Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I guess it would depend a lot on the extent to which you’re able to. If I fire a missile at an enemy, I’m fairly confident that I’m going to only harm them, and I’m not going to harm me. Anytime anything you do is going to potentially blow back on you — for example, a nuclear bomb is one way to think about it — then it’s going to change your calculus because it’s going to be less attractive relative to the alternatives. There’s always going to be a selection of instruments that you could use. I’ve never thought of these kinds of attacks before. It seems to me, their risk of blowback is actually much, much higher, and there’s just a lot of uncertainties. I’m not sure why somebody would want to use them vis-à-vis one of these other, more conventional things that are much easier. Well, they’re very cheap, and it might be hard to trace. But in general, shouldn’t a theory of war be super technologically contingent? If I look who’s likely to launch a drone war, of course, I think the US, but not only. Who’s likely to launch a soldier’s war — it’s maybe negatively correlated. How can we have a general account of who’s likely to launch a war? Isn’t it always per technology? 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.…

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