- I'm James Boyce. I'm an economist at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Among the tools that economists can use for the purpose of studying war and peace are the analysis of distribution of who gets what. Because when we're looking at war and peace, we are of course looking at conflicts within societies. And the idea of treating society as if it were an undifferentiated mass as represented, for example, by national income or at the micro level, by the net benefit of a given development project, is of course an oversimplification that simply cannot be sustained when a critical issue is who gets what and how those economic policies are impacting the balance of power or the distribution between competing groups. So in particular, one dimension of inequality that's been lifted up has been what's known as horizontal inequality. So vertical inequality, the type with which economists are a bit more familiar is simply a matter of ranking the population of a country, for example, from richest to poorest and measuring the degree of disparity. But horizontal inequality is a rather different dimension of inequality, and one that often is particularly salient in the context of violent context. Horizontal inequality is inequality between groups that are defined on some basis other than the fact that they're rich or poor. Defined, for example, on the basis of the region, on whether they are in urban as opposed to rural areas on the basis of ethnicity or language or religion. These are horizontal inequalities, inequalities across groups. Groups that in turn are often mobilized on behalf of conflict against other groups in society. If one decides as an economic policy maker to provide large scale economic assistance to a government, which represents one side in a conflict and excludes assistance to the other side in that conflict, the chances are that assistance, while it may succeed in growing the economic pie, as measured by GDP, it may succeed in building some miles of roads or airports or whatever. It won't succeed in actually building a durable piece. On the contrary, it will exacerbate the conflict. One of the ironies of the conventional measures that economists use for assessing social welfare, that is to say total GDP, is that actually counts expenditures on arms as a benefit. Your economy's bigger, you've grown if you're spending more money on arms, even if those arms are being used to kill people, and in the process the arms are being destroyed, well then you have to spend more on more arms. It's good for growth as conventionally measured. That doesn't mean it's good for people. It doesn't mean it's good for the human beings. It may be good for a few people who are profiting from this or using those resources to persecute their foes or rivals, but it's not good for human wellbeing as a whole. And at the end of the day, human welfare is what economics should be about.