Once Braumoeller took into account both the number of countries and their political relevance to one another, the results showed essentially no change to the trend of the use of force over the last 200 years. While researchers such as Pinker have suggested that countries are actually less inclined to fight than they once were, Braumoeller said these results suggest a different reason for the recent decline in war.
“With countries being smaller, weaker and more distant from each other, they certainly have less ability to fight. But we as humans shouldn’t get credit for being more peaceful just because we’re not as able to fight as we once were,” he said.
“There is no indication that we actually have less proclivity to wage war.”
That paper provides an alternate explanation for the long peace thesis.
However, it rejects “per capita deaths” as a good measure of rate of conflict, which makes it pretty dubious (people are fully aware that per capita is ideal for comparing homicide rates; why suddenly reject it for war deaths?) They write nonsense like:
Moreover, population growth is exponential [...] We should hardly be surprised that deaths from war cannot keep up.
More people means more soldiers, larger economies (hence more manufacturing of weapons), more and larger groups with reasons to rebel/fight/steal each other’s stuff.
They do have an interesting point with “war as information gathering/negotiations”. But a lot of the rest seems to be a conflation of “the reasons things are getting more peaceful are not nice reasons” with “things are not genuinely getting more peaceful”.
Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn’t. Proclivity matters.
I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90′s this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the “just-so story” criticism.
“The proliferation of states in the 20th century” was not an exogenous event, but explicit decisions made by the victors of WWI and WWII, specifically to prevent violence, so they should get credit for them.
Pinker tries to provide several complementary explanations for his thesis, including game-theoretic ones (asymmetric growth, comparative advantages and overall economic interdependence) which could be considered “not really nice reasons for measuring our (lack of) willingness to destroy each other”. Like SA said, Braumoeller seems to conflate ‘not very nice reasons to maintain cooperation’ with ‘our willingness to engage in war hasn’t changed’. And this is one of the reasons why Taleb et al. missed the point on Pinker’s thesis. To test if it’s business as usual, if our willingness, what ever that is isomorphic to, is the same, one needs to verify if State actors are more likely to adopt the risk dominant equilibrium than the payoff equilibrium or if there is intransitivity. There is a connection between the benefits of cooperation and the players willingness to coordinate. What if the inability to dominate places our future in a context where we see don’t see fat tails in deaths from deadly conflicts? What if the benefits of cooperation increases over time along with the the willingness to coordinate? What if it’s not business as usual?
What about this one?
Article: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/wardecline.htm Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2317269&download=yes
That paper provides an alternate explanation for the long peace thesis.
However, it rejects “per capita deaths” as a good measure of rate of conflict, which makes it pretty dubious (people are fully aware that per capita is ideal for comparing homicide rates; why suddenly reject it for war deaths?) They write nonsense like:
More people means more soldiers, larger economies (hence more manufacturing of weapons), more and larger groups with reasons to rebel/fight/steal each other’s stuff.
They do have an interesting point with “war as information gathering/negotiations”. But a lot of the rest seems to be a conflation of “the reasons things are getting more peaceful are not nice reasons” with “things are not genuinely getting more peaceful”.
Violence might not be the exact opposite of peace. Intuitively, peace seem to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just accidentally. A prison might have lower violence than an certain neighbourhood but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity to violence is higher despite the fact violence itself isn’t. Proclivity matters.
I am generally sceptic of Pinker. I have read a ton of papers and Handbooks of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is clear that while he was one of the top researchers in this area in the 90′s this has dramatically changed. The area has shifted towards more empirical precision and fined-grained theories while some of his theories seems to warrant the “just-so story” criticism.
Pinker seems to prevent good evidence for the long peace, but not for his explanations as to why it happened.
“The proliferation of states in the 20th century” was not an exogenous event, but explicit decisions made by the victors of WWI and WWII, specifically to prevent violence, so they should get credit for them.
Pinker tries to provide several complementary explanations for his thesis, including game-theoretic ones (asymmetric growth, comparative advantages and overall economic interdependence) which could be considered “not really nice reasons for measuring our (lack of) willingness to destroy each other”. Like SA said, Braumoeller seems to conflate ‘not very nice reasons to maintain cooperation’ with ‘our willingness to engage in war hasn’t changed’. And this is one of the reasons why Taleb et al. missed the point on Pinker’s thesis. To test if it’s business as usual, if our willingness, what ever that is isomorphic to, is the same, one needs to verify if State actors are more likely to adopt the risk dominant equilibrium than the payoff equilibrium or if there is intransitivity. There is a connection between the benefits of cooperation and the players willingness to coordinate. What if the inability to dominate places our future in a context where we see don’t see fat tails in deaths from deadly conflicts? What if the benefits of cooperation increases over time along with the the willingness to coordinate? What if it’s not business as usual?