No World Wars - is the world richer?

[King Thomas]

Yes, but at the least, it would be slowed down in the UK at least. WW1 let women prove they could work as well as men-without that, they don't get the chance to prove themselves. Most likely it would only slow things down by 10 years, unless a female terrorist movement arises and starts murdering people.

 

[The Gunslinger]

Canada would look a lot different with no world wars. Canada was undergoing huge growth that came to a screeching halt when WW1 broke out. If that hadn't happened she might have kept that pace of growth for another number of years (5-15 would be my guess).

She'd cling a lot closer to Britain too, and the drift towards independence would be a lot slower and more gradual than OTL. English/french relations wouldn't be as strained as OTL.

The World Wars are such radical departures it's tough to say what would have happened had they been snuffed out. I think that social programs would come about eventually, but their pace would be much slower and they might be a little more stunted than OTL... but then again, if governments are relatively wealthy and the world has been at near continuous peace then people might push harder for them than OTL. It's a tough call.

 

[Brady Kj]

Thomas, has there ever been a women's suffrage terrorist group, in the entire history of the world?
Gunslinger, are you referring to population growth or economic growth?

 

[Viriato]

Canada would look a lot different with no world wars. Canada was undergoing huge growth that came to a screeching halt when WW1 broke out. If that hadn't happened she might have kept that pace of growth for another number of years (5-15 would be my guess).

She'd cling a lot closer to Britain too, and the drift towards independence would be a lot slower and more gradual than OTL. English/french relations wouldn't be as strained as OTL.

The World Wars are such radical departures it's tough to say what would have happened had they been snuffed out. I think that social programs would come about eventually, but their pace would be much slower and they might be a little more stunted than OTL... but then again, if governments are relatively wealthy and the world has been at near continuous peace then people might push harder for them than OTL. It's a tough call.

Prior to WWI, the primary investor in Canada was Great Britain, though the U.S. was gaining ascendency, after WWII Canada and Australia shifted from the British orbit to the U.S. economic orbit definitively. With no wars, Britain would remain an economic juggernaut for much longer.

With a strong Britain, the dominions may not see any reason to assert independence when it comes to foreign affairs. The Statute of Westminster only came about because of the post WWI situation. Canada was the first dominion where British influence was supplanted by American. In Australia and New Zealand it was slower, in OTL Australia didn't ratify it until 1942 when the fall of Singapore made the government there realize that it could no longer rely solely on mother Britain for protection. New Zealand didn't ratify the act until 1947.

Economically speaking, WWI and the depression was most severe on commodity producing countries such as Canada and Australia. The wars created short term booms followed by severe busts. Also, the barriers imposed by the closing of trade especially during the depression, retarded economic development.

 

[Malice]

You say that women won't be allowed to vote, but women had full voting rights in quite a few states before World War I, and had some voting rights in almost all states. I imagine the trend would continue.

Women had the right to vote in New Zealand in 1893 and was the first country to grant women the vote in the world. By the outbreak of WW1 suffrage had been extended to women in Australia upon the creation of that country in 1901. Norway granted women the right to vote in 1913. This process would've continued even without the First World War in much the same way as the emancipation of the Jews was sweeping Europe around the same time.

 

[LondoMollari]

Being as we're coming up on the anniversary of the beginning of WWI, I think it interesting to imagine a world without it. So, without the massive wastage of resources and manpower and the damage caused to infrastructure, would the world be more prosperous? Would this extend over the whole world, or would the divide between rich and poor regions be starker?

Well, while much infrastructure would be intact for a couple of decades more than in our time, and 50 million more people, plus their decendents, would be alive to be productive members of their respective countries' workforces, we would be far less advance in most areas.

The sad reality is, that wars are probably THE prime motivator for advancements. First for military use, which later trickles down to civilian use and research. Case in point: Ballistic missiles. Developed by the Germans for military purposes, but that work also made the Apollo program possible.
Jet planes is another example. While the thought had been thought before WW2, it was the German war effort that made it into mass-produced reality.

Now, I'd trade many of those advances in, in a heartbeat, for the horrors of WW2 to have never happened, but we must concede this point: Wars advance technology, and, ultimately, bring benefits down the line. Cynical as that might sound...

 

[Emote Control]

Now, I'd trade many of those advances in, in a heartbeat, for the horrors of WW2 to have never happened, but we must concede this point: Wars advance technology, and, ultimately, bring benefits down the line. Cynical as that might sound...

I see no reason to concede that point. Only WW1 and WW2 could even be argued to advance technology at all -- all those brushfire wars in Africa, or the Korean War, haven't advanced technology, certainly. They've advanced nothing but war profiteers.

Second, you're confusing correlation and causation. Yes, technological advances happened during the wars -- but those technological advances would likely have taken place during those years anyway. Radar, rockets, computation and the nuclear bomb were all under development before WW2, and were simply rushed into production. Sure, the scientists got some more funding, and maybe they worked longer hours, but even that funding took them away from other projects.

Finally, WW1 and WW2 had a vast negative effect on technology and science, by killing off hundreds of millions of potential scientists. I'm a complex analyst, and one of the great minds of my field, Teichmuller, died on the battlefield of WW2, at the young age of 30. In WW1 the equally promising Frechet was killed, and the great Julia was terribly wounded. Grothendieck, probably the single greatest mathematician of the 20th century, very nearly died in a DP camp. Plus you have the fact that universities and laboratories were destroyed, records lost, research disrupted --- and not just during the wars themselves, but for many years afterwards.

 

[Mark E.]

Good things with no WW1 and WW2

-A heck of a lot more living people, a minority of those could invent very good things.
-No Nazism, or if it does exist it will just be a few cranks. No Communism in power.
-Most likely no nukes, at least for a while.
-No destruction caused by the wars.
-No Holocaust and for those of you who hate/dislike Israel no Israel.
-No rationing.

But it's not all good news.

Bad things with no WW1 and WW2

-Without the racism that the Nazis did against white people, racism against non-white people remains acceptable for much longer. Up to at least WW2 in Europe and up to the 1960s in the American South in OTL racism was normal. Without the crimes of the Nazis it might stay normal for decades longer.
-The UK never gets a National Health Service.
-Without the chance to prove themselves in WW1, taking over jobs from men who were fighting in the trenches, women don't get the vote. In the best case, they have to wait an extra 10 to 20 years later then in OTL. In the worst case, some of the suffragettes turn to terrorism, and as governments can't be seen to give in, we have women not having the vote even now.
-If the Great Depression still happens as in OTL, how will the USA get out of it without a war to reenergize the economy?
-The Empires carry on ruling until at least the 1980s (bad if you don't like imperialism.) Although if they ultimately decolonise and educate the people first, most of Africa does not become a basket case which ultimately makes it a Good Thing.
-Without the wars, the left wing is locked out of politics in most places.

Some points about the "bad" aspects.

The American civil rights movement not so much driven by sympathy for the Jews, minorities or the Nuremburg trials. It was driven by suburban sprawl and overall prosperity that made much of American progress "off limits" to blacks and minorities at the end of the fifties. The Jim Crow segregation that was tolerated in 1950 became intolerable a decade later. Television made the disparity painfully obvious on a daily basis, as sponsors filled the (white-only) TV studios with state-of the art appliances and furniture. The civil rights movement will follow whatever factors delay or accelerate automobile-based living.

In terms of women in the work force, American involvement in WWI was so short that their presence in the work force would have had little impact on voting rights. Those issues were in motion for years before the voting rights amendment was finally passed.

Russia, communism and the American Depression.

This is a big variable. Without WWI, do we have a Russian revolution as we know it? If not, does socialism remain a pie-in-the sky philosophy? If so, as a response to the American Depression, do communities selectively adopt some some partial socialism, without religious issues or atheism? After all, the American Midwest had many communial societies, almost all faith-based, in the 19th century, some lasting mere weeks and others lasting decades (the Amana Colonies in Iowa lasted until the 1930's).

 

[Rstone4]

You're confusing correlation with causation, I think.

Well, part of the growth of the 1920s was the money lending to germany so they can pay off their massive debts to the French and English. American banks made good money on that which they were able to invest into the consumer economy of the 1920s, which was the apex of the gilded age birth of the consumer economy which the war had halted. The Consumer goods boom took advantage of the war production from both neutrality and active involvement.

The massive stock-market bubble that grew in 1928 bothered the Federal Reserve so much because they wanted the banks to loan to Germany rather than short term stock market investors that they raised the rates.

 

[Rstone4]

You say that women won't be allowed to vote, but women had full voting rights in quite a few states before World War I, and had some voting rights in almost all states. I imagine the trend would continue.

So, If you remember your disney, Marry Poppins was a nanny for a couple, a Banker and a woman's rights activist in 1910. I don't know if this was part of the books, but The fact that even without the wars women would get the right to vote simply because enough of them had the money and the time on their hands to demand it.

in 1869 Wyoming legalized women voting. My father told me it was so they could reach the population threshold for statehood, I have not followed up on this, my father had a strange way of explaining history. By beginning of the XXth century many western places in the USA were letting women vote. New Zeeland was letting women vote.

Women's suffrage was in full force before the war, if anything it set things back with the idea of "woman, shut up, we have a war to fight." Part of this was the first woman elected to US Congress, Jeanette Rankin in 1917 voted no on WW1 and was not re-elected in 1918. She did get reelected in 1940, just in time to vote no on ww2, the only no vote.

 

[lounge60]

You forget a many important thing.
Without WW-I and WW-I there is not neither cold war.
And the cold war have advanced the technology a lot.

 

[gaijin]

Wars don't improve technology, massive government investment does. Governments spending money on research often leads to developments that private companies don't have the stamina for (imagine a private company trying to go to the moon for example). Wars are by and all destructive.
People are confusing cause and effect I think. Wars often lead to massive government spending on manufacturing, R&D and infrastructure. This is what leads to economic growth. The actual act of fighting a war is destroying wealth not creating it.

 

[Rstone4]

Wars don't improve technology, massive government investment does. Governments spending money on research often leads to developments that private companies don't have the stamina for (imagine a private company trying to go to the moon for example). Wars are by and all destructive.
People are confusing cause and effect I think. Wars often lead to massive government spending on manufacturing, R&D and infrastructure. This is what leads to economic growth. The actual act of fighting a war is destroying wealth not creating it.

But the act of fighting is accompanied with the desire to win and survive your victory.

Massive government spending does BIG things, like Manhattan project or transcontinental rail road or a few trips to the moon. But private sector development does the bulk of inventing new things. How many new things came out of the USSR in the cold war vs the USA? Both did massive government spending, but the USA had a massive private sector, which the USSR lacked.

The actual act of war does destroy wealth, but the desire to win forces creation of new wealth potential. Potential is the key word. All of the medicine that came out of fighting ww2 saved millions of lives that otherwise might not have been saved because that medicine would have been delayed.

 

[Dunning Kruger]

Most of the supposed innovation that came out of the wars would have emerged anyway. The theoretical advances in circuitry, physics, chemicals, and other fields were primarily made outside of wartime. What the wars created were practical uses for the theoretical advances. But there is no reason to think those advances would not have occurred anyway provided there was adequate demand in the private sector.

The one like exception to this is ballistic missile technology with its applications for the space program, satellites, and subsequently communications. I have no doubt German scientists advanced this technology far faster than otherwise would have.

So, to answer the OP, I believe the world would be far richer had there been no world wars, holding all butterflies constant.

 

[DrakonFin]

Without WWI, do we have a Russian revolution as we know it? If not, does socialism remain a pie-in-the sky philosophy? If so, as a response to the American Depression, do communities selectively adopt some some partial socialism, without religious issues or atheism? After all, the American Midwest had many communial societies, almost all faith-based, in the 19th century, some lasting mere weeks and others lasting decades (the Amana Colonies in Iowa lasted until the 1930's).

Many European countries had Social Democratic groups and parties before 1914, and they had been gaining ground for many years. I think a world without world wars would still have strong left wing parties in the 20s and 30s, and their position would be entrenched as a commonplace part of the political milieu. And if these Social Democratic parties manage in many places to push through legislation that helps the workers and the less well off, for their voting base it seems that the democratic system is working. Thus the moderate left wing parties will continually trump the far left in most countries.

In many European countries the depredations and chaos of WWI, especially the latter part, radicalized left wing movements and the Russian example (and sometimes actual Bolsheviks goading them) pushed them to revolutionary acts. Without the war(s), such conditions that seem to allow a violent power grab don't exist and there is less radicalization. If no country in Europe or America goes fully *Communist through a revolution like Russia did, the left also would not be as vilified and feared as it was IOTL. The bourgeois parties would be more inclined to work with the left, and in time would become used to the fact that they have to contend with a strong (if mostly moderate) groups on the left.

The rise of the far right as a "counterweight" to Socialism could well also be somewhat curbed, often keeping would-be Fascists as a minor fringe in bigger parties rather than them forming an actual movement and parties of their own.

 

[Henriksson]

http://www.iaa.es/sites/teslablog.iaa.es/files/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf

Fig. 1 also indicates a general trend of decreased rates of innovation during times of war and increased rates of innovation during times of peace. The rate of innovation declined during World War I and II, and the highest peak at 1845 occurred during a decade with no major wars. Isaac Newton developed calculus and made important contributions to science at the peak in the second half of the 17th century during a time of peace. Major wars before and after this peak include the Thirty Year’s War (1618–1648), Bishop’s Wars (1639–1640), English Civil Wars (1642–1651), War of League of Augsburg (1688–1697), and the War of Spanish Succession(1701–1714).

I don't know where the "war increases technology" theory came from, but it doesn't seem to correlate with the actual evidence.

 

[MattII]

On the technology front, yes, war can sometimes spur government investment in technology, but that doesn't always help. Case in point, aircraft: In 1913, Igor Sikorsly had designed what would have been, in the absence of the war, the world's first airliner, with an insulated saloon, heaters lights, and the world's first airborne toilet. Unfortunately, the service was interrupted by the war, but if the war had been averted, I can easily imagine a sort of airliner race taking place, soaking up government funds to produce larger, grander, faster and longer-ranger aircraft as a matter of national pride, thus aeronautics gets spurred without millions being killed.

 

[kalamona]

http://www.iaa.es/sites/teslablog.iaa.es/files/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf

I don't know where the "war increases technology" theory came from, but it doesn't seem to correlate with the actual evidence.

I think, mostly because the radar, the jet engine and the computer.
These 3 things seems to be a "product" of wartime, even if its quite the opposite.
(Radar developement were seriously hindered by the FIRST ww, jet engine developement were hindered again, not to speak about computers - people always forget the fate of the Colossus or the work of Zuse, if we realyl want to talk about how the war hindered computer developement.)

 

[Curiousone]

I'm pretty sure Europe hit their pre-war level of GDP/capita sometime in the early 1950s and way before the Golden Age of Capitalism ended in the early-mid 1970s.

The pre-war level, yes. Where would they have been in an ATL in the mid-50's without the war though? And damage doesn't necessarily translate to GDP. Consider how long it took London to clear the last of the bomb damage.

I will say one thing for WW2 and the economic levels of our day though. There was just enough of a taste of what atomic weapons could do in it to keep the world from using them again (so far).

Imagine if as other threads ask the Soviets had fallen & the Americans had nuked their way into Central Europe? Into Japan and China?

If peace had held past 1914, past 1945 only for war to break out in say 1950 between nations who had no true idea what industrialized warfare would really mean yet had nuclear arsenals instead of just the machine guns & gas of WW1?

 

[Mark E.]

Massive government spending does BIG things, like Manhattan project or transcontinental rail road or a few trips to the moon. But private sector development does the bulk of inventing new things. How many new things came out of the USSR in the cold war vs the USA? Both did massive government spending, but the USA had a massive private sector, which the USSR lacked.

Precisely. While the US government sunk vast sums of money into missile technology and the race to the moon, it was private enterprise that latched on to the IC microchip after the sixties. The past 50 years of electronic advancement was not primarily oriented to or motivated by war.

In many European countries the depredations and chaos of WWI, especially the latter part, radicalized left wing movements and the Russian example (and sometimes actual Bolsheviks goading them) pushed them to revolutionary acts. Without the war(s), such conditions that seem to allow a violent power grab don't exist and there is less radicalization. If no country in Europe or America goes fully *Communist through a revolution like Russia did, the left also would not be as vilified and feared as it was IOTL. The bourgeois parties would be more inclined to work with the left, and in time would become used to the fact that they have to contend with a strong (if mostly moderate) groups on the left.

The American reactionary conservative response to socialism is primarily related to the Marxist opposition to religion. Without the Russian revolution as a model that included oppression of churches, communism still closely resembles communal living arrangements of the nineteenth century that were often faith-based. In the Depression, you might see some American communities establish collectives to get through rough times.

In Europe, people view their Catholic church as an institution much larger than the state. By contrast, American Baptist churches are independent, individual congregations, smaller than the community and the state, and viewed as vulnerable to a Big Brother that might want to shut them down.