Chris Blattman
About
Development economist at the Harris Public Policy School, University of Chicago
Cast within
No topic-region cast yet — this appears once Chris Blattman's compiled claims are aligned into a topic region's argument tree.
Claims by Chris Blattman (20 of 106)
Hostile Dyads Rarely Fight
Empirical studies of adjacent, distinct ethnic groups in Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s found that only about one in a thousand of these potentially conflicting dyads experienced any violent conflict in a given year, contradicting the perception of these regions as zones of endemic, persistent ethnic violence.
Layering Uncertainty and Commitment Shrinks the Deal Space
When uncertainty and the commitment problem are layered on top of one another, they create impersonal situational forces that drastically narrow the space for a peaceful agreement; leaders' mistakes and foibles—which observers tend to overestimate—then become crucial only because the room to find a deal was already so small.
Putin's First-Order Question Is Holding Power
For Putin, the first-order consideration is not the commitment problem or sanctions but whether he believes he can hold onto power by fighting versus settling; if continued fighting is more likely to preserve himself and his cabal in power, the war can continue regardless of national interest, making this private incentive the thing Blattman worries about most.
Ultimatum Game Reveals Stable Vengeance Preference
In the ultimatum game—where one player splits $10 and the other can accept or reject (with both getting zero if rejected)—most people across societies offer $2-4 and reject offers below that, revealing a stable, predictable preference linked to vengeance and dignity that explains why people forgo material gain to punish unfairness.
Appeasement Is Rational Response to Power Shift
Appeasement is just what we call compromise when we're giving something away in response to a rising power: when a nation dramatically rises in wealth and influence and claims a sphere of influence, the rational move for others—because war is costly—is to concede, as Russia did when a weak post-Soviet state watched the U.S. expand NATO to its borders, and as the West later did over Crimea, Syria, and Kazakhstan when Russia re-asserted its strength.
War Is Costly So Bargaining Usually Wins
War is so costly and ruinous that it very seldom makes sense to fight; rivals can look at relative strength and find a bargained split of the 'pie' that makes both sides better off than destroying part of it in war, so most of the time peace prevails and sustained fighting only happens when something rips actors out of that gravitational pull toward peace.
Projection Bias Sustains Conflict
Humans are remarkably bad at knowing what other people think and tend to stubbornly project their own preferences and beliefs onto adversaries; each side in a conflict assumes its own retaliatory act is obviously just and proportionate and that the other side will recognize it and not escalate, which repeatedly fuels cycles of violence as in Northern Ireland.
Don't Over-Personalize Groups By Their Leaders
We habitually over-personalize groups by attributing their behavior to a single leader and over-attribute outcomes to that leader's mistakes; but even a personalized autocratic state like Putin's has a huge military and political bureaucracy and a coalition of cronies who have a say, and they cannot all be making the same mistakes all the time, so explaining war as one man's miscalculation is misleading.
Five Buckets Explain All War
All explanations for why rivals fail to find a peaceful bargain fall into five buckets: (1) uncertainty/imperfect information combined with incentives to bluff, (2) commitment problems such as preventive war when one side will be much stronger later, (3) unchecked leaders who don't internalize war's costs or have private incentives to fight, (4) intangible or 'stable' preferences like status, vengeance, or ideology that aren't in the material pie, and (5) misperceptions—persistently wrong beliefs about the other side.
Uncertainty and Bluffing Are Correct Calculations
The first cause of war is not a 'miscalculation' but a correct calculation under imperfect information: when you genuinely don't know your opponent's strength and they have an incentive to bluff that they're strong to get a better deal, your optimal strategy may sometimes be to attack to find out—like calling or bluffing in poker—and even without bluffing, if both sides start with sufficiently different priors about relative strength, that inherent uncertainty alone is a risk factor for war.
Unchecked Leaders Don't Internalize War's Costs
The third cause of war is unchecked leaders: when the decision-maker does not bear the costs of war—or has private incentives to fight, such as preserving an apparatus of control threatened by democracy, capitalism, or NATO—the normal deterrent of war's costliness is weakened, and the private benefit to the ruling cabal can overwhelm the costs they personally bear, making war attractive even when it would harm the population.
Commitment Problems Drive Preventive War
The commitment problem—best understood through preventive war—occurs when an opponent will be much stronger in the future and you could head that off now by attacking; even though the rising power could promise a good deal later or give up something now, when they cannot credibly commit to honor that promise (because there's no enforcement architecture), the bargain breaks down and war becomes attractive, as seen in WWI (Russia's rise vis-a-vis Germany), the Iraq invasion (Saddam's potential WMD), and Russia's fear of a Western-armed Ukraine.
India-Pakistan Missile Misfire Stayed Peaceful
Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan and yet calm ensued and the event was barely reported, illustrating that even nuclear-armed rivals with a history of skirmishes have no interest in launching war and routinely defuse incidents that could have escalated.
Passions Drive Individual But Not Group Violence
Visceral passions and emotional reactions (fight-or-flight, flying off the handle) are hugely important for understanding interpersonal violence, but empirically they are not very important for explaining why large groups go to war; group conflict is better explained by persistent erroneous beliefs about the other side than by passion.
Over-Centralized Power Is the Deepest Root of War
Over-centralized power is arguably the most fundamental root of all conflict and warfare, not merely because it insulates leaders from the costs of war, but because it systematically accentuates uncertainty, commitment problems, and the psychological misperception problems—making it a deep and systematic driver that helps explain where conflict will appear in the world.
Democratic Peace From Accountable Leaders
The democratic peace—the observation that democracies rarely fight other democracies—is plausibly explained by democratic leaders being more accountable and thus internalizing the costs of war; autocrats who don't internalize those costs can put democracies in positions where war becomes optimal, though the empirical literature is murky and democracies still go to war against autocrats.
Intangible Preferences Are Not Irrational
The fourth cause of war is stable, arguably rational preferences for things not captured in the material pie—status, vengeance, ideals, dignity, the extermination of a competing identity—and pursuing these is not irrational, just as a homeowner rationally rejecting a higher bid from a disrespectful buyer values dignity over money; when actors can only obtain such intangible goods through violence, it hijacks the normal incentive toward peace.
Sanctions and War-Crime Charges May Block Peace
Western actions may inadvertently make peace less attractive to Putin: decentralized sanctions, corporate boycotts, and lost oil/gas markets that won't easily reverse turn sanctions from conditional repression into unconditional costs, while formal war-crimes proceedings raise the risk of extradition or a palace coup if he steps down, so the absence of a 'golden bridge to retreat' increases the private incentive to keep fighting.
Misperception Requires Uncertainty
The fundamental psychological error driving group conflict is persistently wrong beliefs about the other side: misperception requires uncertainty, because amid uncertainty a leader draws an inference about the opponent's strength or resolve that is way off, and this kind of overconfident, off-base inference is astonishingly common and persistent—not only in war but in finance, CEO decisions, and investing.
Most Wars Are Short
Most wars, when they happen, are short—the unconditional probability based on history is that a conflict like Russia-Ukraine ends within a month or two—because once fighting resolves the uncertainty about relative strength, the bargaining incentives reassert themselves; the salient exceptions like long quagmires are remembered while the many quickly-resolved interventions (e.g., 1994 Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia) are forgotten.
My Notes
Loading notes...