Category: Political Science
When should rhetoric be racially salient?
Utilizing a correlational design (N = 498), we found that those who perceived COVID-19 racial disparities to be greater reported reduced fear of COVID-19, which predicted reduced support for COVID-19 safety precautions. In Study 2, we manipulated exposure to information about COVID-19 racial disparities (N = 1,505). Reading about the persistent inequalities that produced COVID-19 racial disparities reduced fear of COVID-19, empathy for those vulnerable to COVID-19, and support for safety precautions. These findings suggest that publicizing racial health disparities has the potential to create a vicious cycle wherein raising awareness reduces support for the very policies that could protect public health and reduce disparities.
Here is more from Skinner-Dorkenoo et.al. Via D. There may be broader lessons as well.
How the heritability of politics works?
Estimates from the Minnesota Twin Study show that sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public – much more so than population-level results (57%) – but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half.
Here is the research article by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Martin Johnson. The reference is from Matt Yglesias, and one possibility is that you are born with inherited values, but you need to be educated to learn where those values ought to put you on the political spectrum.
Data on IR scholars and their views on Russia/Ukraine
MR reader Edmund Levin sent me this very useful piece, based around a poll of IR scholars, with the poll opened on December 16 and if I understand correctly continuing through some point in January 2022.
Here is one question “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses:
Yes 203 56.08%
No 73 20.17%
Do not know 86 23.76%
You will note that the question could simply be referring to some additional police action, which is in fact what many people were predicting at the time. I find it striking that the researchers don’t ask about a full-scale invasion. What percentage would have predicted a full-scale attack?
Here is the same question posed to the regional specialists, namely: “In the next year, will Russia use military force against Ukrainian military forces or additional parts of the territory of Ukraine where it is not currently operating?” The responses are barely different, though slightly better:
Yes 36 (60.0%)
No 12 (20.0%)
Don’t know 12 (20.0%)
I take those results to be 60-40 that a modest majority of the specialists respondents expected further Russian military action in the next year, again noting that additional police action would suffice to generate a “yes” response.
Is that a good or bad performance relative to a full-scale invasion date of February 24, with the massing of Russian troops well underway?
If I turn to the December 3 Washington Post, I see a major article by journalists Shane Harris and Paul Sonne, titled “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.” The piece offers plenty of detail, including photos, maps, and good sourcing. Of course it turned out to be correct, and I am only one of many people who realized this at the time. Furthermore, if you saw such a piece, you might have inquired with your network at the time (as I did), including sources in multiple relevant countries, and learned in response that the predictions of this article were no joke, no media excess, and in fact likely to happen. Furthermore the rhetoric, demand, and logistics investments of Russia at the time strongly suggested “attack and blame Ukraine” as the equilibrium, rather than some kind of knife-edge bargaining strategy of “attack with p = 0.6” — that one can learn by reading Thomas Schelling.
So in my view the regional IR specialists were well behind the understanding of two Washington Post reporters, or for that matter well-connected newspaper readers. A lot of the experts don’t seem to have tracked the issue very closely. Here is my previous (lengthy) post on the topic.
Addendum: Levin also points out to me that Sam Charap of Rand got it right as early as fall of 2021.
My Conversation with Jamal Greene
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Jamal and Tyler discuss what he’d change about America’s legal education system, the utility of having non-judges or even non-lawyers on the Supreme Court, how America’s racial history influences our conception of rights, the potential unintended consequences of implementing his vision of rights for America, how the law should view economic liberty, the ideal moral framework for adjudicating conflicts, whether social media companies should consider interdependencies when moderating content on their platforms, how growing up in different parts of New York City shaped his views on pluralism, the qualities that make some law students stand out, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There is a crude view in popular American society — even possibly correct — that, simply, American society is too legalistic. There’s that book, Three Felonies a Day. If you have expired prescription medicine in your cabinet, you’re committing a felony. People who are very smart will just tell me, “Never talk to a cop. Never talk to an FBI agent.” I’m an upper-class White guy who’s literally never smoked marijuana once, and they’re telling me, “Don’t ever speak with the law.”
Isn’t something wrong there? Is the common intuition that we’re too legalistic correct?
GREENE: I think that we are too apt to submit political disputes to legal resolution. I think that for sure. What your friends are telling you about police officers is slightly different, insofar as one can have a deeply non-legalistic culture in which the correct advice is to not talk to police officers if those people are corrupt, if those people are abusive.
When I hear that advice — and I might be differently situated than you — that’s what people are saying is, someone might be out to trick you. And that might be a mistrust of state power, as you mentioned before. Maybe it’s a rational mistrust of state power, but I don’t know that that’s about legalism, which again, is a separate potential problem.
We tend to formulate our problems in legal terms, as if the right way to solve them is to decide how they are to be resolved by a court, or how they are to be resolved by some adjudicative official, as opposed to thinking about our problems in terms of just inherent in, again, pluralism, which has to be solved through politics, has to be solved through conversation.
COWEN: But we still have whatever is upstream of the American law, the steep historical and cultural background, so anything we do is going to be flavored by that. We’re not ever going to get to a system where the policemen are like the policemen in Germany, for instance, or that the courts are like the courts in Germany.
Given that cultural upstream, again, isn’t the intuition basically correct? Just be suspicious of the law. We should have fewer laws, rely less on the legal process, in essence, deregulate as many different things as we can. Why isn’t that the correct conclusion, rather than building in more rights?
Interesting throughout.
How did the IR community get Russia/Ukraine so wrong?
In proper Tetlockian fashion, I thought I would look back and consider how well IR experts did in the time leading up to the current war in Ukraine. In particular, how many of them saw in advance that a war was coming? And I don’t mean a day or two before the war started, though there were still many commentators in denial at such a late point.
Where to start? One might look at the mid-2021 words of the very smart Daniel Drezner:
Wertheim thinks that Ukraine could trigger a great-power war. Meh. In 2021 we have already had one round of Putin brandishing the sword on Ukraine, Biden standing firm, and the situation de-escalating. NATO’s deterrent power seems important to the region. To be honest I would be more worried about flash points in the Pacific Rim.
Drezner lived in the Donbas region for some while in the 1990s, so he is hardly a stranger to the relevant issues.
More recently Chris Blattman, who is also very able and very smart, wrote in February that Putin probably was not going to attack. Chris has just published a very well-received major book titled Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Path to Peace. Chris does not pretend he is a Ukraine/Russia expert (“I know very little about Ukraine or Russia”), but he does command the literature on war and violent conflict with very real authority.
John Mearsheimer is one who foresaw the very real possibility of a war against Ukraine. I think he is quite wrong about NATO as the provocation, but if you are grading him on predictions alone obviously he wins some serious kudos.
See also this Scott Alexander post, though mainly I am looking for somewhat earlier predictions. By December 2021 a lot of us knew because it was pretty obvious (as for Scott’s puzzlement over me, due to the information flows I am sometimes in, I am not always in a position to make all my predictions fully public).
Garry Kasparov is another one who was right about the motives and the willingness of Putin to engage in further violent conquest, and I will return to him later. Garry knows a lot of IR, but of course he is not an IR scholar in the academic sense of that term.
Who were the other voices speaking up with urgency? IR voices? Comments are open and I hope you can guide me to the very best commentators who got this one right.
When I google “who predicted Russia war against Ukraine” I get Mearsheimer, a retired Russian general, and a blind psychic, but no bevy of IR scholars.
You might argue that IR scholarship is not about prediction, just as some macroeconomic theories themselves imply that recessions cannot be generally predicted. Still, if IR scholars understand this region reasonably well, many more of them should have been raising red flags, no pun intended. There is no analog of the efficient markets hypothesis here, so IR work should not be so far from some degree of predictive accuracy. Not so many scholars (of various kinds) predicted the collapse of the USSR, and I think it is absolutely correct to conclude they did not understand the late 1980s USSR very well. The same can be said of the earlier Iranian revolution, which also was not widely predicted.
As for further instances of getting it wrong, how about Obama’s famous gaffe in the 2012 debate with Mitt Romney, mocking Romney for his fear of Russia and cold war mentality? While Obama was a President and not an IR scholar, this was toward the end of his first-term and his was a “presidency of expertise” like few others have been. Obama was not irresponsibly “winging it” with his sarcastic take on Russian danger, rather it was a common point of view, especially among Democrats and Democratic political science experts at that time.
Or consider this more recently:
During Burns’ Senate confirmation hearing in February, he said that, as CIA director, he would have “four crucial and inter-related priorities.” They were: “China, technology, people and partnerships.” Russia was not on that priorities list.
Again, he is not an IR scholar but still:
To be fair, few people in Washington were bothered by that at the time. The city was far more obsessed, on a bipartisan basis, with China and its ambitions.
Overall, on a scale of one to ten, how would we grade the performance of IR scholars on the Russia-Ukraine war? 2? 2.5?
What are some possible reasons for those individuals so consistently missing the boat on this issue? I see a few options:
1. The IR community is mostly Democrats, and they were unprepared for the narrative that Putin might invade under Biden but not Trump. They too much had mental models where the evil of Putin works through Trump.
2. Perhaps the IR community doesn’t put enough emphasis on historical continuity and persistence. Russia has been messing around in Ukraine since at least Catherine the Great during the 18th century. Since that time, how many of those years has Ukraine been a semi-free, autonomous nation? Hardly any.
3. The IR community is risk-averse, and preserving of its academic reputations, and thus its members are less willing to make bold predictions than say pundits are. You might even think that is good, all things considered, but it will help explain the missed predictions here.
4. Perhaps partly for ideological reasons, it is hard for much of the IR community to internalize how much Putin (correctly?) thinks of the Western Europeans as cowards who will not defend themselves. The Western European nations are supposed to represent reasonable ways of running a polity, committed to social democracy above all else, and that is what so many academics believe as well. It might be hard for them to see that Western Europe has been full of folly, including with respect to nuclear energy and also collective defense.
5. Amongst academic and many of the scholars outside of academia but on the fringes, thoughts about evil are channeled into domestic directions, such as Trump, guns, “the right wing,” and so on. Maybe there isn’t enough mental energy to stay sufficiently alert about possible evils elsewhere. Along related lines, we don’t always have the background in the humanities, and history, to recognize that a certain kind of destructive evil still is possible in today’s world.
What else?
Listing those five points returns my attention to Kasparov, who has been banging the drum about Putin for quite a few years now and telling us Putin is going to do something like this. Garry is often considered an “extremist” by academics, or “not one of the club,” but it seems to me he has been entirely right and most of them entirely wrong. I know Garry, and can report that he really is able to pierce the veil on 1-5 very clearly. Perhaps that helped him see what was coming. For instance, Garry is strongly anti-Trump, but he doesn’t let that distract him from other issues of relevance. He also knows Russian history and the humanities very well, and his understanding of evil is well-calibrated to yield good predictions in situations like this.
I’ve also found that many individuals from the Baltic states, with real skin in the game, have had an appropriate level of suspicion about Russia for a long time. Anecdotally might this broadly Baltic view be more correct than the weaker suspicions held by the IR scholars?
Addendum: I’ve heard a few people claim that Putin is just an irrational madman and that he lies outside the sphere of prediction altogether. Well, the action in Ukraine had very definite and very direct precursors, including other invasions of Ukraine! It hardly seems like a pure black swan. Furthermore, a lot of the Russian public supports or at least tolerates the invasion. “Putin’s propaganda,” some cry, but all that same machinery of censorship and propaganda was not enough to get the Russian public to trust the Sputnik vaccine, which very likely would have saved many of their lives. So these events are not just about Putin by any means.
Also, if you are curious as to where I think things stand now, here is a good and interesting thread on the current state of the war and where it might be headed.
The magnitude of depolicing
Using a time regression discontinuity design, we estimate a 72.7 percent decrease in lower-level “quality of life” arrests, and a 69 percent decrease in non-index crime arrests in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s death. Our results also show that the decrease in arrests is driven by a 69 percent decrease in police-initiated calls for service. Using the same approach, we find a much smaller decrease of 2.7 percent in arrests and a 1.5 percent decrease in police calls following police-involved shootings. Our results, thus, suggest that the Ferguson Effect exists, and it is much larger following highly publicized events of police violence such as George Floyd’s death.
That is from the new AER, by Maya Mikdash and Reem Zaiour, “Does (All) Police Violence Cause De-policing? Evidence from George Floyd and Police Shootings in Minneapolis.” The title I find slightly Straussian, I hope not outright naive.
“A political football” takes on new meaning (MIE)
The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.
Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.
The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.
The deal was born when both of Winn’s agents, Dale and Sam Hutcherson, came up with the idea and presented it to him, he told Front Office Sports.
“I’ve been lifelong friends with Colin. He’s always supported me,” he said. From there, it was an easy decision to sign with the candidate.
As part of the partnership, Winn said he wore a campaign shirt during a football camp that he ran last weekend. On Monday, his announcement on Twitter included photos of himself and Johnson — both of whom were wearing campaign apparel — spending time on a football field. The tweet encouraged voters to ensure they were registered for the August election.
As for future promotions, Winn said they’re going to “see how things go from here.”
Winn declined to disclose financial terms of the deal.
America! Here is the full story, via Daniel Lippman.
That is now, this was then, Taiwan edition
Words matter, in diplomacy and in law.
Last week President Bush was asked if the United States had an obligation to defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China. He replied, “Yes, we do, and the Chinese must understand that. Yes, I would.”
The interviewer asked, “With the full force of the American military?”
President Bush replied, “Whatever it took” to help Taiwan defend itself.
A few hours later, the president appeared to back off this startling new commitment, stressing that he would continue to abide by the “one China” policy followed by each of the past five administrations.
Where once the United States had a policy of “strategic ambiguity” — under which we reserved the right to use force to defend Taiwan but kept mum about the circumstances in which we might, or might not, intervene in a war across the Taiwan Strait — we now appear to have a policy of ambiguous strategic ambiguity. It is not an improvement.
Here is the full 2001 Wapo Op-Ed — can you guess who the author was? Hint: a prominent Senator at the time. Via tekl.
How much are Republicans and Democrats polarized really?
On the topic of income redistribution, if you just ask them how much should happen, on a scale of 1 to 7:
Perhaps the most striking evidence of polarization is that in the 1–7 scale, the modal response among Republicans is 1, and the modal response among Democrats is 7.
If you look at their actual behavior, Republicans for instance are only slightly more likely to contest an increase in their tax property assessments. Or this:
One question in the online survey…asks about property taxes instead of federal taxes: “Do you consider the amount of property taxes you pay to be too low, about right, or too high?”…the share of Democrats responding that property taxes are too high (36.9 percent) is not much lower than the corresponding share of Republicans (42.9 percent).
Or if you ask people if they should pay lower property taxes, the difference is real but modest:
…the desired tax reduction is 28.46 percent for Republicans versus 23.42 percent for Democrats.
Or if you ask them how property taxes should be distributed across different income classes:
Democrats want to assign 25.92 percent of property taxes to the poorer household, and Republicans want to assign 25.71 percent to the poorer household…
The Democrats do favor somewhat more taxation for the wealthiest class of households. Yet:
The results indicate that as the difference in home values increases, the modal respondent still desires proportional taxes.
The conclusion:
…Republicans and Democrats may say that they feel differently about income redistribution, but those differences disappear when facing real, high-stakes choices. We posit a different, yet still simple, explanation: partisan differences in preferences for redistribution are exaggerated by some, but not all, survey questions.
That is all from a new (May!) AER piece by Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner, titled “Is the Partisan Divide Real? Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution.” I have long thought that over time, membership in “the right wing” will be predicted more by “hatred of hypocrisy” than by many of the more traditional pro- free market values of times hence.
Why don’t nations buy more territories from each other?
Here is a rather underwhelming list of such purchases in recent times. West Germany buys three islands from the Netherlands in 1963? Pakistan buys Gwadar from Muscat and Oman in 1958. America buys the Danish West Indies in 1916. In 1947, though the Soviet Union bought part of Lapland in Finland to enable a hydroelectric plant.
We all know about the Louisiana Purchase. But that’s it since 1916!? Is Wikipedia failing us? I don’t think so.
Are there really no good Coasean trades between the two Irelands? Israel and the Palestinians? Armenia and Azerbaijan? How about Chile selling Bolivia a wee bit of coastline? I can think of a few reasons why territory purchases are these days so hard to pull off.
1. Incoming revenue is subject to a fiscal commons effect. Some crummy noble does not get to spend it on himself. And voters take government revenue for granted in most cases, and so do not perceive an increase in their expected retirement benefits from selling land to foreign powers.
2. In earlier times, a lot of land transactions were motivated by “they’re going to take it from us anyway, sooner or later.” Did Napoleon really think he could hold on to all that land? No. He wisely got out, though sadly subsequent French governments did not do “buy and hold.” Not to mention the Florida Purchase Treaty and Guadalupe Hidalgo. At least until lately, wars of conquest have been in decline and that has meant a corresponding decline in country-to-country land transactions as well.
3. First mass media and then social media have succeeded in making land boundaries more focal to the citizenry. Say Northern Ireland today wanted to sell a single acre to the Republic of Ireland. This would be seen as a precedent, rife with political implications, and it would be hard to evaluate the transaction on its own terms. Trying to sell a county would be all the more so. Just look at the map — should there really be so much of “Northern” Ireland to the south of ROI? Donegal, Derry, etc. — status quo bias, are we really at an optimum point right now?
4. Contested territories today often involve low levels of trust. Selling pieces of the Irelands back and forth is likely enforceable (but does ROI want any of it?), but an Israel-Palestine deal is not. Israel prefers to simply move the goalposts by increasing the settlements in the westward direction. What is really the gain from pressuring one of the Palestinian leaders to sign a piece of paper recognizing this? Most likely it would ensure his assassination and simply enflame tensions further. Both parties might prefer unilateral action over a deal.
5. Land in general is far less valuable than in earlier times. In theory, that could make it either easier or harder to sell land, but if some of the transactions costs (see above) are constant or rising in magnitude, that will make it harder. Let’s say Colombia raised the funds to buy back part of the Darien gap — whoop de doo! The country has plenty of empty land as it is. The whole notion of Lebensraum, and I don’t just mean in its evil Nazi form, has taken a beating since World War II.
6. Russia and China block some deals that might make sense, or maybe America blocks them too. Just run a Google search on “Arctic.” China is doing the investing, but we won’t let them own it. Russia doesn’t want America to own it. Everything thinks Canadian control or ownership doesn’t amount to much. Indigenous groups claim parts of it, but they cannot exercise effective control. And so the whole region and issue festers and stagnates.
7. Consider a deal that does make sense: the U.S. buying Greenland from the Greenlanders and also Denmark. Can we really in essence pay the 56,000 or so residents to give up their country and territory? I am no expert on the politics there, but I suspect they are unwilling to vote their pocketbook. (For one thing, I don’t see them posting a price on eBay or holding a garage sale.) How about skipping the vote and just offering them free condos in Miami? Let’s do it! Still, you can see the problem.
What else? And can you think of any current issues where a transactional approach might actually work?
How big a deal would a nuclear explosion be?
I am no longer so sure, as I outlined in my recent Bloomberg column:
Until recently, my view was that any actual use of a nuclear weapon, no matter the scale, would dramatically change everything. Nuclear use would no longer be considered taboo, and the world would enter a state of collective shock and trauma. Other countries around the world would start frantically preparing for war, or the possibility of war.
But recent events have nudged me away from that viewpoint. For instance, I have seen a pandemic that arguably has caused about 15 million deaths worldwide, yet many countries, including the U.S. haven’t made major changes in their pandemic preparation policies. That tells me we are more able to respond to a major catastrophe with collective numbness than I would have thought possible.
Of course I am referring to a smaller tactical nuclear weapon, as might be used against Ukraine. India by the way lost five or so million people during the pandemic and they didn’t even fire their health minister. And:
I also have seen Trumpian politics operate through the social media cycle. Former President Donald Trump did and said outrageous things on a regular basis (even if you agree with some of them, the relevant point is that his opponents sincerely found them outrageous). Yet the rapidity of the social media news cycle meant that most of those actions failed to stick as major failings. Each outrage would be followed by another that would blot out the memory of the preceding one. The notion of “Trump as villain” became increasingly salient, but the details of Trumpian provocations mattered less and less.
Might the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon follow a similar pattern? Everyone would opine on it on Twitter for a few weeks before moving on to the next terrible event. “Putin as villain” would become all the more entrenched, but dropping a tactical nuclear weapon probably wouldn’t be the last bad thing he would do.
To cite the terminology of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the tactical nuclear weapon might stay “the Current Thing” for a relatively short period of time.
Let’s hope we don’t find out.
The end of history?
How a united Ireland would work is unclear: many voters in Northern Ireland are attached to free healthcare with the NHS, even though waiting lists for treatment are the worst in the UK, and hate the idea of paying €60 to see a doctor as is the case south of the border.
Here is more from the FT, the context is that Sinn Fein is now asking for a referendum within five years.
I Hate Paper Straws!
I am interviewed by James Pethokoukis at his substack Faster, Please! Here’s one Q&A:
JP: American political debates are generally more interested in redistribution than long-term investment for future innovation. What are the incentives creating that problem and can they be fixed?
A big part of the incentive problem is that future people don’t have the vote. Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.
We could solve many more of our problem if both sides stowed some of their cultural agendas to focus on areas of agreement. I think, for example, that we could solve the climate change problem with a combination of a revenue neutral carbon tax and American ingenuity. Nuclear, geo-thermal, hydrogen–these aren’t just clean fuels they are better fuels! Unfortunately, instead of focusing on innovation we get a lot of nonsense about paper straws and low-flow showers. I hate paper straws and low-flow showers! There is a wing of the environmental movement that wants to punish consumerism, individualism, and America more than they want to solve environmental problems so they see an innovation agenda as a kind of cheating. Retribution is the goal of their practice.
In contrast, what I want is for all of us to use more water, more energy and yes more plastic straws and also have a better environment. That’s the American way.
Subscribe to Faster, Please! for more.
The nuclear bunker culture that is Finnish
With its brightly coloured slides, trampolines and tunnels, the soft play area at the Hakaniemi Arena, near the centre of Helsinki, looks much like any other. The difference is that it lies 25m below ground in a cavernous space hollowed out of the Precambrian bedrock beneath the city, and is designed to withstand nuclear, biological and chemical attacks.
The clambering children may not realise it, but they are in one of the safest playgrounds on earth.
Most of the time, this is a family-friendly sports centre. Above ground, the only visible clue to its second identity is a small orange and blue triangle on the wall by the entrance that states: “VÄESTÖNSUOJA SKYDDSRUM”, or “defence shelter”. In the event of an emergency, the arena would revert to being the Merihaka bomb shelter, a subterranean living quarters where up to 6,000 people could exist for weeks, or even months…
Helsinki alone has more than 5,500 bunkers, with space for 900,000 people. Finland as a whole has shelter spaces for 4.4 million, in more than 54,000 separate locations.
Here is more from The Telegraph, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Conversation with the excellent Chris Blattman
Here is the audio, transcript, and video, we did this one face-to-face. Here is part of the summary:
What causes war?…Chris and Tyler also cover why he doesn’t think demographics are a good predictor of a country’s willingness to go to war, the informal norms that restrain nations, the dangers of responding to cyberattacks, the breakdown of elite bargains in Ethiopia, the relationship between high state capacity and war, the greatest threats to peace in Ireland, why political speech isn’t usually a reliable indicator of future action, Vladimir Putin’s centralized motives for invading Ukraine, why he’s long on Colombia democratically — but not economically, why more money won’t necessarily help the Mexican government curb cartel violence, the single-mindedness necessary for bouldering, how Harold Innis’s insights about commodities led Chris to start studying war, how the University of Chicago has maintained a culture of free inquiry, and more.
And from the dialogue:
COWEN: If you look at the marginal cases — since there are some wars — there’s a bunch of cases, even if unusual, where someone is right at the margin. At the margin, what are the factors that are most likely to account for the explanatory variation in whether or not a country goes to war?
BLATTMAN: For me, the one that people talk the least about that strikes me as the most important is how concentrated is power in the country. What’s holding back someone from considering all of the implications of their actions on other people, should they decide to take their society to war?
It’s maybe the most important margin in history, and it’s maybe the one that no one of my tribes — which are political economists — think and talk the least about. It’s the one that — in journalism, people leap to psychological explanations, and they try to understand the psychology of leaders, but they don’t try to understand the way in which they’re constrained. So, it’s this combination of the most important and the most ignored.
COWEN: So federal societies are less likely to go to war?
Interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend Chris’s new and important book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Path to Peace. And here is my earlier 2018 Conversation with Chris.