Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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? Sometimes, any hugely confident prediction of a military action is more often wrong than not. I’m not sure that there’s something, theoretically, that drives the hugely confident predictions because, in those instances, some people are simply too confident. I think the only reasonable way to look at the situation three months ago or two months ago was that this is, at best, even odds. I speak also as someone who was less than even odds. Then it’s very hard to evaluate these claims after the fact. Was the person who said it was 80 percent likely to happen correct? Was the person who said it was 20 percent likely to happen correct? We don’t know. I don’t think they differed theoretically. They may have differed in empirical beliefs and the things they weighed. I think the more that you are convinced that Putin has a personal stake in this military action and in taking Ukraine at all costs, and the more that you believe he and his cabal and his military apparatus are capable of complete misjudgment, then the more likely you perceived a risk of war. In retrospect, the thing I think people should have used to predict a risk of war, but that I very seldom heard anyone talk about, was the degree to which you thought the Ukrainians would be unflinchingly intransigent on any compromise, the degree to which you thought the US government would be intransigent on any compromise whatsoever. That’s mainly what I didn’t predict, but I don’t think anybody was talking about that, including me, a month ago.…

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