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hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i am sitting down yes sitting down with chris blattman once again there's an earlier conversation with chris if you don't remember chris is both an economist and
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a political scientist he does not let either discipline claim him he is a professor at the university of chicago and most importantly for our purposes he has a new and wonderful book out which i have blurbed it is called why we fight
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the roots of war and the path to peace chris welcome great to be back i have many questions about war let's start with demographics so richard hanania made the argument recently in his sub-stack that countries where there was only one child per
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family were going to be much less likely or willing or interested to fight wars do you agree because they put their children at risk and they but also it's a sign they don't care that much about the future that they're
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complacent they're not going to disrupt their lives just to have three kids so if they're not going to disrupt their comfortable lives or three kids they won't disrupt it for a war either i i don't think yeah that doesn't resonate with me i
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think um i think that yeah that i i don't think that the average person's weight on the future and the quality of their life is like a first order determinant if it is it's the kind of political system that i'm not too
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worried about going into war and why isn't how they feel about their lives their future their country so i mean my the way i think about this is that uh there's usually a narrow set of people who decide whether or not to go to war and those people are either accountable or not accountable to lots of people and and the places that we that in the places where they're accountable to everybody else people have an enormous amount of stake not to
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go to war and so like small gradations as to whether or not they have one child or two children or a little bit more weight on the future i mean the wars are so hugely painful that i think if you give those
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people a lot of influence that they're going to press their leaders generally not to go to war just on in general and so i i just don't see this perturbation or this trend is like fundamentally shaping that calculus just because there's already
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this overwhelming incentive not to have their leaders invade somebody but if you look at the marginal cases there are some wars there's a bunch of cases even if unusual where someone is right at the margin right so at the
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margin what are the factors that are most likely to account for the explanatory variation in whether or not a country goes to war i mean for me the one that people talk the least about that strikes me as the most important is how
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concentrated is power in a country and so how how uh like 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 and so and and it's maybe the most important margin in history and it's maybe the one that one of my tribes which are political economists think and talk the least about and it's the one that in journalism people leap to uh
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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 and so it's it's sort of this combination of the most important and the most ignored
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so federal societies are less likely to go to war i think federal societies i think so i think of um i mean the word i like that the word i both loath and and love is polycentric which is this word from from vincent and ellen nostrum
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and it's this idea where there are many centers of powers and so i think we're in the u.s we're programmed to think in terms of federalism which i think is a great example but i think there's lots of other ways you know we can be polycentric in the sense of having lots of supernational powers so we can delegate a lot of authority and bind our hands through international treaties and agreements and alliances and we can uh it's not just about it we
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focus a little bit too much i think on downward and federalist sort of polycentrus in the united states i know it's a small country and it's not near many other countries but new zealand is very non-polycentric right if we put them somewhere else made them bigger we think they would be more likely to go to war than say canada well i it's funny because i think of canada as a not very polycentric place in at least a formal institutional sense um
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and and they are they're also in a reasonably they're in a place where they don't have a lot of temptation to go to war i i think they are but i think i think those both societies i don't i've never been to new zealand
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so i'm i'm more projecting from from other places i know including canada onto it i think they are polycentric in the sense that there's just a lot of informal the the country is in some ways governed and restrained by informal norms and an
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understanding of what is acceptable behavior and what people would or would not accept and so in that sense i think it's a very decentralized place but even if power in the formal decision-making power isn't very uh decentralized
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it seems to me the united states launches a lot of military actions you may or may not want to call them wars something blows up right russia pre-ukraine launched a very large number of cyber attacks your theory of what makes war more
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likely how is it different for an actual physical violent war versus major cyber attacks um that's a good question i think there's so in one sense i think one is that cyber attacks are can be less attributable and less clear and so my you know one of my colleagues ethan what has thought about this this sort of makes the world i think a more dangerous place in the sense that you there's a lot of uncertainty about who's attacking you and and
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uh and they you're always worried that somebody else is attacking you and they're cloaking it in this person you'll be duped into a war and so i think this just leads to a lot more complex strategic calculations that might lead to worse responses
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and so i think we should be wary and probably nations are worried about using it for that reason um because it could spin out of control more easily i think that's probably top of my mind if i the hypothesis that the least
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responsible countries are most likely to do cyber attacks and the sort of more responsible countries even if you disagree with what they're doing are more likely to mount military actions so the earlier british empire in
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a way may have done the wrong thing but it proudly announced what it was doing right does that make sense as a hypothesis it does but then it also gives actors in those larger places incentives to appear to be one of these more rogue
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actors and so i think the thing we have to be worried about in this context is when the ability to conduct cyber attacks is very disaggregated so the idea that uh i don't know if some cia part-timer or consultant could
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potentially launch a cyber attack on his own if he was so aggrieved or vice versa on you know in some other strategic you know energy united states i think is we can't do that with warfare very easily let's say we wanted a theory of which
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nations were most likely to mount a geoengineering war or attack which probably we haven't seen yet but imagine dumping iron fillings in the ocean change the climate change the climate of your rivals how is the theory of a geo-engineering
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attack different um i guess it would depend a lot on the extent to which this they're sort of uh you're able to so if i fire a missile at an enemy i'm fairly confident that i'm going to only harm them and i'm not going to harm me
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and so uh anytime anything you do is going to potentially blow back on you which for example like a nuclear bomb is one way to think about it i think then is going to change your calculus because it's it's going to be less attractive
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relative to the alternatives and so there's always going to be a selection of instruments that you could use and i guess these ones i've never thought of these kinds of attacks before um it seems to me like their risk of
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blowback is actually much much higher and there's just a lot of uncertainty so i'm not sure why somebody would want to use them frieza v one of these other more conventional things that well they're very cheap right and it might be hard to trace but in general shouldn't a theory of war be super technologically contingent so if i look who's likely to launch a drone war of course i think the us but not only who's likely to launch a soldier's
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war it's maybe negatively correlated so how can we have a general account of who's likely to launch a war isn't it always like per technology i think it's really dependent on there's some sort of cost i mean there's some sort of cost-benefit
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calculus that is at the root of all of these and uh and so yeah i'm struggling to think about why this would why that to me is still going to be like the first order decision and so i'm struggling to think about so the
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technology is going to change the costs and it's going to change the potential negative externalities potential which is just another kind of cost and how much it blows back to you so it still strikes me as like a good like a lot of economic theory it's always like a good first order principle for you to use to sort of structure your thinking and then i and then i don't the second order elements just don't seem to me to be um particularly large
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but say in your list of the five main factors that explain more is as i understand it technology isn't one of them why shouldn't technology be a clear number one so the us does a lot in yemen that it probably wouldn't do with
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soldiers but it's clearly willing to do with drones we do drone attacks i don't know in how many countries but it's a large number right west africa sahel so why isn't technology the number one factor so i think so here's the thing so
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let me use a slightly different analogy so like when i have thought about i'm not a particular let's take afghanistan in the u.s and government afghanistan which was uh um i'm not i have no particular expertise in the region
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uh but when i try to understand to myself why was that such a long war i think it's because it was not particularly expensive the united states the united states was saying um this is going to cost us tens of lives per year and uh maybe one percent
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of gdp and in return for that we are going to buy reputation for not tolerating rogue states and terror attacks by rogue states and in return for that we're gonna have some probability diminishing over time a victory over this particular rogue group and that's a that's a and given that this rogue group will not negotiate with us and there doesn't seem to be any ground where we can actually compromise because of our mutual intransigence
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this is a cheap war and we'll wage it and that's not what they say to the public but i think that's de facto what happens and so i think drones and technology is like does it make war cheap and if war is cheap then then i think you're going to be more likely to and use that as an instrument um and and and that's the first order that i think technology sort of gives us so how much does state capacity predict war i mean should that be in your list
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of five main factors state capacity a lot of these things have to do i think it's really important to distinguish between the things that change your bargaining power vis-a-vis arrival and things that actually change
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the probability of war so if i have state capacity or if i have particularly cheap weapons or via particularly effective weapons then it sort of changes what i can expect to get from my rifle and uh and it doesn't necessarily have any
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effect on this basic intuition that like the we should be actually trying to find some solution and that is going to avoid war which most of the time we do as you know this is like one of the main themes in the book and
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and so uh yeah so i would just say it's merely we always have to every time we say does this cause war we have to say are am i talking about something that changes relative bargaining power or i'm talking about something that changed the
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incentives to avoid the costs of fighting now in our last conversation we were both fairly bullish about ethiopia on the grounds of its high state capacity that now seems wrong what do you think we got wrong or you got wrong or i got wrong so uh long run i still have high expectations for ethiopia and i think short run things have obviously gotten very bad um the thing that i think i and you know i have a couple of friends who work very
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closely there and and so partly what i know of channeling them um i think i think what was fundamentally problematic about that like in a lot of african countries is that in spite of the state capacity you have power that's very concentrated and a
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handful of elite groups and these elite groups happen to be ethnic groups so the tigre and the yamaha and the aroma and um and they had they'd cut a deal with one another um they'd cut a deal that for a long time
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heavily heavily heavily favored the tigrans and and that started to fray and the other two groups began to sort of demand more and they fumbled that and i think what surprises me and i think surprises also the leaders of those three groups is that they fumbled it um apparently one thing i've heard is that the the the the prime minister is was surprised at the time that this suddenly turned into violence and continued to be surprised for some time
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um and so i think that uh so maybe people just underestimated the chance that these sort of concentrated elite bargains can go wrong but i guess that's the thing i remembered that i always believed but i never really applied to
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that case is like that to me goes back to this first thing i said like the fundamental thing we don't pay enough attention to is concentrated power and how easy it is then for these deals to fall apart let me tell you my worry and my account of
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what i got wrong i know this theory has only two data points but i'm struck that rwanda also has a reputation for high state capacity which whatever their failings is in some sense true right so maybe high state capacity develops from a past
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where you had ethnic strife for war and in part you develop the high state capacity to keep some groups down or enforce some bargains and maybe on average it's a good thing but it's also increasing your variance
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of outcomes so there's this new piece by o'reilly and i think murphy and economica it shows the best predictor of state capacity today is historical prevalence of war so maybe when you see high state capacity in africa you should also start
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getting nervous a bit intrinsically and indeed anywhere because it's a sign it was needed it doesn't come from nowhere just like you needed a fragmented europe to develop a lot of advances in capitalism but that
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too had a high cost 17th century wars and so on so i guess i would say um i mean the two places we've picked here which are ethiopian rwanda are places that have are i mean they have high state capacity today because they had end coherency because they had high state capacity and coherency 400 years ago as well relative to a lot of other places in on the continent um and i so i think this is like a little bit of a not a false correlation
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i think it's true but i think like the thing that strong states have and i think political scientists would talk about state systems being is that you have lots of competing states close to one another reasonably strong competing states and
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most of the thing that is generating the state capacity is that competition and nine years out of 10 or 99 years out of 100 are is peaceful um and then sometimes it's not so that's like the high variance point right so so
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so the the the fundamental driver of that capacity are these competing state systems and war is an occasional byproduct of that but we only when you run a regression like maybe they did i don't know this paper of of
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of current state capacity and war there's just this omitted variable which is the competitiveness of state systems and so i think we just ascribe a lot of explanatory power to the fighting part that we should uh we should attribute to competition and
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historians would agree they would call this like defensive modernization there's a lot of words and concepts like this that say well we actually revolutionized our society or technology in response to a competitive threat that
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never actually turned violent and that's that's for story so i'm not saying competition is unlike i'm just saying it's the actual there's like an inefficient way to do that competition and sometimes we devolve into that but we shouldn't
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ignore the fact that most of the time that doesn't happen why did the irish troubles heat up in 1968 69 and not earlier in those years in particular yes because things seemed much better a lot of the 1960s there's a sense well the
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civil rights movement has come going to be non-violent resistance we'll work this out and then it all explodes um i mean i i think it's i think it's hard to nail these things down to specific i mean ex-post i mean i think
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this is if i remember the case well i mean i suppose i think this is when the the british army came in which was also an unusual and somewhat surprising development because they had not been coming in right during a lot of
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earlier manifestations of trouble i mean so the decision to bring them so i think the time there's a genuinely fragile situation that could have been resolved different ways and the decision to bring this and the british army in and then
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the decision to conduct themselves in the particular way that they conducted themselves i think helps start that actual violence um you know why i'd actually it's a good question why it happened that year and not five years later or five years earlier i don't know what are the greatest risks to peace in ireland long term or is it just all over i don't think it's all over i mean i've i've spent a total of six days in ireland so uh i don't wanna
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uh i would say um i think brexit and is people feel like there's a very real the the decrease in integration with neighboring places uh both if it finds itself caught between integration unable to integrate with republic of ireland and
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de-integrating with england strikes me as really problematic but that's not that's not maybe the flash point i'm worried about um in the in the near long term what does a bad scenario look like then in ireland in ireland northern
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ireland or the border wherever it's going to happen um you know you know my friend richard english is the historian there and i think he and i could what a lot of people think which is that um or we're thinking
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when i was you know before the pandemic when i had lots of current knowledge about some of these things when i traveled uh was this i think i think it's this idea of in these fragile moments where it's not really in anyone's interests to go to
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war there will be some small splinter groups essentially people who for their own ideological reasons or or mistakes or stupidity will set in motion a series of events that it's difficult to walk back from um i think that does happen and so people who are living in one of these border communities uh and and want to protest against you know violently against um some change or lack of change i think i i i can that's kind of what worried me um
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so nested games would be my phrase okay that you have sub groups playing their own games and they don't care about how the whole game comes out they want to optimize within their game but what they do is a move in the larger game as well
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so and to me this is just a special case of my whole centralization of power story which is to say that there are some groups and societies that are just not accountable to anyone but themselves and their own peculiar set of
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preferences can can determine outcomes and so when i think about any splinter group whether it's some northern irish band of you know uh terrorists or a faction of in palestine or on the israeli government or wherever it may be i think fundamentally it's these groups who can act in their own self-interest because they have at least a temporary interest that can then push a situation into violence that was otherwise quite likely to be peaceful
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and so it's not this it's not just this macro autocrats are more likely to to wage wars which i think is true but it's also these sorts of little pockets of of autocracy that we create in our in our in our own social movements that are
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really dangerous but isn't that isn't that in a way the opposite of centralized power so you have a lot of nested games you have many autocracies the problem is that they're interrelated and no one of them is making a move for
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the whole side or the whole team so you can have your allies drag you into war world war one in part came about because smaller countries dragged in larger countries it wasn't very centralized that's one of the most destructive wars of all time and that seems to fit the nested games worry as the main driver of a lot of wars yeah so maybe not surprisingly we've you very quickly brought us to the i think the bleeding edge of conflict research
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and the thing we don't understand very well like when i think about the one area i wish i understood better both the game theory the strategic dynamics the empirics would be the difficulties coalition formation and the fact that i think
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uh fragmenting coalitions and many decentralized actors with the means of violence is actually really destabilizing um and i i yeah i think we need more i don't know how to think about it systematically because i don't think
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we've had like 20 people with their shoulder behind the boulder pushing and trying to understand that so we're talking today at the very beginning of march and we don't know what's going to happen with russia and ukraine but we know a
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lot has happened and there's one group of people that very confidently predicted a kind of disaster kasparov would be one really many other people i would say the mainstream that until the attack actually came they just thought it would
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be some kind of bizarre limited police action in the east and not amount to much what difference in theoretical approach accounts for who got it right and who got it wrong um well i mean i think i think sometimes any hugely confident
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prediction of a military action is almost is is more is more more often wrong than not and so i'm always a little so i'm not sure that there's something theoretically that drives the hugely confident predictions because i think
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people i think i think in those instances some people are simply too confident i think the only reasonable way to sort of look at the situation three months ago or two months ago was that this is at best even odds um
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and and and and i speak also someone who was less than even odds uh and and then it's very hard to evaluate these claims after the fact like if it was the person who said it was 80 likely to happen correct was the person said it was 20 likely to
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happen correct like we don't know um the uh but the thing that i think the more that you wait i think that or i don't think they differed theoretically i think they may have differed in sort of empirical beliefs and sort of sort of sort of the things they weighed and so i think the more that you are convinced that putin has a personal stake in this military action and in taking ukraine at all costs uh and the more that you believe he's
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and his in his cabal and his military apparatus are are capable of complete misjudgment then i think the more likely you perceive the risk of war i mean in retrospect the thing i think people should have used to predict a risk of war but that i very seldom heard anyone talk about was the degree to which you thought the ukrainians would be unflinchingly intransigent on any compromise and the degree to which you thought the u.s government would be
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intransigent on any compromise whatsoever that's mainly what i didn't predict but i don't think anybody was talking about that including me a month ago let me tell you my sense it may be close to yours but tell me what you think the people i know
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who took seriously the fact that putin believed in his own stated ideas tended to predict this particular outcome better than the people who thought it was a kind of game theoretic calculation well but i mean so i don't really think
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we should place a lot of value on speeches that politicians give as their actual intentions as a general rule i just don't think that's going to lead us to accurate predictions and so if it it might have been consistent with what happened in this case i don't think it's like a useful predictive tool but there are clearly cases it applies to so hitler more or less said what he wanted to do in fact he he did it or tried to do it
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right that would be a case where if you pay attention to his ideas and speeches you would do very well but just in the abstract you might think it's crazy what guy would ever do this well he did it yeah i mean this is an empirical i mean
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if we just took all the leaders and all the things they said and then whether or not they did the things they said they were going to do i guess my prediction is they would actually the correlation would go in the other direction
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particularly with military exercises but i you know that that might be wrong i've never seen someone run that yeah i think i think of political speech as more informative so china is insisting that within the hundredth year
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anniversary of the revolution which would be 2049 that it will bring taiwan back into the fold now they may not succeed in doing that but i strongly believe as a result of their words that's what they intend to do and they will try very hard to do it
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why is that a mistake in inference why would they say it what's wrong with the simple they say it because they're selling the idea to their public and they believe it and a lot of their public believes it and they want to do it i'm not saying there's no information i'm just saying they i mean you often i mean most of the time you have two parties that i mean we have the word brinksmanship for a reason because people bring it to the brink and
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then they walk back and and the language that is necessary to establish a bargaining position i think i mean let's put it in a totally different situation you're negotiating in like a in a in a market for a carpet
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yeah right and you have to sort of stake out i said oh i could never pay that yeah um and and my whole our whole ability to get a deal is actually contingent on me knowing that you have an incentive to actually say something that's false
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about your own intransigence because it strengthens your bargaining power and and so maybe that's why i don't believe political speech because the whole act of bargaining with an adversary is it's necessary for you to pretend that you will give less than you want we all know this we all do this instinctually and it's a ritual and and and uh and more often than not you find the deal you know you don't you don't walk away and eventually buy a
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carpet but how's this for a theory political speech really matters in cases where there's no solomonic solution where you can just split the baby so you can't give putin half of ukraine taiwan can't give china half of taiwan and then in those cases it actually indicates there might be a likely conflict in other cases there's plenty of bargaining right right i mean i think what's the the problem though is actually the fact that we create a set of
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institutional or ideological rigidities that keep us from compromising so that hasn't happened in hong kong right there's all these gradations of chinese control over hong kong because there haven't there aren't as many bright red
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lines and and i think that's meant that that's why there's there's not there's actually that's why i'm not particularly uh i wouldn't predict violence in the case of hong kong and so to the extent that you're right i don't think it's the
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the statements that are the problem i i think i'd look for these institutional rigidities that cannot adapt to changing relative bargaining power given your understanding of the psychology behind decisions to go to war what can we do to lower that risk other than just make people nicer it's sort of tautological answers but substantively yeah i mean i think the answer is more organizational than psychological in the sense that i think we
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they're related because but i think i think we we make decisions as groups and we make decisions as bureaucracies most of the time and very only in the most centralized countries do do individuals make this is and even
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then i don't think it's individuals i think there's still this apparatus and so uh i like to pay attention to the errors that we make as a result of that that maybe accentuate our psychological problems to be or psychological tendencies to to
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probably process too little information and to be a little bit too uh just succumb to something like availability bias which is the opinions in the room and so any type of organizational procedure so i think a smart white house or a smart kremlin or
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a smart uh military uh uh you know defense ministry would would actually try to foster a way of actually reducing availability bias in the room and actually getting the sort of these red teams and these sorts of uh
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other types of ways of sort of getting devil's advocates into the into the into the room um that's yeah what did shakespeare understand about war that current social scientists do not uh so i'm one of these people who didn't really read books until i was at the end of my college career and and missed the induction into shakespeare and so i i i fear i might be the only one you talk about this in your book you talk about henry iv right uh-huh so um
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maybe not in any what i don't know that yeah so i since i can't name the particular insight that shakespeare had i will uh i mean that to me is a an instance of um and this was i think true of a lot again i mean i don't want to beat this
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beat this down because i do think there's a lot of other sources of instability but i mean that period of european history was a period of concentrated autocratic power and a set of monarchs who could indulge not just
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any private interests they have in war but actually person you know ideological or glory driven preferences for status and status competition amongst themselves so that's that's a reading of history that i that echoes i know very
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very uh you know loudly in my ears some of the patterns i see today what do you think of the stephen pinker thesis that basically war is diminishing over time consistently and for structural reasons so i think it's i mean i think it's a
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plausible hypothesis that seems not to be true according to some of the people who i think have done the careful analysis of interstate and civil wars and then i think if you look at other types of violence particularly violence within societies within cities you look at homicide it's unassailable unassailably true and so i think you have to evaluate that depending on the type of violence interpersonal violence interpersonal violence that can be
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controlled by the state definitely going down partly because we have stronger states that control violence violence between strategic actors different polities or factions with inequality i would like the trend to be downwards
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and it might go down but i don't think that's where the evidence points what do you think of the model where maybe there's a downward trend for frequency but there's an upward ratchet in terms of destructiveness so from world war one
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to world war ii well it wasn't that long the second was more destructive now it's been a long time since world war ii weapons are much more powerful if another world war happened again the standard line world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones right is that the best model we have uh i think that's uh i think it's yeah i think it's true that as we it's not always true but i think as a first order prediction thinking that war
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is going to become less frequent but more deadly than it that it is especially when it involves nuclear arm powers that's yeah i think that's basically right so you're a pessimist for your grandchildren yeah and the next one will be a doozy
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right we don't know when it's coming but under that hypothesis there's a great deal to worry about you have to think it will be worse than world war ii so i think it will but worse than world war ii and and and nuclear armageddon are
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two very different things and then the truth is going to be somewhere in between and so i think the probability of a limited use of nuclear weapons in the next 50 years is extremely high and i think the use of of all out mutually assured destruction is i mean impossible to success i i don't see any reason to think it's it's particularly high but the fact that it's small and possible is a little bit terrifying where do you think is the most likely
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next target for a nuclear weapon um and does this include dirty bombs and not dirty bombs but a major explosion uh so a state-sanctioned use of a doesn't have to stay sanctioned but um that's a good question i would i would
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be more worried about uh north korea or using one or pakistan or india than i am of russia or the united states i think we differ on this but i maybe not in the next three weeks anything's possible sadly and well so this will come myself
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so this will look very dated i think it's unlikely but i do think we're that we're recording this when it comes to russia at a moment of just tremendous uncertainty we're just three days four days five days into an invasion uh depending on whether you want to count the beginning um the the the anyways this is this is so so but ignoring that which is kind of impossible uh i i think it's i think it's probably in one of these smaller countries
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if putin thinks he can survive i certainly would infer from that that the chance of him launching a nuclear attack is very small but if he thinks he's not going to survive i would expect he would be willing to incur a strategy that just mixes up
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what's happening uh probably lowers his expected value but boosts the variance and then i would think a nuclear attack is at least a few percent maybe more maybe up to 10 percent am i thinking about that wrong is is that the right
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distinction whether he expects he can survive or not how would you think about that so even ignoring the nuclear calculus in some sense i think the whole basis for this war or the whole basis for the aggression and the aggressive bargaining
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is is putin's desire to preserve and advance his control and his vision and his or maybe that network and that that elite group's control is my in you know not being a russia expert the um why i mean the whole like what what
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possible threat does nato or capitalism or democracy have to the average russian like i mean even i i don't see it and even if it existed i don't see a threat that's worth this kind of aggressive posturing and brinksmanship and and invasion and possibly use of nuclear weapons with with the ukraine so it's all predicated on the interests of this group that's in power sure and so all of the action and and how far will they go to preserve that
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and how far will people around him let him go and how personalized his power actually i don't think we really know or at least i don't know why is it you're more likely to get randomly beat up on the street in england than say in canada america or new zealand are you more randomly likely i think so at times i'm slightly afraid um is it an alcohol issue you live in virginia and i live on the south side of chicago so it's not true but
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so i mean no one's going to beat me up but is someone going to come and knock me down and grab my phone uh maybe that's a very different kind of thing that's a very different type in england if you were beaten up it might just be for sport
36:55
buy a bunch of yeah i think um i mean i would say listen if there's bands of you know hooligans going around beating up people for sport i would i would hypothesize that's that's a social norm that exists in that society that somehow
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says we're going to tolerate this particularly egregious set of behavior we tolerate we just tolerate different bad behavior in our own communities here that's diff so it's just that we tolerate like some communities to some
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extent will tolerate one kind of violence maybe in on the south side of chicago and we kind of tolerate and become accustomed to maybe something different in england that would be my my suggestion we used to have generations of american
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men they'd fight in wars they went away they came back home maybe they were hailed as heroes but they probably had a lot of ptsd that's really not so much the case anymore how has that changed american society well they sorry they probably did have ptsd sure yeah a lot of them um and now there's less of that obviously some veterans coming back from afghanistan iraq but so there's less people having this marshall well i would
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say like the experience the first the most important thing about this experience probably wasn't the exposure to trauma and ptsd i would have thought the organizational experience and the bonding maybe a small fraction would have ptsd
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but everyone would have come back with the socialize the military socialization for example and uh and and maybe uh uh either depending on how that war conducted itself potentially very poisonous and xenophobic views are
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potentially the opposite i mean i think that would be very disconcerting to the particular war um i would say uh maybe like a uh we're a we're probably a society that is less socialized into large bureaucracies and obedience would maybe be my first
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response i would think we're more socialized into large bureaucracies more people work in big companies uh government employment if you count contractors is up society to me feels much more bureaucratic than when i was a kid
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i see i would say well maybe it's that particular i mean that sort of group project and maybe that's i don't know i work in maybe i'm just projecting my own experience because even though i'm in a large institution i'm this very
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autonomous individual and so i'm not seeing that um i do think there's something qualitatively different about being a maybe temporary member of a corporation for the next three years of my life to socialization into sort of a mass war
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movie even if it's also for three years i think it's probably a very different psychological experience especially for the younger members of congress is it a good thing that so few of them have served in the military or should we be concerned you know there is this i mean we shouldn't make too much of these correlations but it is interesting that the the number one if you look at their if you i think the some of the people who have run
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correlations of what kinds of leaders are most likely to end up taking their country to war it's ones who have been trained in the military but never fought in a war and so you can imagine that there's sort of an inverse u-shape that that military
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experience no military experience or military experience with actually fighting a war or both lead you to be a verse and then there's that middle ground and that seems intuitively plausible to me at the same time i'm not
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i don't think that's i'm not sure that's that's on my top five list of things that would or would not make a congress person go to war now you're doing quite a bit of work in colombia recently uh would you go long or short the country and why i go long on the country on democracy and civic participation and stability to a degree which is to say i think it's not going to i think it's unlikely to get worse than it is now and it's quite good
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uh i don't go along on economic development i i see them maybe as getting stuck in the middle income trap um and what's their problem there so i i keep asking people uh who who are in government or in industry and and
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it's striking to me that nobody has an answer and people haven't been thinking about it so the fact that there's no uh the fact that it's not an energetic topic of discussion and focus is in itself maybe a problem um i think there it's also a country that
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just faces like some severe cost disadvantages that being either a industrial or service powerhouse and so so i i put my whole view is that most places in the world are doomed to be part of a middle income trap and the
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lucky ones will find themselves in political union with a place that's not and so so newfoundland newfoundland would be one of the poor countries in the world if they didn't have the good fortune of joining canada 70 or 80 years ago
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um and and so uh if colombia was in a political union with mexico i would be much more bullish on colombian you know economic prosperity because i think they would siphon off a lot of the success of that i would predict for mexico does colombia have the problem that i associate with much of central america that market size is actually quite small the country appears you know moderately populous but the different parts of the country are not
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well connected so it's a set of semi-isolated islands and then their ideal major trading partner the united states is fairly far away and maybe the best scenario for colombia is to think of panama as part of colombia which of course it once was and
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panama is doing great and the rest of colombia is the hinterlands and you have the hinterlands with different cut-off parts with all small market size and no no great neighbor nearby at that i mean i think that's i think it's a
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general strategy for the colombia's and the uganda's and the all of the countries of the world that are not obviously going to be a center of agglomerations of industry or services or tech or ideas but are pretty good um would do better by in the long run they might not do better in other dimensions but they would do better in terms of economic development by seeking more political union maybe not with the panamas although panama is
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important because of the trade networks and things but i would see political union with the economic the the places with those agglomerations but for colombia there's no natural partner right it's certainly not venezuela
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right i mean if if if yeah the the tragedy for colombia is that brazil doesn't speak spanish i mean as their principal language and so otherwise that would be the natural um no colombia is that i think at a geographic disadvantage for long-running
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economic development why does the country have a relatively high quality bureaucracy given those problems you know every single researcher who works there asks themselves why they have this good fortune of working with um amazing technocrats it's you know maybe it's the i mean it's a very unequal country in terms of access to education and and in terms of access to these positions but that's also true of many other latin american countries so
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i'm not sure why colombia seems better i'm not sure that's entirely it um one self-serving hypothesis i have is that in you know in the united states your path to political power and your generic degree is in law
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maybe in china i'm told it's engineering and in colombia it's um political science and economics and so it might just be that that idiosyncratically creates it takes these great people who might have become engineers who might have become lawyers
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in another system and turns and and and turns them and then teaches them a technocratic science and that's like the elite language if someone has two weeks and they want to take the perfect trip through colombia what is it i enjoy so i enjoy um
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renting a car and doing my own road trips uh which is something that very few people do even though it's perfectly safe um there are very few if any parts of the country where you would ever you know that's 10 or 20 years in the past
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where you would worry about that and so uh and then my general strategy is to pick medium-sized towns and sites rather than you know i avoid the big cities so i would avoid i you probably have to see bogota medellin but i would actually try to just skip over them and i would pick a quarter of the country and i would drive around that for two weeks the ones i've chosen we did a two-week road trip from maybe one of my highlights is from um
45:41
uh bukura manga through colombia's grand canyon via delava spanish colonial towns up in the mountains uh down to bogota over two weeks and that was fabulous should i be optimistic about the future of violence in mexico
46:00
i am just starting to answer that question for myself and the few days that i dipped my toe into it in person and now i'm going back makes me um in this paradoxical way very bullish on mexico in general but wondering if how they will ever solve
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this problem of um how they i i i think with i'm not sure how they will ever solve the problem of violence because i think solving the problem of violence requires recognizing that these armed groups and criminal cartels have an immense amount of power and that they have to find a way to live with them and i think the and i'm not sure that's the right choice and i think mexicans have chosen they've sort of said that's unacceptable
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we refuse to do that no matter the cost and so we're going to be engaged in a long brutal and possibly unwinnable war with a lot of particular states well let the groups be and so i think you're going to see yeah you're going to see a mix of and you see that everywhere you see that in any country including the united states different municipal governments and different state governments degree to be conciliatory to their criminal gangs to
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different degrees and one of the challenges is that is i think that tends to be democratically unpopular and that's certainly been true in colombia my first read is that might be what's true at least nationally in mexico and so as soon as you have
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transitions of government i think there's just a risk of every x years of that conciliatory nature and that peace between the state and the gang falling apart what about the wagner's law catch-up hypothesis that for a country
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of its income per capita income mexican government is relatively small and that if the share of government and gdp went up say four percentage points that over time they would just have more resources and beat the gangs and mexico would still be violent but more or less converge to where a lot of other countries are at is it that simple they just need more money well no i mean that's like saying if we arm more do we expect to have less
48:08
violence i think once again i think it's about we're going to change the bargaining power that's it's one of these things you're not changing the probability of war you're changing the bargaining power of the mexican state versus the gangs
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but what you might not have changed is the fact that they're unwilling to compromise so unless you are able to become overwhelmingly more powerful than these gangs and cartels uh and and and thus you know concede either very little or
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just have an incessant war but on the margins which is a little bit like the war on drugs in the united states right we've decided we're just going to go to incessant war against these almost impossible to eliminate gangs but they're now very small and confined that because the we have an immense amount of bargaining power vis-a-vis these very weak gangs i just don't see mexico ever getting there because they're the principal
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channel for drugs in the united states now if we develop other channels of drugs in the united states or if we somehow discover how to grow coca and other regions that lead to different transport networks that would totally
49:05
change it but otherwise that's the sense in which i'm not bullish on that's i'm not yeah i'm bullish i'm not bullish on mexico okay so you're canadian who predicted the ottawa truckers convoy and what is it they saw that other people did not
49:19
well i don't know if anyone predicted it i mean i think anybody who um i would say most canadians even because it's not i don't think it's nearly as polarized to place although i haven't lived there in in um something like 20 almost 25 years
49:36
uh recognize that there's like a strong conservative and anti-establishment sentiment in the country slightly fewer than in the united states but not dramatically different um and and then the my my distant view is that because there
49:56
are very few icu beds and because of the particular nature of the system and for some reason they didn't invest in them over the last two years uh the government has to be super cautious and really had to crack down harder than in the united states where we have many many more icu beds and so uh and they may have just overstepped what people were willing to tolerate um so i don't know i i so i don't think people were surprised at the movement i
50:19
think they might have been surprised that it sort of emerged in this sort of raucous kind of amateurish kind of violent and then they and some of the weirdness at the fringes was extra weird for canada and why didn't the ottawa police just
50:32
arrest the truckers and as a follow-up to that how much is the decision to arrest like the decision to fight i mean i don't know um uh i uh i i grew up in ottawa and that has given me precisely zero insight into 21st
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century policing in ottawa i would say but i mean so the first part of your question i don't have an answer um i think i i mean i just in general i think it it's it's uh causing a uh causing you know violently disrupting or closing down protests is
51:10
just an inherently risky political strategy and if you don't think you have to do it you might just try to wait them out a little bit uh especially if it's you know minus 20 degrees um but is it like fighting i think uh it is
51:22
that's that's in some sense that's the equivalent the world of ideas what did font clause of its get wrong um you know i think the you know the basic insight that we get from him which which is maybe the only one i've internalized and remember i think is basically right which is that and which is the thing we often forget and so so i'm not answering your question because i actually don't know presumably we don't talk about 99 of what's else in
51:58
that book because it wasn't particularly insightful might be part of the answer uh but i think this idea that politics and fighting are sort of two sides of the same coin is a very deep insight that is surprisingly easy to never learn uh and to forget in spite of everyone being able to you know repeat his famous race what special insight do you think you have into hayek none whatsoever but what do people either overrate underrate how's your
52:28
take on him different um i have four volumes by hayek the thinnest one i read 25 years ago so maybe the fact that i suspect a lot of people are like me and that they have bought the volumes and aspire to read but have not fully read so probably underrated but uh but that's yeah that's that's that's what's the thought of albert hirschmann that's influenced you most um i think i mean development projects observed is probably um
53:00
like a whole set of volumes written by people of his of that generation and maybe the next generation it's i think an idea that development is a pro the idea i take from it is that development is a process of trial and error or in some sense um it's
53:20
almost a process of creative destruction that requires lots of trial and error and i think it's unfortunate that our general attitude towards international development and the media or the the general attitude in most
53:32
development organizations is to absolutely ignore and remain institutionally and individually ignorant of the importance of sort of trial and error and creative destruction and policy for decades jeff sacks is a development thinker
53:48
overrated or underrated i would say i mean jeff sacks was my one of my teachers and letter writers and and things so with with great respect to jeff sacks i think overrated only because um i think there's very there's a handful of view
54:06
there's a or properly rated but so many other ideas are just not read and so jeff had a popular book in a a clear message um and as do a handful of others and all of those people whom our friends and i respect are all overrated because
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everything else it's red too much and everything else is read too little for bouldering what's the special skill that you need that most people don't appreciate uh i think it's the fact that you have to not like other sports
54:35
uh because it's the it's the kind of thing that rewards intense focus and and and and i think practice practice practice and so the extent that you like other physical activities i think it it it's a it's a it may be all sports do
54:47
this but i think bouldering in particular will reward single-mindedness and and so a lack of interest in other physical activities is can be a benefit you wrote some long while ago maybe it was even 2007 that people who work for
55:00
development agencies should not expect to fly business class what's your current view of that hypothesis so uh i still live by that hypothesis um uh and i uh i i don't know if i was at all influential in this i'd like to think i
55:17
get like two or three percent of credit but within a few years the world bank did severely limit the amount of business class travel or the conditions under which it's possible so and given how many of my world bank friends previous
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to and after this were mad at me is why is why i'm sort of conceited enough to think i might have had a tiny bit of influence mostly i hope it was just good sense and you think it's correct to save money or to remove the sense of entitlement or some other reason i mean i to the extent that like listen a lot a lot of the development discourse and my own feelings are like a little bit utilitarian in the sense of people are saying listen like we can
55:54
make choices here where we can spend a thousand dollars per person or we could spend 500 on two people and and we'd like to decide which is better in terms of what can have more impact and secondly we'd like to find a bunch of innovations that are really have low cost impact uh and and so that we can take us this limited and sometimes increasingly limited amount of development money and just do the most good with it and and so the antithesis
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of that is just paying four times more for a uh for a slightly more roomy seat so you get a slightly better sleep when you could do the same thing with a five cent you know valium bill what's important about the thought of harold dennis so i was really influenced as a college student by these economic historians of canada and south america particularly southern cone of whom innis was um very important of in the in sort of the importance of of
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specific commodities and the characteristics of commodities and determining a country's development path and i think it's like a really underrated view of understanding different countries development paths and so so innis would
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say well if we really want to understand why canada looks the way it does today we would have to look at cod or we would have to look at furs and and in in argentina you would have to look at cows and in colombia you would you would
57:20
think you have to look at coffee but you actually have to look at all of the things that colombia cycled through before they they stumbled upon coffee as something where they had like a global cost advantage and and so it's just the idea that if we want to understand the economic geography and political paths and political stability of a country we need to understand what commodities they started out with and my own personal and what this led me
57:42
to do and how i got started on the path to studying war actually is by realizing that some commodities are just hugely volatile in price for various circumstances and some are not and so if we wanted to understand long-term passive development and why
57:56
some places weren't prosperous it's because they were there they they they lost the commodity lottery and they got a volatile commodity rather than a stable one not unrelated to russia of course last question so you you teach at
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the university of chicago it still seems to me the place has a special ethos a mix of seriousness people teaching things to themselves showing up meaning business free speech some cluster of ideas how has the university of chicago maintained that
58:24
what's what's the secret there so i selected this place six years ago largely in large part it was one of its chief attractions um and i've asked myself that question uh i think i mean there's a there's a cheap
58:41
answer which is sort of cultural persistence um i but then the question is why so many university cultures have changed right i think i think the fact it may be that the fact that maybe i'm going to go back and contradict myself the political speech point is i mean the fact that i think the university created its it built its social identity around being that um and and uh more than the reason you can point out this thing
59:13
is not even if you didn't spend any time there you would be able to say that is the identity of this university because that's what they say they are and that's what they they that's where they show up in the news because they're the
59:23
university that that does that and so so so yeah i think what's maybe here's what's more surprising to me is why the thing that it shouldn't be surprising that a university has done that the question is why haven't more universities done that
59:38
and i was faculty at yale and i was faculty at columbia and and they were many great things but they were not places that self-consciously defined themselves as places to be about ideas and about ideas at all costs and uh and and so it's only in retrospect that i wonder why not thank you very much chris again chris's new book why we fight the roots of war and the path to peace is now out highly recommended it's been a pleasure thank you