[gozur88]

The author of this article is both dishonest and hopelessly naive. He's redefined war to mean "conquest" and "winning" to mean "come out ahead financially", which isn't always or even usually the point of war.

And even if it was he's still wrong. Land itself has value, and with sufficient brutality you can still "win". The fact that we haven't seen a war like that since 1945 in the developed world doesn't mean it's not going to happen again. Hitler planned to basically kill everyone to the east of Germany and replace them with Germans. That would have been "winning" by any definition of the word.

[tpeo]

It certainly didn't come across like that to me, because to me as if he was talking about the economic spoils of war, not the financial spoils of war. And mind you, these are different things. So long as a group is able to fulfill it's strategic objectives in a conflict while acting in consistence with well-behaved preferences, that's not merely a "victory" by some other arbitrary definition but is in fact an economic victory. Any action which leads an agent to a state closer to his preferred state is an economic victory.

If he meant only that war currently has no financial value, I don't see why he'd make references to Assyria or Rome. Because whatever value those peoples derived from conflict wasn't most likely in increased treasuries, but instead in the extension of land and in the number of subjects, which in itself can be very valuable things to warlike societies as it improves their ability to wage war, either by increasing the defensibility and depth of their borders or by making them able sustain larger armies.

I've might have read him more generally than he meant, though. But still, I don't see the need for such a specific reading.

[gozur88]

>Any action which leads an agent to a state closer to his preferred state is an economic victory.

I find that construction odd. Are you trying to say all goals of war are ultimately economic? If so I think that's needlessly restrictive.

>Because whatever value those peoples derived from conflict wasn't most likely in increased treasuries, but instead in the extension of land and in the number of subjects...

I know next to nothing about Assyria, but the Roman treasury profited quite handsomely from conquest, to the point that in the Republic's most expansive period you only had to work two days a year as a Roman citizen to pay your taxes.

Because when the Romans conquered a people they took everything that wasn't nailed down, sold the land, sold the rights to collect taxes in that area, and then sold people themselves.

[tpeo]

What I meant is that "economic" phenomena encompass a much wider range of phenomena you might be thinking of. It's the opposite of being restrictive: any problem at all where have something like an agent which has to choose something over something else might be considered an "economic" problem, at least from an economist's perspective. If anything like a ranking of choices can be defined as well as a set of possible choices, that's something an economist can work with.

About the Roman bit, the real issue would be how much of any direct monetary gain from conquest ended up in the hands of the Roman state rather than in the hands of private citizens.