Impacts- Econ Bad- War- Goldstein- Long Wave Theory Defense

Impacts- Econ Bad- War- Goldstein- Long Wave Theory Defense

This article summarizes the main empirical findings of a research project on long waves of roughly 50 years length in political/economic life. The statistical analysis of 40 historical economic time series, along with data on great power wars, indicates that war plays a central role in the long wave, that "stagflation" can be seen as a phase of the long wave, and that war dampens economic growth. Since 1495, long waves are identified in great power war severity and in internationally synchronized trends of prices and real wages. Weaker long waves are found in world production since 1750, these phases leading the war phases by about a decade. A theoretical model consistent with these lagged correlations among variables is elaborated. Long waves are seen as arising from a two-way causality between war and economic growth.

Impacts- Econ Bad- War- Goldstein- Long Theory Defense

While these four theories shape the main lines of the debate, a number of hybrid theories combine and supplement them. These include the work of Rostow (1975, 1978), combining elements of the capital and innovation theories but ultimately focusing on the relative prices of primary and secondary goods; of Van Duijn (1983), combining capital and innovation; of Kleinknecht (1981), combining innovation and capitalist crisis; and of Hopkins and Wallerstein (1979) and Bousquet (1980), combining a Marxist interpretation of war/hegemony with capitalist crisis. Despite the differences between the four approaches, they all agree (following Kondratieff's dating) regarding the approximate dating of upswings and downswings during 1790-1922 (the period covered by Kondratieff). However, for the period before 1790 they disagree about whether long waves exist at all; and for the period since around World War II (see Dupriez, 1978; Wallerstein, 1979), the periodizations based on production (e.g., Mandel, 1980) diverge from those based on prices (e.g., Rostow, 1978), or on war (e.g., Modelski, 1981). Empirically, the evidence for economic long waves has been mixed. For price series, there is fairly strong evidence that upswings and downswings match approximately the datings given by Kondratief, for 1790-1922 (Gordon, 1978; Rostow, 1978; Van Ewijk, 1982; Cleary and Hobbs, 1983). For production and trade series, however, there is controversy over the technique of removing longer-term secular trends and identifying long waves in the residuals. The secular trend can be hypothesized as linear, exponential, or cubic, and the results vary accordingly. Long waves are more strongly evident in price series than production series (Van Ewijk, 1982; Cleary and Hobbs, 1983). However, opinion still ranges from the view that long waves are no more than an accidental series of ups and downs (see reviews by Eklund, 1980; and Rosenberg and Frischtak, 1983), to the view that long waves can be found in production as well as price data (Mandel, 1980).

Third, wars were correlated with economic phase periods in several ways. Each war was categorized as having occurred primarily in one phase period.26 These war categorizations are listed in Appendix 2. Fatalities from the wars in each phase period were summed, and expressed as an average annual fatality level for each phase period. Average fatalities on downswings and upswings could thus be compared, and it was hypothesized that they would be higher on the upswings. Average annual fatalities were also calculated for each phase period by a second method-cutting the fatality time series strictly at each turning point between phases. This method counts 'overlap' years from a war into an adjacent phase period, and (when compared to the first method) indicates sensitivity to the choice of turning points. Numbers of wars were also counted for each phase period

Impacts- Econ Bad- A2: War- Econ good

Growth doesn’t stop wars- 20^th century shows
Ferguson 6 (Nial, prof @ Harvard, Foreign affairs, 10.6.6) ET

It might have been expected that such prosperity would eliminate the causes of war. But much of the worst violence of the twentieth century involved the relatively wealthy countries at the opposite ends of Eurasia. The chief lesson of the twentieth century is that countries can provide their citizens with wealth, longevity, literacy, and even democracy but still descend into lethal conflict. Leon Trotsky nicely summed up the paradox when reflecting on the First Balkan War of 1912-13, which he covered as a reporter. The conflict, Trotsky wrote, "shows that we still haven't crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials, and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on a rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter." Trotsky later made his own contribution to the history of mass slaughter as the people's commissar for war and as the commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.
And economic decline doesn’t cause war- empirics prove
Ferguson 6 (Nial, prof @ Harvard, Foreign affairs, 10.6.6) ET

Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.

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