[lendaddy]

Richard Adams
Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian

" Weighing up the pros and cons of the conflict with Iraq has been a difficult business. Thankfully, some economists from the University of Chicago - Milton Friedman's alma mater - have sat down and done the sums. And the answer is: 1.498. That apparently means that war is a good thing. It's really very simple: it's the ratio of (V<+>T-W)/V<+>S - where V<+>T is per capita welfare at the outset of transition and ... er ... anyway, it's entirely straightforward. Economists Steven Davis, Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel, in War Versus Containment: Impact on Iraqi Economic Welfare, calculate that containing Saddam Hussein would cost the US at least $380bn and as much as $630bn, compared with a conservative estimate of $125bn for war and reconstruction. They also estimate that Iraq's per capita output would be much higher under an alternative regime. "War raises Iraqi welfare by nearly 50% in the baseline case," say the authors, finally casting aside the stereotype of economics as a bloodless science. "