weighed against the areas where disruption was smaller. Notice, disruption is what it says, the things that cannot happen because of war. For what it is worth, that comes out at 3.6 years of world economic life lost.

WORKING YEARS.

Another line of approach is to consider the work and labour loss during and after the war.  Of course, the real loss, inestimable in value was the loss of persons, but we are undertaking to sift out economic impacts.  It was not just the immediate loss of labour in the War, devastating though that was. Through deaths and other processes it affected the world economy for over a quarter of a century. Two countries were especially affected – the USSR and China – something not really understood in the West. . The USSR lost at least 25 million of mainly young people and China 8-14 million. So, let us categorize the main areas of loss. Obviously, these are crude estimates, but in each case, there are reasons to suspect they are underestimates.

First, troops were fighting during the War rather than doing normal sustenance work.  In different countries there were some 70 -80 million troops serving for different periods between 1939 and 1945 when each state joined and ended the War. We take a five-year average. We estimate this at 350 million troop years of diverted labour (5 times 70m). Because they were diverted from learning other skills than killing people which they had to pick up later, we add another 20 million years. They were usually young workers entering the work training period. This gives 370 million overall, and this is additional to the disruption, though linked to it, because it was usually other states troops who caused national disruption. This was an absence of work which often women and the old tried to remedy.

They were backed up by those helping the War Effort, or those on the Home Front as it was sometimes called.  Those involved in the “war effort” – weapons, troop equipment, admin, transport – rather than the ordinary business of living are difficult to estimate. In Britain a third (13m) of the civilian population (40m) was engaged in war work in 1944. Other countries would probably be more labour intensive and Britain was fighting in North Africa and Italy between Dunkirk and D Day.  This was about three per member of the armed forces. Assume worldwide war effort workers at three per fighting person, and it amounts to 210m times 5 or 1, 050 million years. Another tranche of work surrounds perhaps 30 million worldwide who were working for, say, two years on average before the war on weapons and other war related work. In Germany and the USSR it was going on from 1933 on a considerable scale, similarly in Japan, and the Spanish Civil War was seen as a testing ground for munitions and bombing. Add in Britain, France, Italy and other countries preparing, and we have a further 60 million years of war work, probably an underestimate.   

In total this is roughly 1,480 million years. The world population at the time was 2.3 billion. The world population-employment ratio is usually something under a half, but that tends to be paid employment and possibly more were “subsistence” employed. So, it seems reasonable to take 60% employment as reasonable. This means an additional economic loss of over a year’s world-wide economic activity.  

DEATHS AND INJURIES.

Deaths. There were 70-80 million war-related deaths in WW2. Most of the armed forces who died and those in Concentration Camps and other massacres were young. It seems reasonable to conclude that 70 million times 20 years of later working life was snuffed out by the loss of these people. Obviously, the age distribution around the world was distorted by this missing generation, and 20 years seems a reasonable, or under, approximation of the work loss. This comes out at a further 1,400 million work years. Given parents and teachers had invested their time in bringing up these usually young people, a token 70 million times 2 years is added on. It could easily be three or more. This gives the total loss of work before and after the war through deaths at 1,540 million years. We take this at another year’s work loss of economic activity.

Those injured amount to some 25 million. The range of injuries vary greatly, but many of them were debilitating in terms of work and cost the work of others in care and medical support. If we guesstimated four years of work loss for each of them it would be almost insulting, but that we do. That is a further 100 million work years. In addition, there were those suffering trauma. It was different from the “Shell shock” of WW1, but the traumas of Concentration Camps, bombing, invasion and war slave labour were deep and especially in the USSR and China were almost incalculable. We call it PTSD now and recognize the costs more. We even understand secondary PTSD as a further cost. Again, we guesstimate a two year work and healthy living loss for a hundred million people, a further 200 million work years. This amounts to, say 20% of a world economic year. This is 1.2 years of economic destruction through death, injury and trauma, actually spread over the next twenty or thirty years.

THE DESTRUCTION AND DAMAGE.

Thus far, we have not calculated the damage and destruction caused by the War. It was, of course, the first great bombing war.  Bombs of all types were used systematically to destroy ships, railways, roads, bridges, dams, factories, ports, cities and towns. The scale of this destruction varied from country to country and with the state of the War. London was bombed and Dresden was bombed, but so too were Stalingrad, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Milan, Turin, most Polish, Soviet, Chinese, Japanese and many other cities. Britain dropped about 1.3 million tons of bombs and the US one and a half million tons. Germany, the USSR and Japan also bombed heavily and the explosions destroyed efficiently. They were aimed at high value targets. In the case of Japan and many German cities where wood was used extensively burning multiplied the effect. Then, of course, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. France which experienced moderate destruction –  a description which is almost obscene – estimates its destruction at three years of GDP. That is, it would take three years of economic activity in the whole economy, aside eating and a few essentials, to restore all that was destroyed to full working order. In some locations old buildings were lovingly restored, while in others, like Rotterdam, a new conception of city centre was developed. For example, the cost of rebuilding cities, towns, factories, roads, infrastructure in the devastated countries is nearly inestimable. Workers slaved to recreate the pre-war housing stock for decades. I remember having seen the poor quality of some Eastern European housing decades later and judging that this was “Communist” housing, but then realising with shame exactly the challenge of building housing for a vast population without Marshall Aid to survive east European winters after the devastation in 1945. The destruction was epic. Perhaps the three year GDP guess will do for the overall impact of war damage. In the USSR, Poland, China, Japan, Germany and elsewhere it was far more. Areas which were really hit faced an awesome task which was one of the taken-for-granted but most outstanding achievements of the late 40s and 50s.  So, the further waste was to throw away three years of the world economy in destruction of infrastructure, housing, cities and factories. It is notable that the United States, the one major country to avoid this kind of destruction, suddenly jumped in 1945 to being half of the total world economy in terms of GDP, and its wealth was suddenly unrivalled.

MARKETS, TRADE, GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY.

The business of economics – markets, trade, sea transport, distribution, the efficiency of tools, logistics, trust in trading relations and many other factors are deeply damaged by War. Obviously, a lot of merchant shipping was sunk. Other bulk transport systems required months or years of work. Harvesting, storing, moving, refrigerating food was difficult and rationing was practiced through beyond 1950.  International trade was depressed. Marshall Aid was only introduced in 1948, three years after the end of the War because trade was so stifled, and the USSR was excluded from it in an act of spitefulness against the state that had done most to defeat Hitler. The organisation of government in economic life was destroyed in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, China (which then had a destructive Civil War), Japan and many other states. For a number of years external control operated until national governments were able to reform. It seems reasonable to assess this as another year of world economic loss.

FIRST COUNT THE COST.

There were other costs to war. The activity of War, although among the Allies it was bent to destroying Fascism, was destructive, as all war  activity is destructive.  Even Churchill said the War could have been prevented as late as 1935-6 and certainly it could have been prevented at the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference if the Hoover proposals had been accepted by Britain. But instead we entered the great War waste. Here the estimate is that WW2 cost 9.8 years of the world’s full economic activity, nearly four years longer than the duration of the War itself, a tenth of the century. The generation of the blighted years has died or is dying. They knew something of the waste directly. Seeing it at a distance is more difficult, and this figure merely conveys something of what it was. Understanding how to end war is necessary, for we have long been building towards another big one. Count the cost. The words of Jesus warn us.