The case that war isn't in decline | Bear Braumoeller (2022)

Описание: Originally released November 2022. Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out.

But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public (including host Rob Wiblin) unsure quite what to believe.

Today’s guest, professor in political science Bear Braumoeller, is one of the scholars who believes we lack convincing evidence that warlikeness is in long-term decline. He collected the analysis that led him to that conclusion in his 2019 book, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age.

Learn more and see the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...

Chapters:
• Rob’s intro (00:00:00)
• The interview begins (00:03:32)
• Only the Dead (00:06:28)
• The Enlightenment (00:16:47)
• Democratic peace theory (00:26:22)
• Is religion a key driver of war? (00:29:27)
• International orders (00:33:07)
• The Concert of Europe (00:42:15)
• The Bismarckian system (00:53:43)
• The current international order (00:58:16)
• The Better Angels of Our Nature (01:17:30)
• War datasets (01:32:03)
• Seeing patterns in data where none exist (01:45:32)
• Change-point analysis (01:49:33)
• Rates of violent death throughout history (01:54:32)
• War initiation (02:02:55)
• Escalation (02:17:57)
• Getting massively different results from the same data (02:28:38)
• How worried we should be (02:34:07)
• Most likely ways Only the Dead is wrong (02:36:25)
• Astonishing smaller wars (02:40:39)

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