Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…To me, this is just a special case of my whole centralization-of-power story, which is to say that there are some groups in societies that are just not accountable to anyone but themselves, and their own peculiar set of preferences can determine outcomes. When I think about any splinter group, whether it’s some Northern Irish band of terrorists or a faction in Palestine or the Israeli government or wherever it may be, I think fundamentally it’s these groups who can act in their own self-interest because they have at least a temporary interest that can then push a situation into violence that was otherwise quite likely to be peaceful. It’s not just these macro autocrats are more likely to wage wars, which I think is true, but it’s also these little pockets of autocracy that we create in our own social movements that are really dangerous. 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.…

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