A TANTALISING fragment from the abstract of a paper by Robert Barro posted this week at NBER:


That starts to make the UN budget look a bargain, if we can only make the thing work a bit better.

I presume Barro means a one-time charge of 20%, not a compounding 20%, but even so. Can it be true? I'm not saying I would pay a premium for wars and disasters, but they do form part of life's rich tapestry, and the newspapers would be a duller place without them, especially when they happen a fair distance away.

If we are bracketing wars with disaster risks, then presumably we have in mind mainly wars-we-lose; or would we be so altruistic as to pay 20% of our income to bring to an end wars that we win?

And by "disaster risk" do we mean "disasters"? After all, if you shopped around judiciously, you might (I imagine) get an all-disasters insurance policy for 20% of your income which would make you whole from any such event. Is that merely another way to say what Barro is saying, or do we pay an altruistic extra for knowing that nobody else will suffer either?  

And what if we could make the payments retrospectively? Would we pay 20% of our income to stop wars having happened in the past? The second world war probably yes; but the first world war?  The Trojan wars?  A silly question, but is it really so much sillier than tithing our income now to save people 300 years into the future from global warming?

But what a great abstract. Now to read the paper.