Examining the second lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%202.pdf
It is all good stuff, but we don’t do a lot of work on terrorism, so don’t have any insights to add. We actually don’t have a category for “terrorism” so this is filed under “insurgencies.”
The point that got my attention was on slide 13 where he states: “Mueller and Stewart estimate that the US is spending about $75 billion per year more on terrorism after 9/11 happened than it was spending before 9/11. The real number is almost certainly bigger than this and, possibly, a lot bigger.”
Hmmm…..16 years since 9/11 times $75 = $1.2 trillion. Is this really the whole cost for the Global War on Terror?
Slide 12 gives economic “losses per incident.” The financial losses from 9/11 is estimated at $200 billion. Of course, there was considerable human life lost. Not sure how that is “costed.”
Anyhow, it is always interesting to see what the economists are looking at. It is worth flipping through the entire lecture. It is pretty interesting material.