Visualizations : Military Costs of Major U.S. Wars : Normalizing by % of GDP during...

There is no way this can be correct in a ‘meaningful way’ (like say % GDP at the time). The civil war’s casualties were some of the worst in US history as a % of the population (I think the highest was actually the revolutionary war). While this does not show the war as a % of GDP, the notion of keeping dollars normalized to a particular fixed dates is to try and get at this issue. The only way to explain this data is today costs are being captured that did not get captured in the past.

I suspect the fact that wars are more capital-intensive (dominated by technology) as time goes by may also have something to do with it. The soldier of the late 18th and all of the 19th century didn’t really have a lot of tech to contend with or call upon.

I wonder if someone has the stats for the cost of internal wars of expansion (“The Indian Wars”) say if one combined the cost right up until the late 1880’s. It would be an interesting addition to the visual.

A. Grossman

i.e. — total cost of 4-year WWII in 1944 dollars divided by 1944 GDP.

I suspect the word ‘cost’ has acquired a new meaning for the duration of the US election campaign. Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz put the Iraq war at $3000 billion.

You all realize that you can click the “Bubble Size” button and change the graph to % of GDP don’t you?

Isn’t this a waste of color and both X and Y axes? A simple B&W bar chart would work better.

If we really only spend 1% of our (United States) GDP on the occupation of Iraq then I want to know where the other 99% of our GDP is going. I havn’t seen any flying hospitals or super-advanced alternative mass transportation.

Java? Seriously?

All of the posters on here are a bunch of pseudo intellectual ass clowns.

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