[justin66]

It's not obvious that the same or greater government spending on R&D would not have happened without the cold war.

In an alternate history where government spent the same percentage of GDP without a cold war (not a huge stretch, I think, since no cold war means no red scare and presumably some higher level of survival for the political left) the amount spent on research would presumably be a lot larger.

People love to look on the bright side of military spending but it's often a case of the broken glass fallacy. You spend a lot of money either destroying property or, at best, building stuff you hope very much will sit around unused. The economic activity that looks great often has an opportunity cost.

[Zigurd]

That's true, but at least it didn't ALL go to waste. "Star Wars" provided some engineers with interesting experience.

Homeland Security and hundreds of thousands of Blackwater contractors is like taking all that money and shoveling into a bonfire. The only "spinoff" I can think of is militarized policing. Ugh.

I suppose the lesson is that bad things can always be done even worse.

[gaius]

Well, yes and no. There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency driving you (this is the means by which startups beat entrenched players). Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc. Would these things have come about "naturally"? Maybe, maybe not. Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

[justin66]

> There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency driving you

I don't know how to prove or disprove this sentiment so I'm not going to say much about it other than to observe that some people manage to be pretty driven without a war threatening them, and a lot of the resources we desperately throw into a war are thrown into solving problems which are fundamentally uninteresting outside the context of that war.

The whole "war is great for the economy!" thing, in the context of something massive like WWII especially, is fundamentally arguing for the efficiency of a directed economy over a free market, which is pretty iffy.

> Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc.

The world had computers well before the war. Radar too, interestingly, and jet turbines. I'm not trying to be disingenuous: obviously getting radar up and running is less of a priority without WWII, and so on.

> Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

That particular conundrum took longer than the end of WWII to answer, though.

The interesting questions to me are whether something like a Manhattan Project are more of a distraction or a spur to people like Alan Turing and Johnny Von Neumann, and what would have happened to them and their field without the war and its spending. Maybe once the economy bounced back from the depression a computer industry would have begun quite a bit before it did on our timeline.

An awful lot of the visionary computer work was conducted with DARPA money over the years, but when you look at the career of someone like Robert Taylor, for example, you have to wonder if - in alternate history terms, I guess - you don't get Xerox PARC earlier or just in another context if you have less of the defense spending and more spending of our GDP on pure research.