Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s the high variance point. Right. The fundamental driver of that capacity are these competing state systems, and war is an occasional by-product of that. But when you run a regression — maybe they did; I don’t know this paper — of current state capacity and war, there’s just this omitted variable, which is the competitiveness of state systems. 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 defensive modernization. There are a lot of words and concepts like this that say, “Well, we actually revolutionized our society or technology in response to a competitive threat that never actually turned violent.” That’s first order. I’m not saying competition is unlikely, I’m just saying it’s the actual . . . there’s 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 in 1968, ’69, and not earlier?…

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