There is a long critique of economics that looks at the value-free way it totals product, expenditure and income. If I buy, it is expenditure, but if I do unpaid (make a cup of coffee, build a house or help a child grow up) it is economically invisible in most analyses.

More than this we buy “goods”, but lots of them are bads or indifferents for those consumers and perhaps for all consumers – foods, drugs, addictive goods and activities, damaging or dangerous products and activities which spoil relationships or lifestyles. They add to GDP, but really reduce our standard of living. It is not difficult to come up with a list comprising perhaps a fifth of all expenditure of things which are bad, or not good for, the people who buy them.Clearly, this is vastly important to real economics.

We look at, perhaps, the biggest failure of see straight of all value-free economics – the world military system. Let us look at its “value-free” size. Something like $1.7 trillion is directly spent on the military world-wide each year.

But, more than this, perhaps 10% of all government expenditure is gathered around security, espionage, defence, international tensions and the business related to the military. So, for example, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the Nuclear Research Agencies, etc are not in the US military budget, and other military budgets must be similarly understated around the world. If world GDP is £83 trillion and Government Expenditure Worldwide is 17%, this extra is $1.4 trillion.

Next we take into account the damage caused by wars and attacks in any year through killing, injury, damage to property, infrastructure, resources and other economic valuables. It is difficult even to guess this. During the World Wars it might have been as high as 20-30% as vast areas were destroyed and dragged back in economic development. Other periods have higher and lower levels of damage and destruction. If we bear in mind that killing a young person takes out perhaps a $1 million of work earnings, these calculations are vast. At a very conservative estimate we could say this figure is 3-5% of GDP.

There are other less tangible figures, like the trading and economic development loss vcaused by militarism and wars, the costs of military and war generation of CO2, perhaps 5% of all CO2 generation, but we exclude these. Overall the costs of these bads are some 6.5% of World GDP, or $5.4 trillion a year – more than the economies of the UK and India together each year.

World disarmament, getting rid of all these costs, and the chronic negative impacts on people’s lives and lands, would be the biggest conceivable benefit to the world economy. We could spend the economies of India and the UK on all kinds of good things. This shows the stupidity of militarism, banging our collective heads against exploding devices, and the eminently sensible route of multilateral world disarmament, MWD.

Of course, those who sell weapons want to hide this reality, so that we can continue attacking and frightening one another, but soon the victims will see through the crack in their visors and start shaking hands with their putative enemies, because spending $1.7 trillion annually on destruction, even if it adds to GDP, is dumb in any language.