Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s some cost-benefit calculus that is at the root of all of these. That, to me, is still going to be the first-order decision, so I’m struggling to think about . . . The technology’s going to change the cost, 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. Like a lot of economic theory, it’s always a good first-order principle for you to use to structure your thinking. The second-order elements just don’t seem to me to be particularly large. 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? The US 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: West Africa, Sahel. So why isn’t technology the number one factor? Let me use a slightly different analogy. Let’s take Afghanistan and the US involvement in Afghanistan. I have no particular expertise in the region, but I try to understand it 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 percent of GDP, and in return for that, we are going to buy reputation for not tolerating rogue states and terror attacks by rogue states. In return for that, we’re going to have some probability, diminishing over time, of victory over this particular rogue group. 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.” That’s not what they say to the public, but I think that’s, de facto, what happens. I think drones and technology doesn’t make war cheap. If war’s cheap, then you’re going to be more likely to use that as an instrument, and that’s the first order that I think technology gives us.…

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