I don&#x27;t think the deaths are the most important thing; rather, it&#x27;s the absences:<p>• Presume that a job market contains people with job-skills, and people without (i.e. &quot;lemons&quot;).<p>• Presume that businesses function better when they can select from a talent pool with fewer lemons; and that lemons in a job market create &quot;noise&quot; in the hiring process that cause openings to go unfilled for longer.<p>• Now, presume either a draft (which doesn&#x27;t care about job-skills, but does care about age, tending to select for younger people with fewer job-skills), or simply a military with lower job-skill requirements for entry than most occupations.<p>Thus, a military on a war footing will selectively withdraw more lemons than non-lemons from the job market, leaving it full of higher-quality candidates, making the businesses in that market more efficient.<p>For this hypothesis to be accurate, the same thing would have to happen if we just gave all the people being sent to war public-sector jobs (or Basic Income) instead. Though that would perhaps work <i>better</i> than a war for stimulating the economy: people remaining in the country would be spreading their demand across the market, rather than consuming goods exclusively from the military&#x27;s line-of-supply contractors.