STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Teresa · Kate Spade

Homework Help...ANY help appreciated!!!

Kelly · Hermes

How long does it have to be? Is it supposed to be an emotional response? If not, I guess I would start at calculating how much wars cost vs how much it would cost to feed the hungry, etc. I would probably try to prove how accurate the quote is (or disprove it, if that's how you feel)

pollyjean23 · Marc Jacobs

Whew. I feel for ya.

The Korean War ended in late July of 1953. That's a clue right there--especially if you can find when E uttered that quote.

Some credit Eisenhower for being key in reaching the armistice that ended the war. Others say efforts to end the war were set into motion when Truman left office.

Eisenhower apparently held a very aggressive stance against China and NK early in his admin but changed rhetoric later.

Accoriding to http://www.trumanlibrary.org/korea/matray1.htm, NK was experiencing food shortages--maybe he was referring to the citizens there.

Coming at it from a historical perspective might help you build the sociological one.

Shello · Kenneth Cole

As an economics student, I totally interpreted that in the economic sense, which is that he's right - those resources (labor, capital, research and development, etc.) which go towards producing weapons and weapons development could have been used to fight other social problems - poverty, homelessness, hunger. Economics uses the concept of opportunity cost, which is the next best alternative choice you could make with a given amount of a resource to evaluate the true cost of what you chose. A silly example of this is: you decide to go see a movie that costs $10. If you weren't seeing the movie, you would be working, earning $20. The cost of seeing the movie then is really $30 - the actual cost to you, plus the opportunity cost of what you're giving up. In this case, the cost of firing a rocket is really the cost of the rocket, plus (for example) the number of people that could have been fed with that money (so long as that is what the government would otherwise have done).

I hope that helped at all, or made some kind of sense!

relrel · Marc Jacobs

I don't know if it will help, but there's a website that actually calculates the cost of the the Iraq War and puts it into dollar amounts of what could have been done. I haven't looked at it in a very long time, but I'm going to assume that it's still up there somewhere. When I last looked I recall that it said something like "give all children free health insurance until they're 18" or some such similar stat. I'm sure if you Google "Iraq cost of war" or something similar, it would pop up.

HeatherLynn · Gucci

Here is a link (although it is in a blog so I would check the original source) for the cost of US wars:

http://storiesinamerica.blogspot.com/2008/02/cost-of-us-wars.html

Suasoria · Chanel

You could also google "guns and butter" for some similar thoughts on military spending versus human need.

Eisenhower gave a brilliant speech at the end of his presidency in which he warned us of the growing powers of what he called the "military industrial complex." Watching his speech or reading the text online might give you some additional insight about the quote. (I notice that the next part of the quote is "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.")

It's timely today because we're officially in an economic recession, schools and roads and healthcare are crumbling, but we've been waging war abroad for seven years. I think what's happened over the last 50+ years since Eisenhower's day is that Americans have come to somewhat accept that military spending and "defense" trumps any kind of domestic agenda of social progress or human dignity.