Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
41 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“I still live by that hypothesis, and I don’t know if I was at all influential on this.”
02 / belief
“My first read is that might be what’s true, at least nationally, in Mexico. So, as soon as you have transitions of government, I think there’s just a risk every X years of that conciliatory nature and that peace between the state and the gang falling apart.”
03 / belief
“I think that does happen, and so people who are living in one of these border communities and want to protest violently against some change or lack of change — that’s what worried me.”
04 / belief
“I’ve spent a total of six days in Ireland, so I would say I think Brexit, and people feel like there’s a very real .”
05 / belief
“I would say the most important thing about this experience probably wasn’t the exposure to trauma and PTSD.”
06 / belief
“With great respect to Jeff Sachs, I think overrated only because there’s a handful of views .”
07 / belief
“I think what was fundamentally problematic about that — like in a lot of African countries — is that, in spite of the state capacity, you have power that’s very concentrated in a handful of elite groups.”
08 / belief
“I would say maybe it’s a particular group project. And maybe I’m just projecting my own experience because, even though I’m in a large institution, I’m this very autonomous individual, and so I’m not seeing that.”
09 / belief
“If we just took all the leaders and all the things they said, and then whether or not they did the things they said they were going to do, I guess my prediction is the correlation goes in the other direction, particularly with military exercises, but that might be wrong.”
10 / belief
“In the US, we’re programmed to think in terms of federalism, which is a great example, but I think there’re lots of other ways.”
11 / recommendation
“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.”
12 / evaluation
“The thinnest one I read 25 years ago. So maybe I suspect a lot of people are like me in that they have bought the volumes and aspired to read but have not fully read, so probably underrated.”
13 / prediction
“What this led me to do, and how I got started on the path of studying war, actually, is by realizing that some commodities are just hugely volatile in price for various circumstances, and some are not. So, if we wanted to understand long-term paths of development and why some places weren’t prosperous, it’s because they lost the commodity lottery, and they got a volatile commodity rather than a stable one.”
14 / evaluation
“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.”
15 / evaluation
“I think the problem, though, is actually the fact that we create a set of institutional or ideological rigidities that keep us from compromising.”
16 / evaluation
“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.”
17 / evaluation
“I would say most Canadians — because I don’t think it’s nearly as polarized a place, although I haven’t lived there in something like 20, almost 25 years — recognize that there’s a strong conservative and anti-establishment sentiment in the country, slightly fewer than in the United States but not dramatically different.”
18 / evaluation
“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.”
19 / evaluation
“The way I think about this is that there’s usually a narrow set of people who decide whether or not to go to war, and those people are either accountable or not accountable to lots of people.”
20 / evaluation
“I’m not sure how they will ever solve the problem of violence because solving the problem of violence requires recognizing that these armed groups and criminal cartels have an immense amount of power, and that they have to find a way to live with them.”
21 / uncertainty
“There’s another story that’s waiting to be told, and I don’t know the answer to it.”
22 / commitment
“What happened in your childhood was a reaction to a series of political and economic shocks and a search for equilibrium after that. It’s possible that we will see very dramatic political and economic shocks to destabilize that many countries again, but I don’t see them coming very soon.”
23 / belief
“What I liked about it the most, actually, was less about what we learned about violent conflict than what we learned about authoritarian politics, mostly the fact that it got the average American reader to get on board with election stealing and terrorist violence by putting them in the position of either the elite or the subjugated group.”
24 / uncertainty
“I don’t know this very well, but I would have suspected that one thing that might be true is that there is a peculiar set of circumstances that exist in East Asia and Southeast Asia that have made it hypercompetitive in this particular sector.”
25 / belief
“If you can go and spend a long period of time, like a couple of months, which most people can’t, then I think trying to find an excuse to live in a village is an incredible experience.”
26 / belief
“I think of the time that I’ve spent helping people think through what their options are, and reevaluating those opportunities suddenly changes all of their returns to investment.”
27 / belief
“If I cut up Canada into 20 independent parts, I would find 18 prematurely deindustrialized places, I think.”
28 / belief
“Then usually, as the result, I change how I think about not just that question, but the whole business of violence and development.”
29 / belief
“I think of it as a fully separate phenomenon. The stories that people tell when they have data, or when they tell something convincing, just sound very different from the kinds of stories that I’m used to thinking about for the kinds of violence I study.”
30 / belief
“At their level of industrialization, I don’t think it matters very much. I would say that .”
31 / belief
“I don’t totally accept this as a stylized fact. I think there are other aspects of .”
32 / preference
“I think if you don’t know anybody deserving of help or that needs something, or if you don’t have a personal connection to a place, as an impersonal way to give effectively, it’s probably the best way we have.”
33 / evaluation
“Going back to this question you had earlier about why was there so much instability in the years after the war, I think a set of misdrawn borders and trying to find a political equilibrium where all of these groups have to live together is one source of that political shock and instability.”
34 / preference
“I would say I would spend one week in Kenya and Tanzania seeing a mix of the large popular and small never-visited wildlife parks, partly because they’re amazingly well run, and they deserve to be rewarded with tourist dollars, but also because they’re incredible experiences.”
35 / prediction
“If war happens, then it’s going to be that much more catastrophic, which is maybe a pattern we’ve seen over the past century. But it comes back to this calculus of not feeling like there’s some equilibrium level of violence that just happens because violence happens, but that this is something that is often strenuously avoided because it just pulls people so far back.”
36 / evaluation
“I don’t like to be that crude because I’m actually a little bit of a skeptic of this knee-jerk to policing: “We need more police, and we need more investment in security resources.”
37 / evaluation
“There’s an answer to what I think my production function looks like, but the answer for most people — when I was in my maybe third year, and you do something, as you know, in academia called your third-year review, where your senior colleagues debate what you’re doing right or wrong, and then give you basically no feedback.”
38 / evaluation
“I tend to think we’re maybe a bit glib about saying that people are resilient because there’s a lot of pain or problems that don’t necessarily show up in our data but turn out to be really important.”
39 / evaluation
“People use it to think about something that we think of as bargaining and the commitment problem, which is that massive power shifts can lead to war, partly because it becomes difficult for the temporarily powerful person to be paid off not to exercise their advantage and, through a first strike, eliminate.”
40 / evaluation
“I think of Africa, which is the site of many of these wars, as undergoing a period of political instability followed by consolidation after a rapid and unexpected decolonization — at the same time that you’re having experimentation with economic systems and political organizations that turned out to be failures, which interacted with that to make it so much worse.”
41 / evaluation
“Any description of African society, African culture, conflict, or politics that relies on this, I have to believe it’s there because so many people have written books. But it doesn’t seem to be a first- or even second-order determinant of what’s going on when I think about the conflicts I know, the politicians I know, and the decisions that get made.”