Response to “Discretionary Wars, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and the Rashomon Effect”

Dr. Jonathan Ratner’s discussion is amazing and a valuable commentary (and sometimes a corrective) upon the work in our article. We are grateful for his thoughtful examination and testing of the assumptions and methodology we have used. His contribution goes far beyond a typical discussion and is an article in its own right, or at the very least a provocative essay. He makes many important points and builds out our reasoning and expands its scope in numerous ways. This response attempts to briefly address some of the key points and suggestions that he makes. Dr. Ratner is quite correct that we made the enormously simplifying assumption of a unitary decision-maker, the “president,” who need only consult his or her utility function, and whose analysis is rational and unselfish but completely proAmerican. Like everyone, we appreciate that the political realities are far more complex than that, but we believe that our deliberate simplification has the advantage of focusing attention on the simple question of whether the five wars (or military actions) under consideration led to good or bad economic outcomes for the United States as a whole. Clearly, one could address a more realistic decision-theoretic framework in which multiple stakeholders (Congress, generals, intelligence analysts, Halliburton, and many others) negotiate or coalesce or diverge in reaching a military decision, and that would surely lead to fascinating work in sociology and political science. But such modeling was not our intent. And we appreciate Dr. Ratner’s recognition that our primary goal was the cost-benefit analysis. Our emphasis on “the U.S.-centric utility function” bothered Dr. Ratner, and we readily acknowledge that it makes us morally uncomfortable too. We would prefer to live in a world in which the United States is not indifferent to the suffering of others and where altruism is part of the calculus of leadership. And we also think that considerations of decency are usually given some weight in the corridors of power. However, we also believe that a callous calculation of the bottom line is a necessary component of military and other policy decisions. Absent that starting point, there seems to be no principled basis for prioritizing cases and causes. Dr. Ratner would prefer to see “a sensitivity analysis, with an alternative, semi-altruistic utility function.” We think that would be interesting and useful, and effective altruism is always important. But (as Dr. Ratner points out later), our article is already heavily freighted with assumptions that have varying degrees of plausibility. Trying to monetize the lives of non-American