It's been just over a year since I last felt like posting something. Today, a few different numbers passed by my screen that suggested a connection.
The title of course refers to the classic Clausewitz and Zhou Enlai aphorisms to the effect that wars and politics are simply continuations of each other. With the perspective of Voltaire's observation that God fights on the side of the biggest battallions, an election can be considered as a simulated war, where both sides simply line up, count off, and decide who would win based on that. It's less inarguably conclusive and less final (the living being prone to more vigorous argument than the dead), but it tends to be cheaper than a civil war, providing a cost savings to societies preferring elections over civil wars for resolution of leadership disputes. (I'd suggest courts of law are a further continuation of the dispute resolution spectrum, but that's a topic for another diary someday.)
How much cheaper? Well, the 2012 elections made for one of the most expensive such in our nation's history. The price tag at all levels was circa seven gigabucks. On the other hand, 2012 GDP was circa fifteen terabucks, leaving around 0.05% GDP the vicinity of upper-bound costs. In contrast, this Congressional Research Service publication indicates the US Civil War cost circa 10% US GDP, which makes elections look like a great bargain. Yay, representative democratic republics.
All this seems pretty obvious, right? So, on to a slightly less obvious step.
The geometric mean of the two percentages would be about 0.7% GDP. Coincidentally, the October 2013 government shutdown is estimated by S&P to result in costs of 0.6% of the US GDP over the next year — just minutely lower than that mean, and comparable to the costs of some of the "brush wars" in the CRS document.
In other words, the current political conflict looks like it's toeing its way up to where an economist would be trying to draw a line for Clausewitz. This does not seem to be a good thing.