Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Foreign Policy & News "Unintended Consequences of Military Intervention"

My hypothesis is quite specific, to wit:
ECONOMICS IS THE MAIN MOTIVATION FOR WARS AND INTERVENTIONS.
In other words, even when there are other motives, the economic ones are the most important.

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. As such, it is a conclusion.

Both my posts and those of numan present a reason why collective decisions tend to be less complex than those of individuals. There is no hard and fast way to determine the process that leads to complexity.

That issue is the threat of Kim Jong Un re: attacking the U.S. What form does the economic motivator take that provokes North Korea's saber rattling?

A question, noomie - what do you think are the "unintended consequences" referred to in the article title? It seems to me that all of the consequences are, if not intended, at least generally predictable.

When does it become a hypothesis? Perhaps when one, or more, examples are presented (with supporting facts)?

This example does not include collective decisions. I suspect that Hitler and Saddam Hussein did not indulge in the collective decision-making process, either.

A conclusion/hypothesis that ECONOMICS IS THE MAIN MOTIVATION FOR WARS AND INTERVENTIONS.
- No examples have been looked at to support the conclusion/hypothesis.
- Several examples have been presented that seem to indicate that economics is not always the main motivation for wars and interventions.
- A second incomplete hypothesis that collective decision-making causes economic motivatiors (?).
- Several examples of nation-level dictatorial decision-making, suggesting that not all large-scale decisions are made collectively.

Critical thinking is reflective reasoning about beliefs and actions. It is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false.

The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition. There is a reasonable level of consensus among experts that an individual or group engaged in strong critical thinking gives due consideration to establish:
Evidence through observation
Context
Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand
In addition to possessing strong critical-thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance, and fairness.

The habits of mind that characterize a person strongly disposed toward critical thinking include a desire to follow reason and evidence wherever they may lead, a systematic approach to problem solving, inquisitiveness, even-handedness, and confidence in reasoning.
When individuals possess intellectual skills alone, without the intellectual traits of mind, weak sense critical thinking results. Fair-minded or strong sense critical thinking requires intellectual humility, empathy, integrity, perseverance, courage, autonomy, confidence in reason, and other intellectual traits. Thus, critical thinking without essential intellectual traits often results in clever, but manipulative and often unethical or subjective thought.

It's your hypothesis, Ezekial. Go for it.

It has been presented with factual evidence. I have seen no alternative explanation.

It has been presented with factual evidence. I have seen no alternative explanation.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about current political issues, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.

Alrighty, then. You won't mind if I submit your hypothesis and proof to Wikipedia then, so the whole world can benefit?

I wonder if this thing here has any relevance to the discussion?

confrimation bias

War can be seen as a growth of economic competition in a competitive international system. In this view wars begin as a pursuit of markets for natural resources and for wealth. While this theory has been applied to many conflicts, such counter arguments become less valid as the increasing mobility of capital and information level the distributions of wealth worldwide, or when considering that it is relative, not absolute, wealth differences that may fuel wars. There are those on the extreme right of the political spectrum who provide support, fascists in particular, by asserting a natural right of a strong nation to whatever the weak cannot hold by force.[99][100] Some centrist, capitalist, world leaders, including Presidents of the United States and US Generals, expressed support for an economic view of war.

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? – Woodrow Wilson, September 11, 1919, St. Louis.[101]

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. – Major General Smedley Butler (simultaneously the highest ranking and most decorated United States Marine (including two Medals of Honor) and Republican Party primary candidate for the United States Senate) 1935.[102]

For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based. – C. Wright Mills, Causes of World War 3, 1960.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. – Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961.