Comparative price of military expenses to overall economy.

A typical Glock in very good condition is $700, $300 in fair condition. One Ford-class supercarrier costs $13 billion. Ergo, every american citizen buying a handgun for personal protection costs as much on average as the new building program for ten Ford-class supercarriers. Essentially, a fleet for a country costs as much as a handgun for every citizen.



How are the equivalent prices in the Honorverse? For example, if a government could or would introduce a "buy a gun for the fleet" bill/moneymaking campaign to their population where each citizen would have to pay the price of a single handgun, what kind of fleet would they get for that money?

1) Haven is 200 systems of, say, 1 billion per world. If they gathered the equivalent in Honorverse currency of $500 per citizen or $100 trillion in total, what could they build?

2) The Sollies are 1500 systems of, say, 3 billions per world. Assuming they could do the same kind of money-gathering campaign, what could they build with their equivalent of $1.5 quadrillion?

A typical Glock in very good condition is $700, $300 in fair condition. One Ford-class supercarrier costs $13 billion. Ergo, every american citizen buying a handgun for personal protection costs as much on average as the new building program for ten Ford-class supercarriers. Essentially, a fleet for a country costs as much as a handgun for every citizen.

The logical failure in this paragraph makes me so, so very depressed.

Belial666 wrote:A typical Glock in very good condition is $700, $300 in fair condition. One Ford-class supercarrier costs $13 billion. Ergo, every american citizen buying a handgun for personal protection costs as much on average as the new building program for ten Ford-class supercarriers. Essentially, a fleet for a country costs as much as a handgun for every citizen.



How are the equivalent prices in the Honorverse? For example, if a government could or would introduce a "buy a gun for the fleet" bill/moneymaking campaign to their population where each citizen would have to pay the price of a single handgun, what kind of fleet would they get for that money?

1) Haven is 200 systems of, say, 1 billion per world. If they gathered the equivalent in Honorverse currency of $500 per citizen or $100 trillion in total, what could they build?

2) The Sollies are 1500 systems of, say, 3 billions per world. Assuming they could do the same kind of money-gathering campaign, what could they build with their equivalent of $1.5 quadrillion?

Well, the flippant answer is 'the fleet that they currently have', but I'll go beyond that because I have been thinking about starting an Economics thread but haven;t gotten around to putting it into words yet.

Of course along with those Carriers you need support ships, smaller warships for protection, aircraft and their support, and the logistics to keep it all supplied--so it will cost a bit more than you are protraying.

For the SEM (and Haven), they do get that much from taxes of various types, albeit Manticore has the advantage of fees from the wormhole/trade moving through the system. OTOH, Haven (whose systems are probably larger than 1B each), has a lot of people and the SL has a S****** of people, so the personal costs to raise a lot of money acts in their favor, as you point out.

Still, presuming Haven has been spending all that they can afford for decades and has the number of ships that they have probably shows the maximum that they can do. And the SL does not directly taxes it's people, making do with trade tariffs and funds from the Protectorates, along with whatever they can get from regulations that they have imposed on league members. To use the MWW words (IIRC), while miniscule compared to the 1800 menbers (who have substantially more than 3B average) total GDP, even a tiny percentage is a stupendous amount to spend on ships.

So I think the amounts you show are perhaps close to the budgets that those powers have to spend.

I look forward to other conclusions, since this is an area (economics) which is at once vitally important and that nobody (including economists) fully understand.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

This excellent subject might be representative of a weakness in the Honorverse economic story line. Haven could spend whatever amount for their fleet, within logical limits. Their citizens did not have that much input.

The Manties were just one system to start out. Their long term navy build up may have cost more than just one system could afford. In other words, Haven should have been in a superior position to overwhelm the Manties.

How much can one government spent on its military? Towards the end of the Soviet Evil Empire, they were spending well over 50% of their gross economic product on their military. Their system collapsed because of such.

HB of CJ (old coot)

Economics is not a strong point of the Honorverse. Don't think too hard about it.

HB of CJ wrote:This excellent subject might be representative of a weakness in the Honorverse economic story line. Haven could spend whatever amount for their fleet, within logical limits. Their citizens did not have that much input.

The Manties were just one system to start out. Their long term navy build up may have cost more than just one system could afford. In other words, Haven should have been in a superior position to overwhelm the Manties.

How much can one government spent on its military? Towards the end of the Soviet Evil Empire, they were spending well over 50% of their gross economic product on their military. Their system collapsed because of such.

HB of CJ (old coot)

Well, the war in Afghanistan had something to do with that as well. By and large, all those who fought in Afghanistan for the Russians did not come from Russia itself. They were from Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Lithuania, etc. Even slaves have a tipping point.

The initial comparison is a gross oversimplification but not as far off as one would expect. The US Navy's entire budget comes at around $200 billion, or $600 per head.

On the other hand, the entirety of defense spending comes out at $4.000, which is quite a bit higher than that. Of course, 40% of that is debt, and that percentage has been steadily increasing over the past few decades.

Even so, that's less than 8% of total income spent on defense, with merely 3.8% spent directly on the military.

A worthwhile topic to discuss. Some time ago I posed the question, if Manticore was fighting for its very existence, why didn't they have austerity programs for the general population of similar intensity to the UK in WW2?
People in the Honorverse seem to have a high standard of living with no rationing, relatively low taxation, and generally little impact on the economy compared to similar all out war here. You can't compare the modern sandpit wars with the Somme in WW1 or Dday as they just don't have the same threat of national dissolution.

Daryl wrote:A worthwhile topic to discuss. Some time ago I posed the question, if Manticore was fighting for its very existence, why didn't they have austerity programs for the general population of similar intensity to the UK in WW2?
People in the Honorverse seem to have a high standard of living with no rationing, relatively low taxation, and generally little impact on the economy compared to similar all out war here. You can't compare the modern sandpit wars with the Somme in WW1 or Dday as they just don't have the same threat of national dissolution.

David gave an answer to that in HoS. I didn't find it very compelling, but he did answer my question.

Belial666 wrote:A typical Glock in very good condition is $700, $300 in fair condition. One Ford-class supercarrier costs $13 billion. Ergo, every american citizen buying a handgun for personal protection costs as much on average as the new building program for ten Ford-class supercarriers. Essentially, a fleet for a country costs as much as a handgun for every citizen.



How are the equivalent prices in the Honorverse? For example, if a government could or would introduce a "buy a gun for the fleet" bill/moneymaking campaign to their population where each citizen would have to pay the price of a single handgun, what kind of fleet would they get for that money?

1) Haven is 200 systems of, say, 1 billion per world. If they gathered the equivalent in Honorverse currency of $500 per citizen or $100 trillion in total, what could they build?

2) The Sollies are 1500 systems of, say, 3 billions per world. Assuming they could do the same kind of money-gathering campaign, what could they build with their equivalent of $1.5 quadrillion?

Cost of purchase is not cost of ownership.


#####

This excellent subject might be representative of a weakness in the Honorverse economic story line. Haven could spend whatever amount for their fleet, within logical limits. Their citizens did not have that much input.

The Manties were just one system to start out. Their long term navy build up may have cost more than just one system could afford. In other words, Haven should have been in a superior position to overwhelm the Manties.

There´s also a "wee" little difference in economical efficiency. If you have many planetary scale economies running at deficit, then you are not going to be able to draw much production capacity from it.

Unless of course you modify the economy into a totally planned one with everything controlled by govt, while it would suck for average economics, if you need to squeeze everything possible out of it, that works well.
But at most times, the people of Haven would never have accepted that.