[Beren]

Why was Korea a success, and everything since then a failure? We were all in, in Korea.

Because Korea, in contrast to Vietnam or Afghanistan, for example, was more like Japan, so thus fit for further westernisation culturally, economically, socially, etc., which is a prerequisite for your success rather than if you're all in at home or not.

[Steve_American]

The Marshall Plan had little impact on post-war economic growth in Europe. At least not the economic aid part. Germany was already an industrial powerhouse before and during the war, hence it recovered quickly afterwards. Afghanistan isn't even remotely similar.

Sir, every single city in Germany was a pile of rubble in May, 1945. Most of their factiries were rubble. All of their fuel plants were rubble.
. . . I don't see how you can think that they didn't need and get a lot of help from someone. I think you need to review your history. You seem to have some parts wrong.
.

[Steve_American]

The Muslim world attacked Europe back in the early 8th century. In fact, at that time they were still a unified Caliphate and were still attacking anyone they could reach. Maybe my history is rusty, but I don't recall Europe launching invasions of the Muslim world before the early 8th century.

[Jews translated books from Arabic.]

This is true, but has nothing to do with who attacked whom and when.

The history is ---
The Muslim world attacked Europe from Spain in 8th cent.
The Muslim world fought the Christiam world in the Near East (Turkey, etc.) pretty much continously.
Europe attacked the Muslim world during the Crusades.
The Muslim world attacked Europe again in 1453, when it took Constantinople.
The Spanish forced the Muslims out of Spain finally in 1492.
The Muslim world attacked Europe from Constantinople later, spreading into the Balkans.
The Muslim world besieged Vienna twice, the last time in the 1680s.
Also, the Muslim world was raiding the Medit. coast of Europe from the sea, pretty much continously.

I don't think it matters much who attacked who 1st 200 yeares earlier. Wars don't start over slights from 200 years ago. They start over current situations and/or attitudes.
.

[AFAIK]

It seems posters here aren't familiar with domino theory aka the threat of a good example. How many countries wanted to follow Vietnam's lead after the Americans destroyed it?

[Potemkin]

It seems posters here aren't familiar with domino theory aka the threat of a good example. How many countries wanted to follow Vietnam's lead after the Americans destroyed it?

"We had to destroy the village to save the village."

[Steve_American]

"We had to destroy the village to save the village."

There are those who claim that that sentence was a play on words, that only made snese if you understood the culture of Vietnam.

It meant ---
We had to destroy the village (the buildings) to save the village (now meaning the people).
They had destroyed the builings and moved the people to a new cluster of villages that could be defended better. The plan was a failure, though. IIRC.
.

[Potemkin]

The history is ---
The Muslim world attacked Europe from Spain in 8th cent.
The Muslim world fought the Christiam world in the Near East (Turkey, etc.) pretty much continously.
Europe attacked the Muslim world during the Crusades.
The Muslim world attacked Europe again in 1453, when it took Constantinople.
The Spanish forced the Muslims out of Spain finally in 1492.
The Muslim world attacked Europe from Constantinople later, spreading into the Balkans.
The Muslim world besieged Vienna twice, the last time in the 1680s.
Also, the Muslim world was raiding the Medit. coast of Europe from the sea, pretty much continously.

I don't think it matters much who attacked who 1st 200 yeares earlier. Wars don't start over slights from 200 years ago. They start over current situations and/or attitudes.
.

In other words, let's just forget about history. Okay, gotcha.

[Godstud]

The history is back and forth for 1400 years, @Potemkin . It's good to remember that, instead of getting hung up on singular events.

[Rugoz]

Fuck off Rugoz. Germany, like the rest of Europe, was bombed to a shit pit and the only factories at the time were building military equipment. Not to mention they lost the fucking war. You think America was going to let Germany just rebuild after the Versailles was trashed and ignored which let the Germans enhance their military capacity last time. The UK, who were an empire before the War was bankrupt and Germany was even worse. The Americans didn't even want to lent Europe money. They rejected the UKs first request. Then someone must have mentioned in Trumans ear "Communism" and then it clicked that perhaps they needed to rebuild Europe after all. But they put in so many conditions and interest that we then became reliant on America. And that is why even today, even under Trump and all the illegal wars, Europe and America as united in geopolitics. It isn't in our interest to be so, but we are too intertwined in their economy because of these conditions that snapping the cord just isn't that easy. So sure, Afghanistan and Europe aren't similar, but before the US lent Europe money it was a shitpit and in that sense it was similar actually.

Sir, every single city in Germany was a pile of rubble in May, 1945. Most of their factiries were rubble. All of their fuel plants were rubble. . . . I don't see how you can think that they didn't need and get a lot of help from someone. I think you need to review your history. You seem to have some parts wrong..

Have you looked at the data or the literature? No, obviously not. Why even ask.

Here are excerpts form a paper actually trying to defend the importance of the Marshall plan:

Quantitative discussions (e.g. Collins and Rodrik, 1991) are more
sceptical. Marshall aid averaged only 2.5% of the combined national
incomes of the recipient countries over the period it was in effect. Even
at its height it could have financed no more than 20% of their capital
formation. There is no obvious correlation across countries between
the magnitude of Marshall Plan allotments and the pace of economic
growth. Germany grew most quickly during the Marshall Plan years,
but its share of American aid was not large. Given the existence of
alternative explanations for Europe's rapid growth - notably post-war
reconstruction and scope for catching up to the US - there is no a priori
case for attaching particular weight to the Marshall Plan (Milward,
1984).

...

To estimate the combined effects of the Marshall Plan operating through
the investment, current account and public spending channels, we
simulated a system of four equations: a growth equation determining
the percentage change in GDP and three equations determining invest-
ment, the current account and government spending respectively. The
Marshall Plan affects investment, the current account and government
spending with a lag; in turn these variables affect economic growth. To
isolate the impact of the Marshall Plan, we simulate the equations using
historical values of the exogenous variables, and then set the Marshall
Plan variables to zero and compute counterfactual values for GDP
growth. The difference between the predicted and counterfactual simu-
lations is the Marshall Plan effect. This effect is shown in Figure 4.
The sum of three small numbers is still a small number. Marshall Plan
allotments have raised GDP in the recipient countries by an average of
less than 0.1% in the two years following its implementation when it
should have had its largest efffects.

...

In this paper, we challenge this new conventional wisdom. We find
that the Marshall Plan's economic effects had a significant impact on
Europe's recovery from World War II. The recipients of large amounts
of Marshall aid recovered significantly faster than other industrial
countries. Strikingly, however, the obvious channels through which the
Marshall Plan could have affected European recovery - stimulating in-
vestment in plant and equipment, augmenting capacity to import, and
financing public investment on infrastructure repair - were relatively
unimportant. Post-war Europe's crisis was not a crisis of insufficient
investment, inadequate capacity to import raw materials, or inability
to repair devastated infrastructure. Rather, Europe was suffering a
'marketing crisis', in which producers refused to bring goods to market,
and workers and managers limited the effort they devoted to market
activity. Political instability, shortages of consumer goods and fears of
financial chaos led them to hoard commodities and withold effort. The
Marshall Plan facilitated the restoration of financial stability and the
liberalization of production and prices; this was its crucial role. The
Marshall Plan thereby allowed Europe to return to its underlying growth
path more quickly than would have been possible otherwise.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344512?re ... b_contents

Basically, it's not the economic aid that mattered but the stability/political order provided (although he cannot provide quantiative evidence for the latter).

From the same (American) author:

But there are also good grounds for questioning whether the Marshall Plan in fact
constitutes an aid technology that is readily transferred. To start, there are reasons to doubt the
importance of American aid for Europe’s recovery.

x The difficult economic and political conditions of early 1947 reflected an exceptionally
cold winter resulting in coal shortages and harvest failures. These exceptional conditions
led contemporaries to overstate the gravity of the postwar crisis; with the end of this
exceptional weather, agricultural productivity and economic productivity could return to
more normal levels.

x The low level of industrial production in Western Europe in 1947 was, in fact, a
peculiarly German phenomenon. Production in the three Western zones of Germany
(occupied by the U.S., France and Britain respectively) was only 34 per cent of 1938
levels, reflecting disorganized conditions, pervasive price controls, rationing, and ceilings
placed by the occupying powers on the output of strategic sectors like iron and steel.
When Germany is removed from the European aggregate, output was already 105 per
cent of 1938 levels in 1947. Europe, in other words, was already on the road to recovery.
Once ceilings on the output of its strategic sectors were removed, Germany could recover
as well.

x The European economy was already highly developed. It is further argued that with the
resumption of investment in plant and equipment, Europe was perfectly capable of
growing under its own steam. In fact the vast majority of investment during the Marshall
Plan years was financed out of Europe’s own savings, not by U.S. aid.

x While the Marshall Plan, by providing dollars, helped to relax import bottlenecks, those
bottlenecks were severe for only for a minority of European industries. Relaxing
bottlenecks mattered for the cotton textile industry, for example, given that little cotton
was grown in Europe itself.

x The Marshall Plan helped to compensate for governments’ lack of fiscal resources. It
thereby helped to finance critical infrastructure repair. But, notwithstanding propaganda
photos of roads, bridges and ports that were reconstructed using U.S aid, the fact of the
matter is that U.S. funds, at less than 2 per cent of the recipients’ GDP, were small
relative to the domestic resources mobilized through the fisc to repair infrastructure,
housing stock, and industrial capacity.

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bit ... sequence=1

[B0ycey]

@Rugoz

You are vastly becoming a PoFo quack. I can imagine you scrolling the internet to find something to back up your opinion and this is the best you can come up with. I only say that because you have been selective on what you have published here. I suggest you go right down to Implications and read the first line. The truth is Europe needed to rebuild. I know that might be difficult for a quack to understand that the most devastating War of all time might have left Europe with a bit of a problem but that is just a matter of fact. Also I thought you studied Economics? Firstly, investing in growth doesn't have an instant impact. Second it matters where investment is put as your source alluded to. The UK, who borrowed the most had just started up the NHS with the money which hardly builds up GDP. And thirdly, the start of your source isn't an arguing point but a reflection from another source. That is to say that isn't the point your source is making but Collins and Rodrik. So yeah, I have have read up on the history of the Marshall Plan. Not recently like you it seems who clearly went the extra mile yesterday. But enough to know that without the money, there was no possibility that the "Educated and skilled" Europeans wouldn't have been able to rebuild.

[late]

The Muslim world attacked Europe back in the early 8th century. In fact, at that time they were still a unified Caliphate and were still attacking anyone they could reach. Maybe my history is rusty, but I don't recall Europe launching invasions of the Muslim world before the early 8th century.

You seem to be doing the old Clash of Civilisations dance, which is goofy.

[late]

Because Korea, in contrast to Vietnam or Afghanistan, for example, was more like Japan, so thus fit for further westernisation culturally, economically, socially, etc., which is a prerequisite for your success rather than if you're all in at home or not.

Perhaps, but that doesn't explain why Vietnam has a growing economy now...

[Rugoz]

I can imagine you scrolling the internet to find something to back up your opinion and this is the best you can come up with. I only say that because you have been selective on what you have published here. I suggest you go right down to Implications and read the first line. The truth is Europe needed to rebuild. I know that might be difficult for a quack to understand that the most devastating War of all time might have left Europe with a bit of a problem but that is just a matter of fact. Also I thought you studied Economics? Firstly, investing in growth doesn't have an instant impact. Second it matters where investment is put as your source alluded to. The UK, who borrowed the most had just started up the NHS with the money which hardly builds up GDP. And thirdly, the start of your source isn't an arguing point but a reflection from another source. That is to say that isn't the point your source is making but Collins and Rodrik. So yeah, I have have read up on the history of the Marshall Plan. Not recently like you it seems who clearly went the extra mile yesterday. But enough to know that without the money, there was no possibility that the "Educated and skilled" Europeans wouldn't have been able to rebuild.

There's not a single relevant argument in that idiotic rant. It is also plain wrong. The paper clearly states in the abstract that "Yet previous analyses of the Marshall Plan are uniformly sceptical that it had important economic effects", hence this is not a minority position.

On top of that, the 0.1% growth estimate is from the paper's own model, not from Collins and Rodrik. In fact the paper concurs with the academic consensus that the impact of the economic aid was close to irrelevant.

As usual, you're a stupid big mouth that has nothing to contribute.

[Potemkin]

You seem to be doing the old Clash of Civilisations dance, which is goofy.

Ask the Aztecs if the 'Clash of Civilizations' is a myth. Oh wait, you can't can you? Lol.

[B0ycey]

There's not a single relevant argument in that idiotic rant. It is also plain wrong. The paper clearly states in the abstract that "Yet previous analyses of the Marshall Plan are uniformly sceptical that it had important economic effects", hence this is not a minority position.

On top of that, the 0.1% growth estimate is from the paper's own model, not from Collins and Rodrik. In fact the paper concurs with the academic consensus that the impact of the economic aid was close to irrelevant.

As usual, you're a stupid big mouth that has nothing to contribute.

Rugoz, you are a complete midwit. The source you published begins with a disclaimer that says the views expressed in the paper have nothing to do with the World Development Report but that of the author. I suspect the author is some Rand wank trash who support the Austrian School and this is no more supporting evidence than Twitter given that. It is an opinion piece. It also doesn't align with the thoughts of other authors or is it the accepted truth from other published works. But even so, the report STILL SAYS that the Marshall Plan was paramount in the growth and rebuilding of Europe. In other words even though your evidence is still opinion based, it STILL DOESN'T SUPPORT your idiotic view that Europe was always going to rise out of the ashes like a phoenix. The truth is the loan had so many conditions attached to it that you had to be desperate to borrow. If there was any chance Europe could have rebuilt without it they would have done so. The UK begged the US for the money and at first they were turned down. It was only because the alternative for Europe would have been Communism that the US decided to change their mind. Which then goes to the question of could Europe, who were in rubble, been as successful as the SU who were not, given they ultimately failed in their project? I would say not. They would have just became another addition of the SU instead.

[Rugoz]

Rugoz, you are a complete midwit. The source you published begins with a disclaimer that says the views expressed in the paper have nothing to do with the World Development Report but that of the author. I suspect the author is some Rand wank trash who support the Austrian School and this is no more supporting evidence than Twitter given that. It is an opinion piece. It also doesn't align with the thoughts of other authors or is it the accepted truth from other published works. But even so, the report STILL SAYS that the Marshall Plan was paramount in the growth and rebuilding of Europe. In other words even though your evidence is still opinion based, it STILL DOESN'T SUPPORT your idiotic view that Europe was always going to rise out of the ashes like a phoenix. The truth is the loan had so many conditions attached to it that you had to be desperate to borrow. If there was any chance Europe could have rebuilt without it they would have done so. The UK begged the US for the money and at first they were turned down. It was only because the alternative for Europe would have been Communism that the US decided to change their mind. Which then goes to the question of could Europe, who were in rubble, been as successful as the SU who were not, given they ultimately failed in their project? I would say not. They would have just became another addition of the SU instead.

As usual you're talking out of your ass. It's like diarrhea. Are you incapable of reading or using Google?

This guy is a "Rand wank trash"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Eichengreen

I cited two sources. The first one is a paper published in Economic Policy and has 209 citations. The second one is just a note, but provides additional info.

I said:

The Marshall Plan had little impact on post-war economic growth in Europe. At least not the economic aid part.

Some say the Marshall Plan was still important, by providing stability and certain economic policies etc. I acknowledged that from the very beginning. Unlike you I don't make up the shit I say.

[B0ycey]

Some say the Marshall Plan was still important, by providing stability and certain economic policies etc. I acknowledged that from the very beginning. Unlike you I don't make up the shit I say.

Your source is STILL an opinion piece and considering the Marshall Plan is largely accepted as a success, you're still a midwit. It may well be the author was playing devils advocate or bringing forward a contentious view. But it isn't the view of the World Development Fund and he didn't conclude the Marshall Plan wasn't needed. So given your view was that Germany had all the means to build up its economy post war and the money wasn't needed at all, that is the only thing I want to point out as you are wrong and that is what you said. It isn't my fault that the vast majority of the money went into building homes and basic infrastructure but even so it is largely accepted that GNP went up 25pc anyway.

And I also want to point out that you said that this view is the basic view on the Marshall Plan when you said I didn't research it. Not only is this view not largely accepted, it proves to me that you don't know what you are talking about by even suggesting that. Now where is the moo gif?

[late]

Ask the Aztecs if the 'Clash of Civilizations' is a myth. Oh wait, you can't can you? Lol.

That's what I was afraid of.

"The criticisms of the clash of civilizations thesis can categorised under three headings – epistemological, methodological and ethical. The epistemological critique condemns the clash of civilizations thesis on grounds of its realist, orientalist and elitist outlook. The methodological critique attacks its monolithic, inconsistent and reductionist/essentialist attitude while the ethical critique denounces it for being a purposeful thesis that fuels enemy discourse and, in the process, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thirdly, the epistemological critique finds fault with the elitist orientation of the clash of civilizations thesis. It argues that Huntington’s thesis is an ‘official mythology’ generated by US elites to ‘scare the hell out of the American people’, as ex-US Senator Vanderbilt put it. Therefore, the agenda of US elites differs from that of the American masses.

The ethical critique condemns the immoral implications of Huntington’s thesis. It proclaims that the clash of civilizations is a purposeful thesis that serves particular interests. Edward W. Said revealed that Huntington formulated his thesis while keeping an eye on rivals in the policy making ranks... Interestingly the personal ambition of Huntington was in tandem with the expansionary goals of US policy makers."

Lots more at the link, which is itself just a brief (to an academic) overview:


https://www.e-ir.info/2017/04/02/the-clash-of-civilizations-thesis-a-critical-appraisal/

[Rugoz]

Your source is STILL an opinion piece

It's a peer-reviewed paper published in a respectable journal and informs us what the consensus was, at least at the time it was published. It's not a freaking opinion.

Meanwhile you have provided absolutely nothing, zero. It's pathetic.

Not only is this view not largely accepted...

By whom? The general public? Why would I give a shit about that? I care about the scientific consensus, in this case among economists. If you have nothing on that, this "debate" is over.

[B0ycey]

It's a peer-reviewed paper published in a respectable journal and informs us what the consensus was, at least at the time it was published. It's not a freaking opinion.

Meanwhile you have provided absolutely nothing, zero. It's pathetic.



By whom? The general public? Why would I give a shit about that? I care about the scientific consensus, in this case among economists. If you have nothing on that, this "debate" is over.

Well I am on my phone and out. The paper had a disclaimer so how about that for a consensus view.

Also it isn't the view of the journal. I thought I had already pointed that out. But whatever. It also stats it is the view of the author not the consensus. I thought I pointed that out. But I can see you running and to be honest this thread is about Biden. So we all know you were chatting shit and anyone who know history really knows you are chatting shit. And I suspect you know you are chatting shit also. But you might have learnt something so perhaps not a complete loss for you.