1 Political Science Notes The Better Angels of our Nature Why Violence has Declined Steven Pinker The Long Peace chapter 5 A Arnold Toynbee 1889 1975 versus Lewis Fry Richardson 1881 1953 a Toynbee famous historian of the 20th century i In western history war has followed war in an ascending order of intensity WWII is not the climax of this movement 1 Pessimistic view of world wars in the future as inevitable b Richardson physicist meteorologist psychologist and applied mathematician i Though the two world wars may make it seem as though a third is inevitable the long future will likely be without a third world war 1 Optimistic 2 Used statistics and was right a The world s attentions has shifted from the idea of a third nuclear war to other kinds of conflict i Wars in smaller countries as opposed to two big nations ii Civil wars iii Genocides iv Terrorism B Statistics and Narrative a 20th century most violent century i first half very violent WWI WWII Civil wars genocide ect ii Second half unprecedented avoidance of war 1 the Long Peace John Gaddis b Argument for this chapter i Identify the components of the long term trends in wars between states 1 No cycles a big does of randomness an escalation recently reversed in the destructiveness of war declines in every other dimension of war and thus interstate war as a whole ii Understanding the trajectory of war using statistics and narratives th c 20 century the bloodiest i High death tolls higher population than in previous centuries ii Historical availability we do not have as much access to the records of wars in centuries in distant past iii Historical myopia closer an era is to our vantage point the more details we have 1 This affects common sense and professional history 2 Overestimations based on relative understanding 2 C The Statistic of Deadly Quarrels Part 1 Timing of Wars a Richardson 315 deadly quarrels that ended between 1820 1952 i Logarithmic scale allows us to visualize quarrels of a variety of sizes addresses the problem of defining war ii malice aforethought soldiers killed on battle civilians killed deliberately or as collateral damage death of soldiers due to disease or exposure not civilian deaths form disease or exposure because that is more due to neglect than malice iii The military horizon iv Poisson Process randomness seems to come in clusters v Wars are random Richardson s data sets 1 Poisson process with drifting probability nonstationary a The possibility of war declining non stationary Poisson process with a declining rate parameter D The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Part 2 the Magnitude of Wars a When Richardson plotted the log of the number of quarrels of each magnitude against the log of the number of deaths per quarrel he ended up with power law distribution b Power law distributions piles of data in which the log of the frequency of a certain kind of entity is proportional to the log of the size of that entity i When you put away the logarithms and go back to the original numbers the probability of an entity showing up in the data is proportional to the size of that entity raised to some power which translates to the slope of the line in the log log plot plus a constant 1 In this case the power is 1 5 a With every tenfold jump in the death toll of a war you can expect to find about a third as many of them ii scale free as you slide up or down the line in the log log graph it always looks the same like a like a line 1 As you magnify or shrink the units you are looking at the distribution looks the same 2 The odds of going from one magnitude of war to a higher magnitude of war are the same at every heightened interval 3 sixe doesn t matter the same psychological or game theoretic dynamics that govern whether quarreling coalitions will threaten back down bluff engage escalate fight on or surrender apply whether the coalitions are street gangs or armies of great power a coalitions themselves are power law distributed in size that they fight each other in proportion to 3 c d e f their numbers and they suffer losses in proportion to their sizes iii thick tails non negligible number of extreme values 1 Declines gradually rather than precipitously as you rocket up the magnitude scale 2 Extreme values are extremely unlikely but not astronomically unlikely iv Why do wars distribute themselves as power laws 1 What combination of psychology and politics and technology could generate this pattern 2 self organized criticality in the simulation war depends mainly on the territorial size of the combatants and their alliances a In the real world the destructiveness of war also depends on the resolve for the to parties to keep war going with each other hoping that the other will collapse first Preferential attachment the bigger something is the more new members it attracts i Accumulated advantage the richer get richer the Mathews effect John Maynard Smith First applied game theory to evolution modeled this stand off as a War of Attrition game War of Attrition i Paradoxical scenarios like Prisoner s Dilemma the Tragedy of the Common and the Dollar Auction 1 A set of rational actors pursuing their interests end up worse off than if they had put their heads together and come to a collective and binding agreement 2 a ruinous situations Pyrrhic Victory 3 Sunk costs public commitment Smaller wars show a higher probability of coming to an end with each succeeding year than do large wars wars that are longer in duration are not just costlier in fatalities they are costlier than one would expect from their durations alone i Historically leaders on one or both sides of war have pursued blatant irrational loss aversion strategy 1 Hitler Lyndon B Johnson ii Escalating commitments in war of attrition produce a powerlaw distribution we need to assume that leaders keep escalating as a constant proportion of their past commitment 1 Weber s law For an increase in intensity to be noticeable it must be a constant proportion of the existing intensity 4 2 Richardson observed people perceive death in the same way Weber Fechner Doctrine that an increment is judged relative to the previous amount g Richardson estimated the proportion o death that were caused by quarrels of all magnitudes combined from murder to world wars 1 6 percent i Two world wars killed 77 of the people who dies in all the wars that took place in a 130 year period 1 Wars don t even follow the Pareto Principle 20 of the population controls 80 of the wealth 80 20 a