Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Isn’t that, in a way, the opposite of centralized power? 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. 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. 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. Maybe not surprisingly, you very quickly brought us to the bleeding edge of conflict research and the thing we don’t understand very well. When I think about the one area I wish I understood better — the game theory, the strategic dynamics, the empirics — would be the difficulties of coalition formation and the fact that fragmenting coalitions and many decentralized actors with the means of violence is actually really destabilizing. I think we need more — I don’t know how to think about it systematically because I don’t think we’ve had 20 people with their shoulder behind the boulder, pushing and trying to understand that. 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. There’s one group of people that very confidently predicted 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 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?…

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