A Time for War—But Why?

INTERVIEW

In the shadow of Ukraine, economist Chris Blattman takes on the mysteries of violence: the nuances of group decision making, of personalities, and of the economic choices that trigger conflict.

By Russ Roberts

Russ Roberts, EconTalk: My guest is economist and author Chris Blattman. Our topic for today is his book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. Why did you write a book, of all things, on war?

Christopher Blattman: Well, I was working in conflict zones from about 2004 and initially working on how to relieve the worst effects of war on kids, on families—especially those who had been participating in the war. And that got me down a path, a part of my research, of just trying to figure out what works in terms of poverty alleviation in these extreme scenarios. When you’re in these places, you can’t help but wonder all the time, what is going on? Why is this happening? Why did this even occur in the first place?

Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago and author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022). Russ Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project, host of the podcast EconTalk, and the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.

Most of my research turned to understanding: Who participates? Why do people fight? Why are individuals violent? And then, more and more: Why are groups violent?

Roberts: This book is in a tradition that I both love and am suspicious of, which is using the economist’s toolkit to understand various forms of human behavior. Before we go into the specifics of how you frame the problem, I’d like you to talk about what we’re going to call a meta-issue in this kind of work, incentives—you and I face incentives all the time, financial incentives, psychological incentives—and that’s the bread and butter of much of economics work. Nations are a little more complicated because although it’s easy to say Ukraine is resisting the Russian invasion or Russia invaded Ukraine, it of course is not—a nation is not an actor, a single, unified, purposive creature. Talk about how you think about that issue and how your book deals with that.

Blattman: There are two ways that I thought about this. Let’s call them principal-agent problems—the fact that a group can’t necessarily control its decision maker, right? We see that going on with, say, autocrats today and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This isn’t the people of Russia invading Ukraine. This is a cronyistic elite with some popular support, but by no means all.

But then there’s also this problem—and I think it’s maybe underresearched—where a lot of people are very quick to say, “Oh, so-and-so miscalculated.” That’s the classic explanation for World War I: “The foibles of these unaccountable leaders marched Europe into war. They sleepwalked into war.” The narrative that Vladimir Putin, for example, is the master strategist playing four-hundred-dimensional chess has disappeared overnight. It was just his foibles.

I give these narratives some credence. I think there’s a lot of behavioral, psychological miscalculations. But people personalize it too much. We like to do this. We like to over-personalize groups by their leaders and overattribute mistakes. Yet we have these big bureaucracies: even if Putin runs a

“If we always assume everybody’s crazy, we’re not going to be very good at preventing future wars.” “War is costly. It’s ruinous. So ruinous that it very seldom makes sense to fight.”

personalized state, there’s a huge military and political bureaucracy. There’s a big coalition that has a say, and they can’t all be stupid and making all the same mistakes all the time.

And so, this book forced me to think more about the mistakes we make in groups—in group thinking, in bureaucracies.

Roberts: The easiest explanation for anything that’s puzzling is, “Well, it’s a mistake.” Not a helpful explanation, although it could be true, of course. We understand people do miscalculate; they are overconfident; all of us make these kinds of mistakes all the time.

But there are often very strong forces working to make decisions that are maybe not mistakes. And, if we always assume everybody’s crazy, we’re not going to be very good at preventing future wars.

Blattman: There is this weird bifurcation. I think political economists and some realists, and a lot of international-relations scholars, are really quick to over-weight these systematic, root, strategic forces, which are really important. And then they totally discount any of the psychological stuff, whether it’s mistakes or whether it’s just what people have as principles or values. Everybody keeps making the same mistakes.

Roberts: It strikes me, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that one of the common mistakes people make is assuming that Vladimir Putin is something like them. He’s not. He’s not like you. He’s a Russian, which most people in the West literally don’t understand. He’s a former KGB person, which you don’t understand. He is a member of a former Soviet set of actors who have all kinds of chips on their shoulders and baggage that you don’t understand.

I remember the words of Hilaire Belloc, who wrote “The Pacifist.” It’s a very short poem:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

People have different attitudes toward violence, honor, territory, culture, their homeland, and their nation.

Blattman: One of the things that really struck me as I read account after account of different conflicts at different levels, whether it’s gang wars, or insurgencies, or international wars, is that we’re really bad at knowing what other people think. This is not a new insight from behavioral science. We tend to project our own preferences and our own beliefs on other people in a way that’s incredibly stubborn.

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

I have a friend who had written several books on the Irish, the Provisional IRA in particular. I went to visit him in Belfast for a few days, and I talked to him and to many people involved with the conflict. I toured the city a little bit. And my overall impression was, how many people thought that their response to some act of violence was just? That “oh, the other side would recognize that this punishment, the fact that I’m throwing a bomb at a police station, seems like an appropriate response to the latest challenge to me or the latest sort of injustice that was done to me. And they’ll surely understand that I’m not going to escalate things further.” Of course, that’s not true. The other side thinks, “Well, everyone will realize that I can’t find the person who threw that firebomb, but I can go into this neighborhood and arrest the thirty or forty suspects, round them up, beat them up a little bit, put them in jail. Everybody will understand that this is reasonable.”

FATAL UNCERTAINTY

Roberts: So, let’s get to your book. You give five reasons for war. What are they?

Blattman: Even to explain the five, I think you have to start with this insight: war is costly. It’s ruinous. So ruinous that it very seldom makes sense to fight.

This is a game-theoretic insight; it’s also a commonsense insight. Sun Tzu and virtually every general who’s written a book on conflict for centuries has, in some sense, said this: it’s better to bargain than fight. And most of the time, people do. Then this gravitational pull that peace has because of these costs—somehow, something rips you out of that orbit. Two of the reasons are familiar to political economists and game theorists, who like to talk about imperfect information or, more broadly, a lot of uncertain situations. One, if you genuinely don’t know the strength of your opponent and they have, in addition, an incentive to bluff— to pretend they’re strong in order to get the best deal—on occasion, your best incentive might be to attack to find out. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. The second is what game-theorist political economists called the commitment problem. One of the best examples is called a preventative war. If your opponent’s going to be much stronger in the future, and you could do

something to head that off right now—say, by invading them and stopping them from doing that—then you’ll do so.

Now, your opponent could say, “Whoa. OK. Before you do that, why don’t I promise—I’ll give you a good deal in the future when I’m powerful, don’t worry.” Or “I’ll give up something that’s going to make me powerful, just enough to make you not attack me now.” And in fact, that happens a lot. But when they can’t commit to do that, perhaps because there’s no international architecture to make sure you do, you have this so-called commitment problem.

Both of these are dominant explanations for everything from World War I to the US invasion of Iraq. There’s a lot of relevance for understanding Russia and Ukraine: the power shifts, the rise of Russia vis-à-vis Germany, the rapid rise of Russia vis-à-vis Germany in World War I. The possibility that Saddam Hussein could get a nuclear bomb or other weapons of mass destruction. And, in this case, the possibility that Ukraine could grow close to the West and be armed by the West to the point where maybe it has the long-range missiles to harm Russia.

And then you layer on the uncertainty. We can send in weapons inspectors to Iraq and say, “Well, maybe we can be mostly confident that the capability is not there.” But are we 100 percent confident? Are we 100 percent confident not just now, but that it can’t be restarted in six months or a year or five years? Are we pretty confident that Saddam Hussein would like to do this?

Roberts: I want to reiterate a couple of ideas in the book, which I love. Most of the time, there isn’t a war. Nations that don’t get along don’t fight all the time, because each side does realize that there’s an enormous cost.

Blattman: We forget that because we write millions and millions of blog posts and articles and TV coverage of the wars that happen. And then, for these conflicts that didn’t happen, we don’t write books. No one is going to write a book about the cruise missile that landed in peace.

Roberts: I don’t know if this Ukraine war is costly to Putin or not, yet. There’s a lot of deaths. I don’t know if he feels any harm. I don’t think he goes to bed at night saying, “What have I gotten myself into?” Is it costly to him? Stalin thought nothing, it appears, of sacrificing millions of his citizens to the German war machine. It was his defense mechanism for victory. I don’t know if there’s any cost to him. So, the costs are not necessarily borne by the decision makers.

“IT’S BETTER TO BARGAIN”: University of Chicago Professor Chris Blattman seeks to treat warfare as an exercise in group decision-making, a complex

interplay of realism and psychological factors. [Jason Smith]

Blattman: Which brings us to reason number three: if war is to be avoided precisely because it’s costly, if the decision-maker doesn’t bear those costs . . .

Roberts: Absolutely.

Blattman: . . . we still see the bargaining space, but it narrows. We talk about the democratic peace in political science [the proposition that democratic states never or almost never wage war on one “No one is going to write a book about another]. And this may be the cruise missile that landed in a self-serving statement peace.” for democracies, but I think there’s a lot of truth to that. There’s this thing I call unchecked leaders, which is to say they’re not internalizing costs; or they have their own private incentives to go to war.

Over-centralized power may be the most fundamental root of all conflict and warfare. I argue it accentuates uncertainty, it accentuates commitment problems, and it accentuates these psychological problems. It’s a much deeper and more systematic problem and helps us understand where we’re going to see conflict in the world, why we might see more, why we might see less over time.

Roberts: What are the next two reasons?

Blattman: The next two, I think, are gifted to us by a mix of sociology and psychology and behavioral science. I won’t say they’ve been ignored by game theory and political economy, by any means, but I think they get overlooked and understudied.

Sometimes we have stable, arguably rational preferences—things that we just value. We have tastes, we have preferences, we have principles, and they’re not all summed up by how much we value that material pie. We can also value status, we can value vengeance, we can value an ideal, we can value the extermination of a competing idea or identity, and pursuing those is potentially terrible but comprehensible.

Roberts: So, the fourth one—this would be when I have an offer from someone who wants to buy my house, and he makes me an offer that’s 25 percent higher than anybody else’s, but he treats me dismissively and without respect, and he’s obnoxious. And I just can’t stand the idea of him living in my house, so I don’t take the highest bid. I think some economists would call that irrational, and you’re pointing out it’s not irrational. We care about things other than how much money we have.

Blattman: Right.

Roberts: We don’t just care about how many toys and vacations and shirts we have. We care about our dignity and our pride and our respect. And we also, by the way, can be a little bit vengeful. So, we might get a lot of pleasure from keeping that person from enjoying our house.

Blattman: The thing that might be irrational is that the guy who is buying your home, who treats you like dirt, that might be a mistake. Or maybe it’s chance. So, it’s hard to explain how you’re going to turn to vengeance as a “state of preference”—a thing that could lead people to fight. If you look at, say, James Scott’s studies of Southeast Asian peasant uprisings or Elisabeth Woods’s work on Salvadoran insurgents, this is a major reason people join fights. And it may be a reason why entire societies go to war. “Yes, it was costly, but I get this other ethereal thing that I can only get through violence.”

THE PERSISTENCE OF ERROR

Roberts: Sometimes people lash out, right? There are a lot of reasons people do things where you say, “Gee, that was selfish. That was cruel.” I don’t think that proves people have a taste for violence. However, I do think we have some violence in our heart, many of us. You ignite it, and it will come to life.

Blattman: In the fifth area, we form persistent erroneous beliefs about the other side. And now you think about the strategic interaction that we started with, which is that I’ve got to assess your strength. You’ve got to assess mine, including my resolve. And we’ve got to assess the costs of war. Any “Are we 100 percent confident? Are reasonable assessment we 100 percent confident not just of relative strength and cost of war, even if now, but . . . in six months or a year or we’re off a bit, we can five years?” both see that we need to go to peace. But if we are way off—like, if I grossly overestimate—amidst the uncertainty . . . and maybe you do the same to me. That kind of error is amazingly common. Not just in war—it’s amazingly common in finance, high-stakes economic interactions, the decisions of CEOs. There’s a huge management literature on overconfident CEOs, overconfident investors, fund managers. It’s astonishing in its persistence.

Do Putin and his cabal, wide or narrow as it may be, think it’s in their interest to keep fighting or not? If they think that giving up—rather, if they think that fighting will be more likely to preserve themselves in power—then it can keep going. What’s more, they might look at peace “There’s a huge management litera- and say, “Actually, peace ture on overconfident CEOs, overcon- looks pretty costly now. fident investors, fund managers.” Number one, all these sanctions, I’m not sure if they’re going to go away. Maybe the US government would wipe this away, but all these private companies, all these boycotts, I’m not sure if that’s going away. Maybe no one will buy our oil, and maybe we’ve lost this European customer for our oil and gas. So, peace might be less attractive if we’re unable to unravel this.”

And then he says, “Wait a second. The US president just called me a war criminal. They’re formalizing proceedings, and that’s going to make it hard for me to step down, because if I step down, eventually—even in ten years— whatever apparatus of control I’ve built, I’m no longer going to be a retired statesman. There’ll be some incentive for them to extradite me.” Or there’s an added incentive for a palace coup. So, does that make him more likely to settle, or not?

We don’t know. It’s really complicated. The West is doing some things that are not obviously making peace more attractive. There’s this famous quote from Sun Tzu, “You build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat along.” I wish we were doing it.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by permission from Russ Roberts’s podcast EconTalk (www.econtalk.org), a production of the Library of Economics and Liberty. © 2022 Liberty Fund Inc. All rights reserved.

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