[throw_away]

I don't know if I'm the chorus you're talking about, but they were both much shorter than the ones marked (gulf war 1: 90-91, korea: 50-53). If he shaded those boxes as well to the graph, I don't see it "ruining" his argument. The growth in those four years wasn't exactly spectacular. Very slightly up at best.

[TomOfTTB]

The U.S. was only in WWII from 41-45. It was only in WWI from 1917-1918.

Also saying "The war on terror" is kind of misleading since troop levels have varied greatly. To give one example the initial Afghan offensive only involved about 1,300 ground troops. As of 2003 that number was still only at 10,000 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/01/ap/government/main...)

That's around the same number we had in Somalia (5,300), the '89 Panama invasion (30,000) and several other conflicts. So the fact that the chart starts to level off as of 2001 while these other conflicts don't seem to have made an impact undermines the implied point

[randallsquared]

Also saying "The war on terror" is kind of misleading since troop levels have varied greatly.

Only if you believe the cause is troop levels. There are lots of things about a war that could be responsible for a correlation that are not directly correlated with number of troops deployed.

[TomOfTTB]

The author is contending that armed conflicts have an impact on the economy. I'm offering other conflicts with similar troop levels to disprove that theory. I'd be open to any other factors you think distinguishes the Afghan conflict from these other conflicts but just saying there could be other unnamed factors doesn't further the debate.

[throw_away]

Rereading the article, I don't think the author is claiming that at all. The wording of the original yc comment framed the question in terms of whether wars are good or bad or what constituted a war, etc., and that's how we followed, but all the author claims is that wars=inflation and that good dow years follow inflationary spikes.

I would imagine that the only reason why someone would posit this correlation would be to say something on how to view our current situation, and I think he's saying that we've had a bad 10 years (logarithmicly speaking), but once we're out of this war (by him, inflationary) period, things will be great.

I'm not sure if I buy this argument or its implications, but the omission of korea, panama, gulf war 1 and somalia and the inclusion of the GWoT don't "ruin" it for me, at very least.

[randallsquared]

Thing is, I don't necessarily buy the original authors assertion. It's just that there are lots of other things that could easily have an effect, such as investor mood, government spending tie-ins like growing debt (or debt ratio) and inflation, diversion of investor money from things with higher growth potential into things that have immediate profits, like Xe...

None of those necessarily have a great deal to do with troop strength, but they do all seem to correlate with (some) wars.

[qq66]

50-53 growth is as strong as the general trendline. 90-91 is too small to tell.