[diggernet]

But a lot of the catastrophe cost is just "shuffling".

Eg pay $1,000,000 in construction worker salaries, the money is moved from taxpayers to workers. Then the workers spend the money. What was lost?

The comment about alternative work still applies, but much of the money is still recycled back into the domestic economy.

So it's not a trillion simply lost.

All in all, I think the comparison to war is very apt.

[graeme]

Real resources go into the building of those buildings though. You could have built other things, but instead you must rebuild new york.

Whereas, soldiers probably weren't doing much economically productive in the first place. And as long as there is spare capacity in the labour force, moving people from "unemployed" to "soldier" isn't a massive misallocation of resources.

It's not nothing - taxpayers could habe spent the money better had they kept it. But it's not the same as if you levelled a city.

Further, the vast bulk of costs associated with the iraq war are interest on debt. That is really just shuffling money around. Especially if the debt is held by americans.

Money is just a unit of exchange. It isn't synonymous with wealth itself. Climate change will actually directly destroy wealth: it will level capital stock, it will lower crop yields, etc.

This is very different from movements of money back and forth that leave the physical economy untouched.

Iraq suffered destruction of capital during the Iraq war. Not sure if a dollar figure was attached to it, but that would be a more comparable situation.

Iraq's economy is $200 billion per year. I'm guessing the dollar loss to them was much less than 2.4 trillion. And yet I'm sure the real hardship caused by capital loss is greater than americans feel from their financial loss - even if you account for population size differences.