Hey /biz? I'm stuck on this question for my econ class and

>>1570362
How is this a hard question? It says not shit, the only interesting thing about that figure is how small it is. So either the gov't didn't care a whole lot or the Iranian gov't was weak as fuck. Right/wrong not applicable to numbers.

That's a subjective question. Weak or strong in what sense? Toppling a foreign and possibly hostile democratically elected government, and installing a friendly dictator because it was at the time in our economic interests was (in my opinion) wrong and extremely short sighted. In return for 15 years of the pro-west shah we created a monster. That's merely from an economic perspective, from a moral perspective it was even worse. When a nation like Iran has an election and says we want to pursue a new course that brings us closer to the USSR instead of America we as a democracy ourselves have to accept that and try to learn what it was we did that so turned them off from us, not just say fuck you have a dictator who supports us instead. The goal of American foreign policy should be to bring freedom to as many as possible, not snuff it out because its economically expedient. And as we've seen, even that economic expedience was short sighted as now we've had a government in Iran for over 40 years that's FAR more hostile to the US than Mossedegh ever was.

>>1570362
What kind of fucking Econ class is this? My undergrad is in Econ and never in any of my classes did I ever get a foreign policy question like this.

>>1570362
>Can this real figure be used to address questions as to how weak or strong the Mossedegh government was
$531K is a retarded low number to topple a government considering what we spend on a single bomber or tank. I guess you could say Mossedegh government wasn't retardedly weak?

>Can this real figure be used to address questions whether it was right or wrong to topple a foreign government?
No. the dollar amount has nothing to do with your moral perspective. E,g, if you're a far-left fuitcake like Noam Chomsky, then you think hiring someone is slavery no matter what the person being hired says. Liberals don't understand national defense and reason.

>>1570362
What should be asked is how efficiently the funds were used. This can be calculated with astonishing precision, and, if inefficiencies are found (in terms of allocations of funds), these inefficiencies should be corrected by either reallocating the funds to other sub-programs, or changing the management.

The price mechanism provides astonishing information on how efficient the decisions which are being made are. If the risk-adjusted returns on the programs is shitty, the funds should be diverted. Unless one wants to keep funding inefficient shit which doesn't work, which is another question entirely.

And as the others said, the question simply makes no sense.

>>1570378
>Liberals don't understand national defense and reason.
that's a bit of a broad statement don't you think? What makes you think conservatives understand national defense better? The Iraq war was something conservatives had wanted for years and all it did was make our nation weaker.

>>1570387
>implying Democrats weren't chomping at the bit to go after Iraq too
>implying Bill Clinton didn't also bomb Iraq during his presidency

Iraq has been a complex foreign policy problem for our nation since Reagan was in office and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

>>1570392
indeed, but I was just using that as an example to show how retarded it is to say liberals don't understand national defense when you could just as easily say conservatives don't understand it either

I really hate such sweeping generalizations, yet they're used so frequently these days.

>>1570362
Also, if you want to research more on the topic, you should study the areas of stochastic game and decision theory with incomplete information (the "right/wrong" part), and economics 101 for the "was it worth it" part.

That being said, a form of benefit accounting (which is risk-adjusted) is necessary for any kind of right/wrong questions to be asked. Is it only the economic advantages brought by the project which are at stake? Is it more? If it is more, one obviously needs a proper model to value the benefit of such programs, in order to be able to make decisions regarding them.

>>1570387
He's using the term in the traditional sense. World politics 101 is usually a mandatory class at most universities. If you assume his statement has nothing to do with US politics, then it is not wrong.

>>1570399
ok it was a little bit of bait but I felt like Op's whole thread was bait to begin with

>>1570399
I'd agree with you. At the end of the day most problems facing those holding national political office require a pragmatic solution and not one based in the ideology of whatever their party is.

>>1570400
To elaborate my point some more, a sort of a project utility valuation could be used and implemented easily.
This utility valuation could include the economic benefits, the strategic and geopolitical benefits, and so on.

The foreign policy decisions could then be as rational as investment decisions. One could make decisions on whether one wants to seek long-term or short-term advantages... and more importantly, one could value the risk, which could be easily measured, based on the volatility of the payoff of different programs.

>>1570362
The cost of toppling the Iranian government in 1953 was in 2016 dollars about $531k. Now we know that toppling the Iranian government today would cost roughly $2 trillion. So the answer is answered by answering the following two questions: Why so expensive now (hint oil, technology and population.) and What government could we topple today for $513K and why, if none, is this so. Moral questions are outside of economics. So think about these issues more deeply.