Sunday, October 11, 2009

War and Politics

That's the title of TPS friend Pavel Yakovlev's first book. Here it is at Amazon. Here is the product description:
This monograph is a collection of empirical and theoretical essays on the interplay between political regimes, military spending, and economic growth. Chapter 1 surveys the literature on political regimes, policies they choose and their economic consequences. Chapter 2 examines how democracy and conscription may affect the number of battlefield deaths and the value of a statistical life in military conflicts. Chapter 3 investigates how arms trade and military spending may affect economic growth. Chapter 4 examines the efficiency of political markets and factors influencing political polarization. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings and suggests the avenues for future research.
A semi-spoiler:
The book is based on his dissertation, and one of the more interesting findings that emerge from it is that democracies substitute kapital for labor at a higher rate than dictatorships, as do countries that employ the draft. You can think of countries without a draft being forced to pay market wages for soldiers, and thus substituting to more military machinery, whereas the draft carries the ability to coerce labor at below-market wages.

If you think more elaboration on those ideas would interest you, then do check out the book. Especially if you are a doctoral student interested in conducting similar lines of research.

Disclosure: In compliance with new federal regulations, let it be known that I received no compensation for this review.

1 comment:

Justin M Ross said...

After receiving 2 emails regarding my "typo," let it be known from this point forward that I always refer in writing to mechanical capital as "kapital." Why, because its Das Kapital, man!