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 enlarge | Authors: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Linda J. Bilmes
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy Used: $6.98
You Save: $15.97 (70%)
New (44) Used (29) Collectible (2) from $6.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 91748
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0393067017
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.704431
EAN: 9780393067019
ASIN: 0393067017
Publication Date: March 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Barely used in dust jackett, 1st edition
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| Customer Reviews:
 Is Someone Making This Up? March 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is enough to make an anarchist out of anyone who reads it. I won't review the contents (admirably done elsewhere by reviewer Steele), but if anyone doesn't believe a Nobel Prize winning economist from Harvard and his associate, also from Harvard, then there is no one left to tell us the true story. According to the authors, the government is certainly not going to tell the complete, true story about Iraq.
How our government in a representative democracy could have gotten us into the situation in Iraq boggles the mind. As Stiglitz and Bielmes point out repeatedly, our involvement was/is a combination of lies, stupidity, poor planning, "big ideas" (transform the Middle East!), cronyism, arrogance and the influence of a foreign country, Israel (if you doubt this, see THE ISRAEL LOBBY, Mearsheimer and Walt, pp. 229-262).
And what have we gotten out of it? 4000+ dead, tens of thousands wounded, gas approaching $4.00 a gallon (the war was about oil, right?), the hatred and contempt of the rest of the world ("hypocrites," they rightly call us), a worn-out army, and, very important to these economists, a debt of borrowed money that will take years and decades to pay back.
As the authors point out, what could we have done with that money to make our own counry better! And the tens of thousands of talented men and women who, if not dead, will suffer the effects of this war for the rest of their lives. . ..
So, what have we gotten out of our involvement in Iraq? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Less than nothing. We even have a Presidential candidate stupid enough to claim that we should stay there for years. And a government that we elected to look after our interests got us into this.
read and weep March 26, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
The Bush administration told taxpayers that the Iraq war would cost about $50 billion dollars and be paid for by that country's oil revenues. Joseph Stiglitz, chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and a 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, estimate that the real cost of the war is three trillion dollars. And that's almost certainly a "gross underestimate" due to the conservative methods and estimates used in their calculations. Even worse, because of the gross incompetence and deliberate secrecy of the DOD accounting procedures, no one can know the true cost of the war.
If you divide three trillion dollars by the number of households in the United States, you get $25,000 per household. That's your share for the Iraq war. But don't worry. You won't have to pay because because the war has been funded entirely by borrowing money. We'll let others pay our debts. Plus, the economic costs of the war are off the books, above and beyond the DOD's bloated budget. The richest country in the world, the authors observe, hasn't been able or willing to live within its means. But there's a "simple message of this book, one that needs to be repeated over and over again: there is no free lunch, and no free wars. In one way or another, we will pay these bills."
We're already paying heavy "opportunity costs." The human consequences of the war have been as disastrous as the economic costs. After five years, the most powerful country in the world, a country that spends more on its military than all other countries combined, hasn't been able to subdue a country with only 10 percent of its size and 1 percent of its GDP. Iraq's middle class has been ravaged. A majority of its children don't attend school. The country now has only half the number of doctors as before the war. As of September 2007, over 4 million Iraqis (one of every seven) had been displaced from their homes. Oil has soared from $25 a barrel to $100 a barrel since the war began, making the oil companies (along with defense contractors) one of the few beneficiaries of war. Over 751,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have already been discharged from the military will need medical care and benefits the rest of their lives (1.6 million men and women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan).
Yes, it would be a disaster for us to leave Iraq. But the longer we wait, the more disastrous these consequences will be for the US, for Iraq, and for the world. With no exit plan in sight, and Bush intent upon running out the clock in order to pass the problem to the next president, it looks like we'll delay that debacle just as we've pushed the economic costs into the future. Given these economic and human costs, it's unconscionable that any administration can act with such impunity.
MUST READ March 24, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book should be required reading for military officers, veterans, members of Congress. Well-written, factual, jargon-free, and a web of information. Web, because Stiglitz and Bilmes lay out the links within the cost of any war. Isolation of each variable without laying out the web or network is deceptive when costing out the universe (war in totality) Relating information in this book to proposed veterans' legislation further demonstrates the depths of understanding possessed by the authors! Remember this: the total cost of any war is not known until the last veteran of that time of war is dead! A MUST READ to be re-read!
Mistaken assumption on part of some commenters March 19, 2008
4 out of 13 found this review helpful
It's an assumption--and probably a bad one--that had not these monies been and will be spent on the war(s), Congress/the President would have chosen to borrow/spend equivalent sums on alternative and presumptively more worthy initiatives. I see little evidence for this.
At what cost? March 19, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Both authors of this book are correct when they say that no amount of money can value the cost of a human life. Considering the amount that has been lost in the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq by the American government and its "coalition of the willing," their statement almost seems banal. No amount of rhetoric, no matter how sophisticated, can justify the initiation of force against another human being without provocation. It is a moral axiom that such an initiation is the ultimate evil, and no accountant's spreadsheet is going to be able to add up the costs of unprovoked violence. Even if the illegal and immoral war against Iraq only cost one dollar, it would not matter. It is not the cost of war that is at issue, but rather whether it has moral justification. A war is to be fought only for purposes of defense against an armed attack. The accountants can then inform relevant parties what the costs will be, and then practical decisions will have to be made about the scale of the resulting conflict.
There is some value to this book though if one takes a pragmatic view. The extreme numbers that the authors report on the cost of the immoral and illegal war against Iraq may encourage more to take measures to end it. It is also has value in the sense that it gives the reader insight into the accounting system of the U.S. Federal government, and how difficult it is to obtain accurate information on spending activities. For this reason the authors described themselves as being "sleuths" rather than analysts in a recent public forum on their book. Their discipline in obtaining the relevant information is to be commended, and such investigative activities should be emulated whenever possible, if only to obtain a more accurate picture of the workings of governmental bureaucracy. In addition, their recommendations on veteran care, if implemented, will assist greatly in granting future veterans the medical assistance they require after coming home from legitimate wars. Their current situation is deplorable, especially if compared to the kind of care that those who ranted on about their need to go to war have access to. The latter class of individuals was keen on rhetoric but short on intestinal fortitude.
One could also take the book as being a tutorial on the current operational readiness of the Armed Forces of the United States. It gives insight into just how much it takes to fund a war, and this information is extremely valuable if a legitimate war is to be fought in the future. High technology, logistics, and medical care are to be weighed in, as much as future medical care for injured veterans. One can only hope that this will be the last book that estimates the costs of a war, but with political eyes currently looking east of Iraq, this seems doubtful.
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