Conversations with Tyler - Chris Blattman on War and Centralized Power

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

What causes war? Many scholars have spent their careers attempting to study the psychology of leaders to understand what incentivizes them to undertake the human and financial costs of conflict, but economist and political scientist Chris Blattman takes a different approach to understanding interstate violence. He returns for his second appearance on Conversations with Tyler to discuss his research into the political and institutional causes of conflict, the topic of his new book ​​Why We Fight: The Roots of War and The Path to Peace. 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. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded March 1st, 2022 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Chris on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am sitting down, yes, sitting down with Chris Blatman once again. There's an earlier conversation with Chris.

If you don't remember, Chris is both an economist and 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 bookout, which I have blurbed. It is called Why We Fight, 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 substack, that countries where there was only one child per family were going to be much less likely or willing or interested to fight wars. Do you agree? Because they'd put their children at risk. But also it's a sign they don't care that much about the future, that they're 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 for three kids, they won't disrupt it for a war either. Yeah, that doesn't resonate with me. 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 worried about going into war. And why isn't how they feel about their lives, their future, their country? So, I mean, the way I think about this is that 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. In the places where they're accountable to everybody else, people have an enormous amount of stake not to go to war. And so like small gradations as to whether or not they have one child or two children are a little bit more weight on the future. I mean,

the war is just so hugely painful that I think if you give those people a lot of influence, that they're going to press their leaders generally not to go to war, just in general. I just don't see this perturbation or this trend is like fundamentally shaping that calculus just because there's already this overwhelming incentive not to have their leaders invade somebody. But if you look at the marginal cases, since there are some war, is there's a bunch of cases, even if unusual, where someone is right at the margin, right? So 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?

I mean, for me, the one that people talk the least about that strikes me as the most important is how concentrated is power in a country. 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 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 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 sort of this combination of the most important and the most ignored. So federal societies are less likely to go to war? The word I both loathe and love is polycentric, which is this word from Vincent and Ellen Rostrom. And it's this idea where there are many centers of powers. And so I think 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. We focus a little bit too much, I think, on downward and federalist sort of polycentric. 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? It's funny because I think of Canada as a not very polycentric place in at least a formal institutional sense. They're in a place where they don't have a lot of temptation to go to war. But I think both societies, I've never been to New Zealand, so I'm more projecting from other places I know, including Canada, onto it. I think they are polycentric in the sense that the country is in some ways governed and restrained by informal norms and an 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 decentralized. It seems to me the United States launches a lot of military actions. You may or may not want to call them wars, but something blows up, right? Russia, pre-Ukraine, launched a very large number of cyber attacks. your theory of what makes war more likely. How is it different for an actual physical violent war versus major cyber attacks? That's a good question.

So in one sense, I think one is that cyber attacks can be less attributable and less clear. And so one of my colleagues, Ethan Wendonisgita has thought about this. This sort of makes the world, I think, a more dangerous place in the sense that there's a lot of uncertainty about who's attacking you. And 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. And so I think we should be wary.

And probably nations are worried about using it for that reason, because it could spin out of control more easily. I think that's probably top of my mind. If I had the hypothesis that the least 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 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 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, I don't know, some CIA part-timer or consultant could potentially launch a cyber attack on his own. if he was so grieved or vice versa, you know, in some other strategic, you know, enemy to the United States, I think we can't do that with warfare very easily. Let's say we wanted a theory of which 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 a theory of a geoengineering attack different? I guess it would depend a lot on the extent to which. 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. And so 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 going to be less attractive relative to the alternatives. And so there's always going to be a selection of instruments that you could use. And I guess I've never thought of these kinds of attacks before. It seems to me like their risk of bowback 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, Vreezee v. one of these other more conventional things that are 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 U.S., but not only, who's likely to launch a soldier's war, it may be negatively correlated. 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-benefit calculus that is at the root of all of these. And that, to me, is still going to be like the first-order decision. And so I'm struggling to think about, so the technology is going to change the costs, and it's going to change the potential negative externalities, which is just another kind of cost and how much it blows back to you. So it still strikes me as, 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 the second order elements just don't seem to me to be particularly large. But say in your list of the five main factors that explain wars, as I understand it, technology isn't one of them.

Why shouldn't technology be a clear number one? So the U.S. does a lot in Yemen that it probably wouldn't do with 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 let me use a slightly different analogy. So like when I have thought about, let's take Afghanistan.

in the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which was a, I have no particular expertise in the region. 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 to the United States. The United States was saying, this is going to cost us tens of lives per year and maybe 1% 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 going to have some probability diminishing over time, a victory over this particular a rogue group. 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, 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, doesn't make war cheap. And if war is cheap, then I think you're going to be more likely to use that as an instrument. 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 of five main factors? State capacity, 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 the probability of war. So if I have state capacity or if I have particularly cheap weapons or if I have particularly effective weapons, then it sort of changes what I can expect to get from my rival. And it doesn't necessarily have any effect on this basic intuition that, like, 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 I would just say, every time we say, does this cause war, we have to say, am I talking about something that changes relative bargaining power? I'm talking about something that changed the incentives to avoid the cost 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 long run, I still have high expectations for Ethiopia. And I think short run things have obviously gotten very bad. And, you know, I have a couple of friends who work very closely there. And so partly what I know channeling them, 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 in a handful of elite groups. And these elite groups happen to be ethnic groups. So the Tigray and the Amhar and the Romo. And they'd cut a deal with one another.

They'd cut a deal that for a long time, heavily, heavily, heavily favored the Tigranes. 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. Apparently, one thing I've heard is that the prime minister was surprised at the time. that this suddenly turned into violence and continued to be surprised for some time.

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 that case. It goes back to this first thing I said. 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 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 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 of outcomes. So there's this new piece by O'Reilly and I think Murphy and Economica that 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 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 do had a high cost, 17th century wars and so on. So I guess I would say, I mean, the two places we've picked here, which are Ethiopian, Rwanda, are places that, I mean, they have high state capacity today and coherency because they had high state capacity and coherency 400 years ago as well relative to a lot of other places on the continent. So I think this is like a little bit of a, not a false correlation. 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 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 peaceful. and then sometimes it's not.

So that's like the high variance point. Right. The fundamental driver of that capacity are these competing state systems. And war is an occasional byproduct of that. When you run a regression, like maybe they did, I don't know this paper of current state capacity on 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 attribute to competition.

And 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 a technology in response to a competitive threat that never actually turned violent. And that's for storage. So I'm not saying competition is unlike, I'm just saying there's like an inefficient way to do that competition. And sometimes we devolve into that. But we shouldn't ignore the fact that most of the time that doesn't happen. Why did the Irish troubles heat up at 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 civil rights movement has come. This could have been nonviolent resistance. We'll work this out.

And then it all explodes. I think it's hard to nail these things down to specific. I mean, ex post. I mean, I think this is, if I remember the case, well, I mean, ex post, I think this is when the British Army came in. Which was also an unusual and somewhat surprising development because they had not been coming in during a lot of earlier manifestations of trouble. So I think that 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 the decision to conduct themselves in the particular way that they conducted themselves, I think, helps start that actual violence. 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 sent a total six days in Ireland. So I would say, I think Brexit and people feel like there's a decrease in integration with neighboring places, both if it finds itself caught between unable to integrate with Republic of Ireland and deintegrating with England. But that's not maybe the flashpoint I'm worried about in the near or long term.

What does a bad scenario look like then? In Ireland. Northern Ireland or the border or wherever it's going to happen. You know, my friend Richard English is a historian there and I think he and what a lot of people think, which is that, or we're thinking when I was before the pandemic when I had lots of current knowledge about some of these things when I traveled. I think it's this idea of in these fragile moments where it's not really in anyone's interests to go to war, there will be some small splinter groups, essentially people who, for their own ideological reasons or mistakes or stupidity, will set in motion a series of events that it's difficult to walk back from.

I think that does happen. And so people who are living in one of these border communities and want to protest, you know, violently against some change or lack of change. That's kind of what worried me. So nested games would be my phrase. Okay. That you have subgroups 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. 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 in society that are just not accountable to anyone but themselves and their own peculiar set of preferences can determine outcomes. And so when I think about any splinter group, whether it's some Northern Irish band of, you know, terrorists or a faction in Palestine or of 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. And so it's not just as macro autocrats are more likely to wage wars, which I think is true, but it's also these sorts of little pockets of autocracy that we create in our own social movements that are really dangerous.

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 the whole side or the whole team. So you can have your allies drag you into war. World War I in part came about because smaller countries dragged in larger countries. It wasn't very centralized, but 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 very quickly brought us to the, I think, the bleeding edge of conflict research 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 fragmenting coalitions and many decentralized actors with the means of violence is actually really destabilizing. And I don't know how to think about it systematically

because I don't think 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 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 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? I think sometimes any hugely confident prediction of military action is almost more often wrong than not. And so I'm not sure that there's something theoretically that drives the hugely confident predictions.

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. And I speak also as someone who was less than even odds. And then it's very hard to evaluate these claims after the fact. Was the person who said it was 80% likely to happen correct? It was the person who said it was 20% likely to happen correct. Like, we don't know. I don't know. I think they differed theoretically. I think they may have differed in sort of empirical beliefs. It's 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. And the more that you believe he's and his cabal and his military apparatus are capable of complete misjudgment, then I think the more likely you perceived a 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 but degree to which you thought the U.S. government would be 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 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. So I don't really think 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. 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 did it or tried to do it, right?

That would be a case where if you pay attention to his ideas and speeches, you would do very well. Though just in the abstract, you might think it's crazy, what guy would ever do this? Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, 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 the correlation would go on the other direction, particularly with military exercises. That might be wrong. I've never seen someone run that analysis. Yeah, I think of political speech as more informative.

So China is insisting that within the 100th year 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. 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 most of the time you have two parties. I mean, we have the word brinksmanship for a reason because people bring it to the brink and then they walk back. and the language that is necessary to establish a bargaining position. I mean, let's put it in a totally different situation. You're negotiating in a market for a carpet, right? And you have to sort of stake out. I said, oh, I could never pay that. 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 about your own intransigence because it strengthens your bargaining power. 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 won't. We all know this. We all do this instinctually, and it's a ritual. And more often than not, you find the deal. You know, you don't walk away and eventually you buy a 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 case, there's just plenty of bargaining, right? Right. I mean, I think what's the problem, though, is actually the fact that we create a set of 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 aren't as many bright red lines. That's why I'm not particularly, 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 statements that are the problem. 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, sort of tautological answers, but substantively. Yeah, I mean, I think the answer is more organizational than psychological in the sense that I think they're related.

But I think we make decisions as groups and we make decisions as bureaucracies most of the time. Only in the most centralized countries do individuals make this? And even then, I don't think it's individuals. I think there's still this apparatus. And so I like to pay attention to the errors that we make that maybe accentuate our psychological tendencies to probably process too little information and just come 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 a smart military, you know, Defense Ministry would actually try to foster a way of actually reducing availability bias in the room and actually getting the sort of red teams and these sorts of other types of ways of sort of getting devil's advocates into the room.

What did Shakespeare understand about war that current social scientists do not? So I'm one of these people who didn't really read books until I was at the end of my college career and missed the induction into Shakespeare. And so I fear I might be the last person. But you talk about this in your book. You talk about Henry IV. So since I can't name the particular insight that Shakespeare had, I will. That to me is an instance of, and this was, I think, true of a lot. I mean, again, I mean, I don't want to 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 any private interest they have in war, but actually ideological or glory-driven preferences for status and status competition amongst themselves. So that's a reading of history that echoes, I know, very 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? I mean, I think it's a 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 unsalably true. And so I think you have to evaluate that depending on the type of violence. Interpersonal violence that can be controlled by the state, definitely going down partly because we have stronger states that control violence. Violence between strategic actors, different polities or factions within a polity. I would like the trend to be downwards 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 I to World War II, well, it wasn't that long, but 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 IV will be fought with sticks and stones, right? Is that the best model we have? 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 is going to become less frequent, but more deadly than

it is, especially when it involves nuclear arms, yeah, I think that's basically right. So you're a pessimist for your grandchildren? Yeah, I mean. The next one will be a doozy, 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 Nuclear Armageddon are two very different things.

And then the truth is going to be somewhere in between. And so I think the probability of limited use of nuclear weapons in the next 50 years is extremely high. And I think the use of all-out mutually assured destruction is impossible to assess. I don't see any reason to think 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 next target for a nuclear weapon? Does this include dirty bombs? Not dirty bombs, but a major explosion. So a state-sanctioned use of a formal...

It doesn't have to be state-sanctioned, but... It's a good question. I would be more worried about North Korea or using one or Pakistan or India than I am of Russia or the United States. I think we differ on this. Maybe not. In the next three weeks, anything's possible, sadly. And so this will come... So this will look very dated.

I think it's unlikely, but I do think we're recording this when it comes to Russia at a moment of just tremendous uncertain. We're just three days, four days, five days into an invasion. depending on what any one to count the beginning. But ignoring that, which is kind of impossible, I think it's probably in one of these smaller countries. 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 what's happening, 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%. Am I thinking about that wrong? Is that the right distinction, whether he expects he can survive or not?

How would you think about that? 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, is Putin's desire to preserve and advance his control and his vision, or maybe that network and that elite group's control, and, you know, not being a Russia expert. what possible threat does NATO or capitalism or democracy have to the average Russian? 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 invasion and possibly use of nuclear weapons with the Ukraine. So it's all predicated on the interests of this group that's in power. And how far will they go to preserve that? 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 to get beat up there? At times, I'm slightly afraid. Is it an alcohol issue? Well, we live on different streets. You live in Virginia and I live on the south side of Chicago. Then it's not true. 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, maybe. That's a very different kind of violence. In England, if you were beaten up, it might just be for sport. Listen, if there's bands of, you know, hooligans going around beating up people for sport, I would hypothesize that's a social norm that exists in that society that somehow says we're going to tolerate this particularly egregious set of behavior. We just tolerate different bad behavior in our own communities here. So it's just that we tolerate, like some communities to some extent will tolerate one kind of

violence, maybe on the other side of Chicago, and we kind of tolerate and have become accustomed to maybe something different in England. That would be my suggestion. We used to have generations of American 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 to American society? They probably did have PTSD. Sure, yeah, a lot of them. And now there's less of that. Obviously, some veterans coming back from Afghanistan, Iraq, but much more. So there's less people having this martial.

Well, I would 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, but everyone would have come back with military socialization, for example. Either depending on how that war conducted itself, potentially very poisonous and xenophobic views are potentially the opposite. I mean, I think that would be very idiosconcratic to the particular war. I would say we're probably a society that is less socialized into large

bureaucracies and obedience. Would maybe be my first response? I would think we're more socialized into large bureaucracies. More people work in big companies. Government employment, if you count contractors, is up. Society to me feels much more bureaucratic than when I was a kid. I see. I mean, that sort of group project, maybe I'm just projecting my own experience because even though I'm in a large institution. I'm this very autonomous individual, and so I'm not seeing that. 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 move, 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? We shouldn't make too much of these correlations. If you look at some of the people who have run 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 no military experience or military experience with actually fighting a war or both lead you to be averse, and then there's that middle ground. And that seems intuitively plausible to me. At the same time, I'm not sure 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. Would you go long or short the country, and why?

I go long on the country on democracy and civic participation and stability to agree, which to say I think it's unlikely to get worse than it is now and it's quite good. I don't go long on economic development. I see that maybe is getting stuck in the middle income trap. And what's their problem there? I keep asking people who are in government or in industry and it's. It's striking to me that nobody has an answer and people haven't been thinking about it. So the fact that it's not an energetic topic of discussion and focus is in itself maybe a problem.

I think it's also a country that just faces like some severe cost disadvantages at being either a industrial or service powerhouse. And so my whole view is that most places in the world are doomed to be part of a middle income trap. And the lucky ones will find themselves in political union with a place that's not. And 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 eight years ago. And so if Columbia was in a political union with Mexico, I would be much more bullish on Colombian economic prosperity because I think they would siphon off a lot of the success 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 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 Columbia is to think of Panama as part of Columbia, which, of course, it once was. And Panama is doing great. And the rest of Columbia is the hinterlands. And you have the hinterlands with different cut-off parts with all small market size. No great neighbor nearby at that. I think it's a general strategy for the Colombians and the Ugandas and 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. Would do better 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 Panama's, although Panama's important because of the trade networks and things, but I would seek political union with the places with those agglomerations. But for Colombia, there's no natural partner, right?

It's certainly not Venezuela. Yeah. The tragedy for Colombia is that Brazil doesn't speak Spanish. I mean as their principal language. And so, no, Columbia is, I think, at a geographic disadvantage for long-run 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 amazing technocrats. I mean, it's a very unequal country in terms of access to education in terms of access to these positions, but that's also true of many other Latin American countries. So I'm not sure why Colombia seems better.

I'm not sure that's entirely it. One self-serving hypothesis I have is that, you know, in the United States, your path to political power and your generic degree is in law. Maybe in China, I'm told it's engineering. And Colombia, it's political science and economics. And so it might just be that it takes these great people who might have become engineers, who might have become lawyers in another system 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 renting a car and doing my own road trips, which is something that very few people do, even though it's perfectly safe. There are very few, if any, parts of the country where you would ever, that's 10 or 20 years in the past, where you'd worry about that. And so my general strategy is to pick medium-sized towns and sites. You know, I avoid the big cities. You probably have to see Bogota and 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. Maybe one of my highlights is from Bukaramanga through Colombia's Grand Canyon, Bia de Lava, Spanish colonial towns up in the mountains, down to Bogota over two weeks, and that was fabulous. Should I be optimistic about the future of violence in Mexico? 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, in this paradoxical way, very bullish on Mexico in general, but wondering, 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'm not sure that's the right choice. And I think Mexicans, they've sort of said that's unacceptable. 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 these groups. But a lot of particular states, well, let the groups be.

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 different degrees. And one of the challenges is that I think that tends to be democratic. 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 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 of its 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 violence? Once again, I think it's about we're going to change the bargaining power. 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. 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 and thus concede either very

little or 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. 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 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 change it.

But otherwise, that's the sense in which 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? I don't know if anyone predicted it. I mean, I think anybody who, I would say most Canadians even, because it's not, I don't think it's nearly as polarized a place, although I haven't lived there in something like 20, almost 25 years. I 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. And my distant view is that because there 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, 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 they may have just overstepped what people were willing to tolerate. So I don't think people were surprised at the movement. I think they might have been surprised that it sort of emerged in this sort of raucous, kind of amateurish, kind of violent. And some of the weirdness at the fringes was extra weird for Canada. And why didn't the Ottawa police just 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.

I grew up in Ottawa, and that has given me precisely zero insight into the 21st century policing in Ottawa. But, I mean, so the first part of your question, I don't have an answer. In general, I think violently disrupting or closing down protests is just an inherently risky political strategy. And if you don't think you have to do it, you might just try to weight them out a little bit, especially if it's minus 20 degrees. But is it like fighting? I think it is.

In some sense, that's the equivalent. The world of ideas. What did von Klausovitz get wrong? You know, the basic insight that we get from him, which maybe the only one I've internalized and remember, I think, is basically right. Which is the thing we often forget. 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 that book because it wasn't particularly

insightful. It might be part of the answer. 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 and to forget in spite of everyone being able to, you know, repeat his famous phrase. What special insight do you think you have into Hayek? None whatsoever. But what do people either overrate, underrate?

How's your take on him different? 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... What's the thought of Albert Hirschman that's influenced you most? I mean, development projects observed is probably like a whole set of volumes written by people of that. generation and maybe the next generation. The idea I take from it is that development is a process of trial and error or in some sense, it's almost a process of creative destruction that requires

lots of trial and error. And I think it's unfortunate that our general attitude in most 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 Sachs is a development thinker, overrated or under-reacted? Jeff Sacks was one of my teachers and letter writers and things. So with great respect to Jeff Sacks, I think overrated, or properly rated, but so many other ideas are just not read. And so Jeff had a popular book and a clear message, and as to a handful of others, and all of those people whom our friends and I respect are all overrated because it's read too much and everything else has read too little. For bouldering, what's a special skill that you need that most people don't appreciate? I think it's the fact that you have to not like other sports. It's the kind of thing that rewards intense focus and, I think, practice, practice, practice. And so the extent that you like other physical activities, it may be all sports do this,

but I think bouldering and particularly rewards single-mindedness. And so a lack of interest in other physical activities can be a benefit. You wrote some long while ago, maybe it was even 2007, that people who work for development agencies should not expect to fly business class. What's your current view of that hypothesis? So I still live by that hypothesis. and I don't know if I was at all influential in this. I'd like to think I 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. And given how many of my World Bank friends previous to and after this were mad at me is why I'm sort of conceded 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? A lot of the development discourse in my own feelings are like a little bit utilitarian in the sense of people are saying, listen, like we can make choices here where we can spend $1,000 per person or we can spend $500 on two people, 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, and so that we can take this limited and sometimes increasingly limited amount of development money and just do the most good with it.

And so the antithesis of that is just paying four times more 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 Innes? So I was really influenced as a college student by these economic historians of Canada and South America, particularly Southern Cohn, of whom Innes was very important in sort of the importance of 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. So Innes would 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 in Argentina, you would have

to look at cows. And in Colombia, you would think you have to look at coffee, but you actually have to look at all of the things that Colombia cycled through before they stumbled upon coffee as something where they had like a global cost advantage. And so it's just a 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 what this led me to do and how we got started on the path of 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 some places weren't

prosperous, it's because 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 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 is the University of Chicago maintained that? What's the secret there? So I selected this place six years ago, in large part. It was a mode of its chief attractions, and I've asked myself that question. I mean, there's a cheap answer, which is sort of cultural persistence, but then the question is why? So many university cultures have changed, right?

It may be that the fact that maybe I'm going to go back and contradict myself the political speech point. I mean, the fact that I think the university created, it built its social identity around being that. And the reason you can point out this thing is 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 they show up in the news because they're the university that does that. And so here's what's more surprising to me. It shouldn't be surprising that a university has done that. The question is why haven't more universities done that? And I was faculty at Yale and I was faculty at Columbia.

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 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. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app.

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