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November 19, 2005

This is interesting

From this interview:

RF: How does increased compensation affect soldiers' decisions to re-enlist?

Moffitt: I have tried to build some simple models which assume that soldiers are forward-looking agents. Much of this work was co-authored with Tom Daula. I have found that the bonuses the military has offered to get soldiers to re-enlist do not have a large effect. They simply are not big enough to change most soldiers' decisions. What is more important is the type of training that a soldier can expect to get in the military. Let's say that you join when you are 18 and that you make a career of it, meaning you spend 20 years with the military. That means you get out when you are 38. Sure, you get a nice military retirement package when you leave. But at 38, you are still a relatively young man and you will want to have acquired skills that will allow you to have a career on the outside at a good job. Those type of issues tend to dominate compensation issues, especially when the compensation takes the form of a one-time bonus payment for re-enlistment.

I find this interesting, because one of the things I believe is that the US military has always provided a sort of social safety valve. Because it provides education to its members, while most raw recruits come from the lower strata of our society, it provides a clear path to the middle and upper class. As the ads say, “we'll page for college”, and they do; the average US soldier is better educated then the average American.

So while one day I see us dramatically drawing down our military, we'll have to find something to replace it with. The Peace Corp won't do it, they're kind of snobby; you have to have a college degree to join. Maybe we could have a “disaster” force that would respond to natural disasters all over the world, but that's my own weird twist on Thomas Barnett's SysAdmin force.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolutions

Posted by the at November 19, 2005 2:11 PM

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Comments

While what you say is probably true for those raw recruits who do come from the lower strata, most recruits do not. The lowest quintile is the only quintile to be underrepresented in the military. The top two quintiles are the most overrepresented. This is true even though fully forty percent of recruits come from the South, which is the poorest region of the country; while only fifteen percent come from the Northeast, which is the richest.

See:

http://tapscottscopydesk.blogspot.com/2005/10/data-shows-military-recruits-highly.html

Posted by: Grim at November 21, 2005 6:38 PM