February 08, 2016
Binyamin Appelbaum has an NYT piece arguing that many economists oppose a draft. At the risk of losing my economist card, let me raise a couple of points of dissent.
First, Appelbaum dismisses the argument that requiring everyone to share the risk of fighting a war, regardless of class, as being a deterrent to politicians’ adventurism. He refers to research that shows this is not true.
While I have not seen the research, I would be skeptical. Even if the children from wealthier families can ultimately escape a draft, forcing them to jump through hoops still means they pay a price for a war, even if not as great a price as the children from poorer families who actually have to fight. (Bill Clinton’s letter to his ROTC colonel is an excellent example of this sort of price. ROTC was a way to escape the war for those lucky enough or connected enough to get in.) Certainly protests of the Vietnam War seemed to fall off sharply when Nixon stopped sending draftees there, as the piece notes.
The other point is that the military has historically been an important source of upward mobility, at least for men, when it involved near universal service. This meant that children from disadvantaged backgrounds had the opportunity to meet, and occasionally make connections with, people who grew up in families with far more resources. (It is also good if people who will subsequently hold positions of responsibility at least have some contact with people who grew up in working class and poor families.)
These benefits are even more concrete when veterans enjoy benefits like low-cost or no-cost college tuition and access to low interest mortgages. Congress is more likely to support generous veterans benefits when they apply to nearly the whole population, rather than a subset of relatively low-income people who have little alternative to the military as a promising career opportunity.
For these reasons a draft might not be a bad idea, in spite of the standard economic arguments against it.
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said that the piece had claimed that “all” economists opposed the draft.
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