Editing Guns versus butter model (section)

==Significance==
"Butter" represents nonsecurity goods that increase social welfare, such as schools, hospitals, parks, and roads. "Guns" refer to security goods such as personnel&mdash;both troops and civilian support staff&mdash;as well as military equipment like weapons, ships, or tanks. Because these two types of goods represent a tradeoff, a country cannot increase one without negatively impacting the other. States often attempt to share the burden of defense through alliances. This allows a state to reduce its own production of guns and shift resources towards social goods.<ref name="Poast">{{Cite journal|last=Poast|first=Paul|date=2019-05-11|title=Beyond the "Sinew of War": The Political Economy of Security as a Subfield|journal=Annual Review of Political Science|language=en|volume=22|issue=1|pages=223–239|doi=10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317-070912| doi-access=free|issn=1094-2939}}</ref>

If armed conflict is avoided, then expenditure on guns represents deadweight, or resources that could have been better spent on butter. In the case of war, however, the [[production–possibility frontier]] shrinks through the loss of life and infrastructure. This, in turn, limits the ability of the state to produce social goods, and the ability of society to benefit from them.<ref name="Poast"/>