the "world" part of world war is also important. pretty much every economy involved was at least undergoing heavy handed rationing of goods, encouraging people to donate scrap metal, etc.

Russians are not under food rationing yet.

Here’s hoping they feel the war in Moscow and St Petersburg this year. A bit of rationing wouldn’t hurt them.

More than the war, they’ll feel the peace. More than 100% of the economic growth of the last few years has gone into war production, meaning the civilian economy has shrunk. When the weapons factories are scaled back the economy is going to hurt something fierce. Even Muscovites will notice.

This is why Putin can’t stop fighting. When the fighting stops Russia will face a reckoning. Better to postpone that day hoping that Europe runs out of steam.

ww2 history begs to differ. The USSR has seen massive economic growth in 1946-1950s.

That was a very different situation. The USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, and despite its huge losses still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap. It was much more like the process of industrialisation in China that’s seen huge growth there over the last generation. Russia has already industrialised so it doesn’t have a catch-up growth opportunity in the same way. They are much more labour and resource constrained these days.

"still had vast reserves of labour in the countryside to tap"

There was a huge shortage of labor in the countryside after the war.

This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves). But leading up to WWII, they were transformed into educated, literate, laborers. Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).

So while there was less labor, they were far more productive labor thanks to post-revolution, post-WWI measures

So one person says, USSR was still catching up in industrialisation, the other one says, they were far more productive... what is it? The whole argument still feels far-fetched at the very least.

> This labor was, pre-war, a bunch of poor, uneducated serfs (basically slaves).

This is incorrect. Serfdom in Russian empire was abolished in 1861, long before the revolution. Peasant literacy rates, while still poor, had been gradually improving after that.

> Also the USSR had invested leading up to WW2 in agriculture outside Ukraine (since the Nazis controlled it).

What? Not only Ukraine was controlled by Bolsheviks at the start of WW2 its territories have also been extended with parts of Poland and Romania annexed by Soviets between the start of WW2 and the so-called "Great Patriotic" phase of the war.

The USSR's (well, Russia's) growth had begun before WW2, and it was in response to pre-WW1 Russian being severely underdeveloped. There was a ton of room for growth that started before WWII, and it continued unabated.

Basically, Russia up to WW2 had economic growth because it was "catching up" to the West. Industrialization was one place. Literacy was another. There was a huge effort to improve literacy after the Tsar was killed.

Finally, because the Nazis occupied Ukraine during WW2, Russia/the USSR had to develop other places during WW2 just to feed its people, which accelerated growth post-war.

These conditions do not exist today, I don't think. But this isn't my area of expertise. I just know that Russia was a feudalistic shithole until the Tsar was overthrown, and then they worked hard to turn the serfs into educated and literate people, right as they were forced by invasion to economically develop previously overlooked lands.

If you want a very pro-1% take on this, check out Anna Karenina. The "good guy" main character of the novel is a large landowner with a lot of serfs (read: slaves) whom he visits and instructs, based on latest science, how to farm better.

Same thing happened in Japan about a generation or two earlier. There's ar eason tiny, flyover Japan beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese war. Russia was totally backwards, even by "barely industrialized Japan" standards.

British Empire was heavily involved in Europe, North Africa and South-East Asia. Events in India had great consequences on Europe

The USSR on the other hand barely had any involvement in the Pacific theatre, entering in August 1945.

The USSR had to carefully keep enough land forces in the Pacific region to deter a Japanese land invasion. (Remember that Japan controlled Manchukuo.) So, yes, the USSR had little involvement, and they had to be very careful to keep it from becoming an active front.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol (that was in 1939).

Fear of the USSR entering the war against them was also a deciding factor in Japan's surrender. More so than the atomic bombs.

> But the entire economic surplus of Europe, Asia and North America was basically dedicated to (or extracted towards) making things that were reasonably expected to be destroyed within the year.

This is no longer necessary to inflict the catastrophic destruction we're really referring to when talking about a hypothetical WWIII

Their argument is that, by definition, it can’t be a world war unless all economic surplus is dedicated to war purposes.

I tend to agree with both of you, and that by extension, we will never see another world war unless society as we know it collapses significantly.

I don't think you are using standard definitions.

> A world war is an international conflict that involves most or all of the world's major powers. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war

> Total war is a type of warfare that mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain war production, blurring the line between military and civilian activities and legitimate attacks on civilian targets as part of a war without restriction as to the combatants, territory or objectives involved. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

It does so happen that the two world wars were also total wars.

Well first off I think we were speaking colloquially. But secondly, I think unless certain powers cross some threshold where they’re undeniably engaging “total war”, they’ll use wishy-washy terms like “special military operation” (Russia) or “armed conflict”. That’s also not to mention proxy wars (Syria) or even non-violent acts of aggression against sovereignty (Hong Kong).

In other words, “total war” is a necessary ingredient for a “world war” these days or you’ll have all of these countries claiming they’re not actually at war.

Things have changed since I was a kid. We've gone from saturation bombing and dropping nukes as the big kahuna to being able to do point assassination strikes.

Topical the Israelis just killed Khamenei.