YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Blattman

lines on the record: 56
first: 2022-06-27
most recent: 2022-06-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Solely through these interviews. And so the other thing I try to institutionalize is large scale data collection. So, in some sense, that's been my one of my contributions is showing that you can go into an ongoing civil war or into a post-conflict period with ex-combatants or into a city full of gangs and actually collect careful block-by-block data on the kinds of things you need to know to solve the problem. And then very often A lot of the things that we've believed to be qualitatively true have we've been proven false both through the data and then through experiments. Natural experiments are actual formal experiments. And so the qualitative work is like essential, but we can't stop there because it can be misleading on its own.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I try to approach it from two ways. One is much more than I'm sort of part political scientist, part economist, just trying to do a huge amount of time in speaking to the actors, armed actors, the non-armed actors, the government, the NGOs, the community members just to understand how the whole system works. But I also recognize that those kinds of small sample and qualitative conclusions can be really misleading because we tend to remember the most salient things and we select on the dependent variable and we also, it's very hard to judge what's going on.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lots of smart and careful people have gone, and either as peace builders or as academics gone into some of these more dangerous people and found the safe space to carve out some sort of peace building activity and how to also research and understand it. So it always can be done. But I think it just has to be done very cautiously and with local collaborators as a general rule. And the longer answer would take maybe more time than we have right now.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, a surprising number do in this. I think I was part of a movement of, I think anthropologists and sociologists always did. And I was maybe at the vanguard of a group political scientists and economists who, when I was a graduate student, began doing this work. And now there's just innumerable people who have followed. So it can be done, it has to be done carefully and selectively. It's almost always done with local collaborators who know the context really, really well. And so I bring my specialties, but they bring theirs in particular, you really need to understand what's safe to do and what's safe not to do. There's a reason I do this in Colombia and not Mexico, for example. And there's a reason I worked”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Piece is broken down, and they're trying to do something to repair that, but the myriad ways in which this happens is, I think, different in every context. So it's more of a lens to look at and sort of to sort of like organize our thoughts about all these confusing solutions and problems. And rather than there's no one specific path to peace.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it comes from this just the daily horrific cost of the fighting and the growing acknowledgement of everybody on every side that this is terrible and the treasury is being drained, you know, whether it's gang. So even gangs try to structure their own peace. And many cities across the Americas, gangs have successfully created criminal orders that keep themselves in building checks and balances and rules in institutions and penalties and interdependence. So even they have, now normally communities and states have other tools that they can use when those fail, but those incentives are so powerful that even the warring parties themselves, even when they're criminal gangs often often see code peace. Now, how they do so is so different in every, it sort of all these sort of, what they all have in common is they're all identifying which of the five reasons.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, absolutely. I mean, I think that's why so many states and so many societies are relatively peaceful. So we might be polarized. There might be a lot of loathing and peace. But I think it is in a society with checks and balances, in a society with a strong state and predictable rules and strong institutions in a society where we're mutually interdependent and that can be fostered. I think humans have been really, really good at reducing interpersonal homicide rates, reducing the risk of civil war. And so we've got vast swaths of the planet that are more peaceful than they've ever been in any part of history. And it's the states that have not gotten the societies that have not gotten their act together that are experiencing a lot of the domestic internal violence today. And then it's the fact that we don't have that overarching order and checks and balances in institutions at the international level that I think is keeping us from.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we focus on those sort of psychological institutional things a lot. We forget the importance of uncertainty and reputation too often, where the US was perceived as weak, would never put boots on the ground, might bomb a country. And so the US engaged in a 20-year exercise in reputation building, not because it made sense to fight that fight for 20 years, but because they were sending a message to every other prior estate future adversary terror group about how far they would go even when losing to basically punish an attack on American soil. And so, and I think they were as gross a failure as that was, I think that was also a success. And so we don't have to judge that as a good thing any more than we can judge that this drug leader, this drug gang leader, was doing a good thing by establishing his reputation, right? We can understand it and we can understand there's”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had to become a killer and he had to put his gang at war against other gangs because they were robbing him. They underestimated, amidst this uncertainty about how strong and resolved he is, they underestimated him and they robbed him. And he realized that he would have to construct a reputation through violence and through retribution, not because he felt passionate about it and wanted to seek vengeance, but in order to sort of because there are all these other gangs that were paying attention and he wanted to establish a reputation. Reputation only makes sense amidst uncertainty. And so But these logics that can operate at the lower level sort of can operate at every level. I like to use, for me personally, those three logics of intangibles and misperceptions and uncertainty and the need for reputation building help understand the US invasion of Iraq. So there was a desire for vengeance after the attacks of 9-11. There were misperceptions, not just passions, but also intelligence failures.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The third thing that happens, right? So we're already seeing two of the five, but the third that I think is underrated is like the strategic logic of a lot of gang violence, like a gang leader here in Chicago who told me how he was engaged in”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, because my day job isn't actually analyzing Ukraine, Russia. I'm working on gang warfare in the United States and Latin America, and I'm working in rebel groups. Warring ethnic villages in West Africa and so forth. And so I'm thinking about that micro level. And there's a lot of parallels. So when it comes to gang violence here in Chicago or in Medellin, Colombia, where I spend a lot of time, you hear like three stories. You hear a story. Why does this happen? You hear one story you hear is a story of these intangible ideological incentives, which is vengeance. Like I'm pursuing, it's a blood feud between two sides and I'm pursuing you killed my father and then I killed your brother and we're both engaged for the purpose of revenge. It's not irrational. There might be an element of rationality, but they don't regret this. This is like they're fighting, they're paying the costs for purpose. The other story that's very common is one of misperceptions in bias, particularly sometimes it's overconfidence, but it's also passions in the heat of the moment, hot reactive selves.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't think authoritarianism is equivalent to conflict. I think it's this personalization of power that's so dangerous at every level of society.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it's a region of the world that the great powers don't really have a strategic interest in. So, a lot of Southeast Asia, a lot of Africa, they do a reasonably good job at peace building because they can come in and they can guarantee these agreements and solve commitment problems. They can provide mediators and bargaining tables and reduce uncertainty and misperceptions. They can provide sanctions and foreign aid as a carrot and all sorts of things to sort of counter ideological incentives and unchecked leaders. And so, and they're reasonably good, I think, at building peace, all right? And so that's, so I think that rules-based international order would be more functional if it wasn't sort of stiff and relatively in some sense non-participatory and inflexible and non-democratic. And I think China would be more stable still, the more checks and balances it had.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Power is much more institutionalized in a country like China than it is in Russia. And ideologically, there's just a lot of military business political actors in that society that constrain what any leader can do. And I think that's fundamentally stabilizing. And so I think these strong and institutionalized autocracies are much lower risk of invasions. And I think they're much lower risk of igniting civil wars in their own territory. Likewise, the rules-based order internationally that we have is not democratic. We have a UN Security Council. When the UN Security Council, in its somewhat authoritarian or non-participatory way, When there isn't a great power involved,”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a big part of it. I mean, let me give me that a lot of the work being done there is in the absolutist and not the autocracy, that I think there's a possibility of authoritarian peace. So which is to say that I don't think, and I think there's a more liberal democratic piece has a better chance of success, but I think a lot of work can be done by checking and balancing power even within authoritarian regimes. So let me give two examples. So one is like to compare China versus Russia.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Destroying a share of that pie. And so typically when countries suddenly become more poor or groups suddenly become more poor, whether it's a drought or a sudden climate shock or a sudden plunge in the price of whatever it is that you pursue, these groups aren't more likely to go to war, it turns out.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think I think there is a myth that That nations fight because they're poor. And that individuals fight because they're poor, that is maybe trotted out to understand or explain terrorism or civil wars and other levels of conflict, gang war, that I think happens not to be true. It's something I myself believed and started research on and couldn't quite for a long time figure out why the evidence wasn't really there to back up the idea that poverty raised the risk of violence in a lot of countries and societies. I think that's less relevant in this Russia-Ukraine case, but it's, I think, relevant for understanding conflict more broadly. And the intuition is pretty simple. Like war is costly. If you're fighting over a big pie, you don't want to destroy a share of it before splitting it. You'd rather just split it. And if you're fighting over a small pie, you don't want to destroy a share of it before you split it. If anything, when you're fighting over a shrunken and pie because of you're in a very poor place and resources are more scarce, you may even have be more averse.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there probably would have been 12 other nasty things that Vladimir Putin would have done in his unchecked interest, pursuing his ideological objectives, pursuing his country's ideological objectives. And so I think it was restraining, but we don't really know. This is the inherent thing that's so difficult to test, at least at this level.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fact is that there were fundamental interests here, and a set of strategic and non strategic, there's sort of psychological and ideological factors that I think drove Russia to do this despite the costs and despite the economic and social entanglement. My personal opinion is, and so we don't want to judge this by the failures. There's all these quiet successes where any number of countries, because they're entangled and because they fear sanctions don't do nasty things. So I personally think that were it not for this entanglement and were it not for the threat of sanctions and the withdrawal from that entanglement,”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, listen, I think of it as like if you live on a busy road where there's aggressive drivers, you want to put on speed bumps. And speed bumps are probably almost always a good idea. But they're not going to completely eliminate the risk, right? And so if there was an accident on your street and somebody was hit, I don't think you'd say we should be getting rid of these speed bumps. Now you could say let's not be fooled into complacency by speed bumps and let's recognize that there's speed bumps and not anything more. But I think you wouldn't say, well, let's get rid of all the speed bumps.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where that superpower, we're essentially two powers on either side, you have, let's call it NATO and Russia, where they have fundament, they've just got a fundamentally different system of organization order. And so their interests are completely in conflict with one another. I think short of Russia essentially becoming more checked, maybe not full democratization, but short of it becoming more checked. I don't really see an alternative to like a really tense standoff for generations when that hopefully just never erupts into conflict, like violent conflict again.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't see a path to that in Russia versus NATO right now, and I don't see a clear path to that. Kind of entining and rules based order between Russia and Ukraine. It doesn't just not clear we have much of an apparatus for anything beyond this sort of tense confrontation that hopefully will simply be nonviolent. And I think that's because I think that's almost always the case with a superpower.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, So What I was trying to say in the second half of the book is to say that. Would be nice to go right now, the costs of war are a deterrent enough to get us probably at least to a frozen conflict, if not a settlement. But you'd like to have, so the absence of violence, what some people call negative peace. But what you'd like to have is what some people call positive peace. You'd like to have lots of insulation. You'd like to have Russia and the West or Russia and Ukraine so integrated or an overarching set of international institutions and rules and enforcement or whatever such that this just never needs to occur. that they're like the United States and Canada, right? Or Britain and France. Things are so entwined and there's such a rules-based order that conflict, violent conflict is just not going to happen for generations and maybe never.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Balancing Act, isn't it? So sometimes the commitment problem is arising from strategic factors alone. The fact that my enemy is going to be more powerful in future, I'm temporarily strong now and I can lock in that advantage, right? Other times the commitment problem comes from the fact that our political elites and circumstances can manufacture this intransigent, manufacture these intangible incentives to fight no matter what. And that this isn't just happening in Ukraine, Russia. You could see this in ethnic conflicts. You can see this in civil wars where leaders sort of have to walk this perilous path of enraging their group against the other side in order to shut off bad bargains without going so far that they shut off any possibility of a bargain in future.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Settlements that are preferable to both sides than warfare. What you would like to do is rile up your population to make a whole set of those settlements, the settlements that are just advantageous to you politically impossible so that when you go to the negotiating table with Putin, you can say, listen, I would love to be able to offer you what you are asking, right? Because I want to end this war. But I'm democratically accountable and there's no way I could ever ratify this and you know this. And so I actually have an incentive to go to the negotiating table having tied my hands. And then what you hope is that the other side hasn't done the same to such a degree that there's no settlement that's acceptable to your two, the two groups to which you're accountable. I was going to say that's a very fun.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's very difficult to Talk about to sort of talk about this publicly, I think is. And on top of that, the sad thing is because of how Russian forces have been acting, it's very difficult to imagine how any negotiated settlement that left Russia with any level of Ukrainian territory, which may be very little in the end. but wouldn't have like a terrible human cost for people who are left on that side of the official or unofficial border. So I think that's, but the other thing that's going on is this is actually like a strategic weapon, right? If you can roil up your side, right? So let's suppose you're a politician and you know there's going to have to be a negotiated settlement. You're the president of Ukraine and you know as Zelensky has known from the beginning and used to state quite publicly that there's going to have to be a settlement and they're going to be painful compromises. There's so many possible”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that. Okay, so I think we know all wars end. They can end either in a negotiated settlement or in sort of a frozen conflict. So Kashmir is sort of like a frozen conflict, one where there's no actual peace deal and where a negotiated settlement is just politically very, very difficult. So I think behind closed doors, most politicians understand that this is probably going to end in one of those two ways. The question is when, and then everyone agrees that a negotiated settlement would be better than a frozen conflict. The challenge is that there's sort of two challenges. One is there's, for understandable reasons, this is an illegal invasion. It's a violation of the UN Charter. It's for Westerners. It's sort of a resurgent of a traditional enemy, it seems. And so people are very angry and outraged about this.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Support and how long they'll get that support is unclear. And Russia is facing a 10 or 15% drop in national income. The head of the central bank called it the phenomena that will take place is deindustrialization in the country. And they're seeing a steadily dropping sort of available number of troops. Armaments parts. So I don't think either side is really, as usual, is really prepared to fight this war that much longer. It could happen, right? But I think the dynamic that we always have to focus on that is hard to focus on in these moments is actually just how much the active fighting narrows the attention of both leaders to just how ruinously costly this is. And I think that's maybe why we've seen a concentration of the war over much smaller stakes in a much smaller region rather than an escalation of this conflict.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, to me, actually, the universal constant is just how costly these things grow over time. And how that piece exerts this gravitational pull because of that. And so we see this on the news in terms of civilians and soldiers killed or destroyed buildings and so forth, where Zelensky and Putin are seeing it are the treasuries being drained and the massively like the armaments and even just the munitions that they can marshal onto the battlefield disappearing steadily. But most of all, it's just this question of money. Ukraine needs half of its monthly income pre-war to wage the war it's been fighting. It's not earning that right now. So it's only getting that through.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one that the other thing is the commitment problem, the failure to solve the commitment problem gets us into a war and then often is what keeps it going. And some people, you know, most wars when they break out are short, actually. You know, we remember the long wars, but we forget that most wars actually are just skirmishes. And then when they go beyond skirmishes, most wars end within a few months and only a few go on much longer. And some political economists and historians have made the argument that every long war is actually the function of a commitment problem, the fact that the deal is simply impossible for both sides to agree to.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To some extent, we sort of make a decision to sort of initiate violence every day in the context of a long war, right? Because of a failure to sort of pay attention. So, yes, those in, but they can mutate, right? So, what do you see happening? What do you often see happening over the course of many, many wars? Not just in Ukraine and Russia. You can see it there, but a lot of civil wars. One is you often see as the atrocities and the destruction mount that people are angry in a way that they weren't beforehand. So maybe they went into the war because they were uncertain, they misperceived the situation. That usually gets resolved really quickly, right? All those misperceptions, all that uncertainty is resolved. But what's replaced them is now perhaps anger and a desire for vengeance and a desire for justice. That's an intangible incentive, right? That often takes hold that sort of says, I am going to keep fighting merely for the sake of punishing this evildoer.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the argument because he's obtaining these other things through it. And he doesn't see another means to obtain them. In some sense, war is his means of last resort to obtain them after 20 years of failing to co-opt Ukraine through every other means possible. And so there are elements, I think, of each of these five that I think, so if anything, I think the newspaper stories dwell a little bit too much on his intrinsic ideological intangible incentives. And they dwell a little bit too much on the misperceptions and bias, which I think are right. So they dwell too much, as we often do in the two psychological causes. And I think we dwell a little bit too little on the strategic causes, which is the fact that he's unchecked, that the situation was basically uncertain, and that in this environment, it's very hard for both sides to commit to a deal.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In contrast, I would say so this is an instance where all of the things where we're aware that war is costly, but we're willing to pay that price. And if anything, once you, you know, I think this might be one of the chief ways to understand the war that's going on. Every time somebody says Putin is pursuing personal glory and a place in history, so that's an intangible thing that he's achieving through war that he's willing to pay the costs of war for. And by the way, he's unchecked, therefore he doesn't have to pay most of the costs. That's his intangible incentive. Other people point to national glory, getting the empire back together, accounting for recent humiliations or status competition vis- ⁇-vis NATO in the West. All of these are all rational in the sense that our values are values, right? Why do I prefer Putin is in some sense willing to pay the cost of war?”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you worry that other acts, each actor has their own private or political incentives to keep fighting in spite of the massive, massive costs.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the terms of a settlement. On the Ukrainian side, Russia is concerned that of a repeat of the Minsk Accords, which is to say that maybe the top leadership will agree to a deal, but then parliament will refuse to ratify it because it will be so unpopular. And of course, what's on most people's minds, however, is the fact that no one really trusts Putin to stick to any settlement in terms of a deal. They worry about him continuing to have incentives because he's unchecked and for other reasons to sort of try to carve off Ukraine or other parts of the former Soviet Empire sliced by slice and that any settlement will merely be an opportunity for him to regroup and reattack. And so these are basically this phenomenon called commitment problems where there's one is there's no overarch.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I would say, sort of, of the five logics, three are strategic in the sense that they're cold and calculating. One is just driven by the political structure, unchecked leaders, right? The fact that you have that unchecked leader is going to pursue their own interest. We can trust that most of the time. Uncertainty was all and that the fact that you might gamble on warfare is a quote-unquote optimal behavior is also strategic logic. And then this third that you're talking to, which is you worry that your opponent's unreliable and there's a potential commitment problem, is another strategic challenge. And a good example in this context is, well, I think there's two. Let me say I think it's actually more useful for understanding why this war is hard to end, which is that neither side really trusts the other to be able to hold up.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If human beings couldn't make the same high stakes decision over and over and over again and get it wrong, right? In a really repeated, it's much simpler than in with great feedback on just how poorly you're doing relative to the marketplace, and yet it still persists. So the idea that this could be happening among political leaders is surely true.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's very, and that's true in a lot of walks of life, even really high stakes decisions. So we can be overconfident as leaders and as institutions and politicians in two ways. One is we can overestimate our chances of victory, but we can also be overconfident that we underestimate just how uncertain it is. Like we basically, we're too precise. We're overconfident. We think we don't really recognize just how uncertain it is. And I don't think we would have a mutual fund management industry.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's just like poker. So I like to sort of in this context to hold up misperception, uncertainty together. You can only have misperceptions and midst uncertainty. So how much of this wars are just a genuine uncertainty and war is a gamble versus systematically underestimating the costs because you were getting bad information. I don't think we'll really know. I think we have to say that the answer is probably both.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brave and resilient and plucky Ukrainians would be, or how resolved the West would be on sanctions. And the idea that Russia would get a bad draw on all three of these things was always within the realm of possibility, but I don't think anyone predicted it, least of all Vladimir Putin. And so amidst this uncertainty, war is always a gamble. And of course, you'd like to just resolve that uncertainty and find out the strength and resolve of your adversaries. This is where some of the strategic logic comes in. You can never really trust them to tell you honestly because they have an incentive to bluff.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that's possibly true. But then what I usually like to point out alongside that is, so that's an example, a classic example of misrepresentation. So we ignore the costs or overestimate the benefits. But there's this third factor, one of the five that I like to point to in this example of uncertainty, which is to say that this, by saying this was a bias or misperception or mistake, I think understates the extent to which This is an incredible, all conflicts, all adversarial relationships. We really don't know the strength to resolve our enemies. And just to use the Ukraine as an example, the idea that five months ago, remember how uncertain it was, how strong Russia would be, how...”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So this gets back to the potential rationality of war is maybe we ignore the costs because we underestimate them systematically or we systematically overestimate our chances of victory. There could be psychological roots of our overconfidence. There can also be institutional roots. So when people talk about Putin being an isolated, insulated autocrat who is getting poor information because of the whole political structure, they're basically saying that this is a systematic misperception such that Putin is going to war because he's basically acting on bad information.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, for two reasons. One is because I do think that Putin is a personalized dictator, and this is, I think if Russia were run by a Politburo still instead of a personalized ruler, I think this conflict would have been less likely to happen. I think if it was a plutocracy of financial oligarchs, which turned out not to have been, right? There's oligarchs, but they weren't that politically powerful or organized. I think this conflict would have been less likely than it is. So I think whenever power is more broadly spread, not just because it compels the ruler to internalize more of those costs and maybe not pursue these private agendas, but because all the other four factors which are going to talk about, and we can come back to this, but I think all these other four factors get aggravated by that super centralized power.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a really basic and the least talked about cause of war. It's the idea that it's incredibly ruinous, but if the people who are deciding whether to take a group to war aren't accountable for those costs, then they're going to be too ready to use violence. And so a personalized dictator is the ultimate example, but of course, you know, democratically elected presidents may have, they can ignore some costs. And what's more, is most leaders, they may have their own private incentives. and their own sort of power grabbing that they can use war to obtain, right? And so that's sort of an example of an unchecked or unaccountable leader deciding to use war. It's bad for the group, but it's good for them. And this, I think, explains a tremendous amount of conflict in the world.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I hesitate from that is because sometimes it's deeply strategic and even optimal. There's circumstance. It's a set of, so some of the things we do are irrational, but there are also circumstances, situational factors that make fighting and make us ignore, that lead us to ignore the costs of war or lead us to gamble on the costs and sort of lead us down that path, even if we're the most cold, blooded, and calculating rational computers.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in the book, I sort of say, well, there's five main ways that happens. But what they all have in common is there are different ways in which our society or its leaders are overlooking or ignoring this brutal cost of war.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So the first thing I like to tell people and have them remember is that war is ruinous. And so every answer to why we fight is a reason that our societies, our leader, ignore those costs. And that usually these reasons, which are many boil down into five main ways in which we ignore, overlook the costs. And I call them unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. This bargaining through bloodshed and destruction and nourishion and all this is ruinous. War is ruinous. And every answer to why we fight is a reason that a society or its leaders overlook those costs.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are out there don't bring the two together. And so partly I wanted to bring these sort of different social sciences together and sort of show that they can talk to one another and we can look at them through a common lens. So I'm not saying my theory is right. All the other theories are wrong. I'm trying to say here's a way, here's a way to look at all the existing theories that are out there and just understand them in a different light.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I had to do a lot of sense making on my own. I mean, I think the job was made easier by the fact that I think there are dozens and dozens of scholars who have been trying to do some sense making for decades. And so for me, writing the book was born of frustration that all of these insights and some of the organization that I provide in the book had been around for 30 years. And it's only a slight exaggeration to say there's no original ideas. I'm just trying to sort of boil down all these ideas that have been there and some of these frameworks for people to manage. I think though the problem that was out there is there's a set of sort of strategic diagnoses of war that employ a lot of game theory and economics and some political science. And then there's a lot of sort of more psychological theories of war. And often those sense makers.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's a concept that I think in peace studies people would call, and I'm talking about negative peace. I'm sort of saying the absence of pitched battles. Is what we're sort of trying to understand why that's rare and why we shouldn't maybe overdiagnose it in the world.”
2022-06-27 · Intelligence Squared · Why We Fight, with Christopher Blattman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT