Peace economics
"[11] The notion of violence is not explicit and the benefits of peace are seen only inasmuch as a reduction of conflict may improve opportunities for expanded global trade.
In related work, Tinbergen writes about a world order that would inhibit violence and permit peace between and among states.
[15][20] While for most contemporary economists, work in positive economics may lead them to lay out a descriptive array or evaluation of policy choices from which one that is most valued is recommended to or chosen by policy makers, in peace economics, in contrast, it is the norm of peace to be achieved that inspires the search for a system design that can reliably deliver on the desired norm.
Similarly, choice architecture may facilitate the (re)design of institutions aimed at securing beneficial social outcomes such as peace.
[23] A prominent 20th century US exponent of this idea was the Secretary of State under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Cordell Hull.
Upon resigning from the United Kingdom's Treasury team at the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919, John Maynard Keynes penned a small book.
Predicting a coming World War II, Keynes wrote: "... if this view of nations and of their relation to one another (i.e., a Carthaginian Peace) is adopted by the democracies of Western Europe, and is financed by the United States, heaven help us all.
In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the rise of fascist powers, many western socialist and liberal thinkers believed that capitalism caused war.
[25] Late in World War II, as Nazi-Germany's eventual defeat appeared clear, Henry Morgenthau Jr., then-Secretary of the United States Treasury, advocated the partitioning of Germany, stripping it of its most valuable raw materials and industrial assets, and envisioned the complete pastoralization of Germany.
Following victory, Germany's remaining factories were dismantled, parts, machinery, and equipment shipped abroad, patents expropriated, research forbidden, and useful engineers and scientists transferred out of the country.
The new global institutions and the unilateral Marshall Plan action combined to endow new institutions with sufficient resources to result in a somewhat unwitting peace economics: clearly designed toward the purpose of international peace and prosperity, yet skewed toward Western Europe and the incipient Cold War.
Despite this, the French appreciated his good efforts and awarded him with the post of Deputy Secretary-General of the then newly founded League of Nations.
Thus, no institutional structures were put in place that, due to accrued vested interests, would later prove to be too difficult to change.
It does this by developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analysing country-level risk and understanding positive peace.
"[29] More recently, there is a turn towards local implications of economic reforms in conflict-affected societies in an attempt to understand how economies of peace impact on the everyday.
