Christopher Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where he co-leads the Development Economics Center and the Obama Foundation Scholars Program. Chris also has affiliations with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, the National Bureau for Economic Research, and the Center for Global Development. He has served as a consultant and adviser to the World Bank, the United Nations, and governments in Uganda, Liberia, Colombia, and the United States. This conversation was a lot of fun and we covered a lot of ground: from Sparta to Kiev, from the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War, from Russia’s attack on Ukraine to the prospects of war between China and Taiwan, and so much more! We start by talking about Chris’s journey, from growing up in Ottawa to finding his way to international work and then eventually to conflict. We then shift to Chris’s book, “Why We Fight”, and the concept of fragility. Chris highlights how fragility sets the stage upon which the five reasons why we fight push a society away from bargaining to using violence or as he puts it: “when killing an Archduke in some random Balkan city can send the world to war.” The five reasons for war that Chris identifies in his book are: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. We discuss whether there is a potential hierarchy among then, how they are connected, which of the five reasons played a role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as how intangible incentives can be seen in the Ukrainians’ resolution to protect their country. Chris also sums up decades of research and practical insights into 10 general principles that can set the world on the path to peace. We talk about how leaders are tempted by grand visions, but in reality, change happens incrementally – too bad 3% better doesn’t make for a good slogan! Listen to the episode for so many more insights from Chris Blattman!
Christopher Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where he co-leads the Development Economics Center and the Obama Foundation Scholars Program. Chris also has affiliations with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, the National Bureau for Economic Research, and the Center for Global Development. He has served as a consultant and adviser to the World Bank, the United Nations, and governments in Uganda, Liberia, Colombia, and the United States.
This conversation was a lot of fun and we covered a lot of ground: from Sparta to Kiev, from the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War, from Russia’s attack on Ukraine to the prospects of war between China and Taiwan, and so much more!
We start by talking about Chris’s journey, from growing up in Ottawa to finding his way to international work and then eventually to conflict. We then shift to Chris’s book, “Why We Fight”, and the concept of fragility. Chris highlights how fragility sets the stage upon which the five reasons why we fight push a society away from bargaining to using violence or as he puts it: “when killing an Archduke in some random Balkan city can send the world to war.”
The five reasons for war that Chris identifies in his book are: unchecked interests, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions. We discuss whether there is a potential hierarchy among then, how they are connected, which of the five reasons played a role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as how intangible incentives can be seen in the Ukrainians’ resolution to protect their country.
Chris also sums up decades of research and practical insights into 10 general principles that can set the world on the path to peace. We talk about how leaders are tempted by grand visions, but in reality, change happens incrementally – too bad 3% better doesn’t make for a good slogan!
Listen to the episode for so many more insights from Chris Blattman!
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Dr. Christopher Blattman
Website: https://chrisblattman.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cblatts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisblattman
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Mihaela Carstei, Paul M. Bisca, and Johan Bjurman Bergman co-host F-World: The Fragility Podcast.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fworldpodcast
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fworldpodcast/
Website: https://f-world.org
Music: "Tornado" by Wintergatan. Many thanks to Wintergartan for allowing us to use their wonderful music! This track can be downloaded for free at www.wintergatan.net.
Video editing by: Alex Mitran - find Alex on Facebook (facebook.com/alexmmitran), Twitter (twitter.com/alexmmitran), or LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/alexmmitran)
EPISODE RESOURCES:
Blattman, Christopher (2022). Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. New York: Viking Press
The prospects for war with China: Why I see a serious chance of World War III in the next decade
https://chrisblattman.com/blog/2022/10/26/the-prospects-for-war-with-china-why-i-see-a-serious-chance-of-world-war-iii-in-the-next-decade/
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:55 Chris’s background – people, places, ideas that charted his path
00:02:56 How Chris approaches risk and how to think about career moves
00:05:08 How culture enables risk taking and the role of failure in progress
00:07:17 A potential correlation between risk taking and creativity
00:10:50 What is fragility?
00:12:57 Dividing the pie and fragility
00:15:32 Why we don’t write books about wars that didn’t happen OR Why enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace
00:18:29 When do we actually fight
00:22:41 The five reasons for wars
00:26:49 How to think about uncertainty vs. commitment problems
00:30:46 How do intangible incentives that evolve change the nature of commitment problems
00:33:07 What is the interplay between uncertainty and technology
00:38:16 How interdependence failed to stop Russia’s attack on Ukraine
00:44:58 Is there a threshold of violence that we should accept in order to avoid war?
00:47:56 Why the West missed the Ukrainian people’s resolve - Most oppressed people don’t revolt
00:53:12 Bad guys and good guys support propaganda
00:56:52 Can you change people’s and leaders’ misperceptions?
01:01:19 Which leaders take their country to war - Leaders that have military training, but no battle experience, take their country to war
01:05:06 Wicked problems – what are they and how to tell the difference between a simple and a wicked problem
01:07:44 When misperceptions are desirable, aka politics
01:11:29 Chris’s 10 commandments as the anti-bureaucracy commandments
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Hi, and welcome to F-World: The Fragility Podcast, where together with guests from around the world, we explore how the forces of fragility affect all sides of society. Today, we have a special guest with us Chris Blattman, who is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, where he also co leads the Development Economics Center and the Obama Foundation Scholars Program.
His work on violence, crime, and poverty has been widely covered by a range of publications that we all know of, such as the New York times, the Washington Post and many, many more. And we're excited to be with him today here to discuss a subset of this work, as well as his new book, Why We Fight. Welcome to F-World, Chris!
Chris Blattman: Thanks for having me.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: So, having read through your bio and your background so many questions come up. And and I think one of the potential titles for a future biography that came to me was from KFC to FCV. Which which you know, so I was hoping that you could fill that too short and you know, and simplistic headline with some color about the people ideas and places that have defined you and that have kind of charted this path from, from your early days and until your work today, right?
Chris Blattman: Yeah. Well, I grew up in a suburb of Ottawa, which is Canada's capital, where if you wanted to earn some part time money as a high school student you ended up in fast food or eventually I got to work in a music store, which was much cooler. I'm not sure that either one of those - maybe other than creating a little bit of a work ethic - actually did anything for me.
It took me a while to find my way to international work and then eventually even to conflict. So, I went the circuitous route through, going to school for more business and accounting and then thinking I was gonna do that as a career and doing that for a little while before I decided I was miserable at it and became enchanted with the idea of international development in theory, but didn't know how to do it in practice.
And so I went back to school and one thing led to another, and I was able to, you know, different professors sent me off to work on their research projects - just as I hire young people today and send them off around the world to work on my projects - and that turns out to be a great pipeline, both into, I think a lot of development work, but then also into this like intellectual production that I became a part of.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: So I think at least for me, it really resonates this thing of going into one career and then realizing that this is absolutely not the way that, that you should be going about your work life. But I think a lot of people struggle with taking, making the leap, you know, from that and then changing around for you, what was it that kind of pushed you over the edge or that made you take the risks, if you will, that a lot of people feel are inherent there.
Chris Blattman: Well, I mean, partly it was just, I was unhappy and so it seemed obvious I should leave. I think I've always been, I'm also the kind of person if I don't like, if I'm in a movie, or if I'm at a play, and I don't like it, I'll just leave at intermission. So I, the sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy I subscribe to.
So, I like to just take that approach in general. But, but yeah, maybe the person who works in conflict zones has a slightly different tolerance for risk than the average person. But nonetheless, I try to tell everybody, I think it's partly just a mindset, so I try to tell young people to just think of careers as sampling.
And take the approach to restaurants and plays and books and if you do that, then I think you'll just take more risks in general and you'll find on average it works out. But actually the one thing I'll say is, you know, and that's what I like about working at a public policy school is master's programs and public policy programs can be this nice transitional way to reduce the risk.
So I was in business. I wanted to international development, I didn't know how to make that transition. And I do think master's programs really fulfill that. You know, especially two year programs where you have a chance to sort of figure out what the heck you're doing in year one and then year two you can use that.
And then the labor market allows you to make that transition. It like legitimates that decision. It's an expensive way to do it. Let's be honest. And so it took me many years to pay that off. But I think it was the right investment.
Paul M. Bisca: So you've just mentioned, part of that journey is your temperament, the fact that you want to try out new things, and that you actually had the courage to change tune, change gears when things weren't working out. And you just also talked briefly about the costs, but to kind of foreshadow a bit, the things would be discussing a bit - so your intangible incentive, so to speak, was that you wanted to be on this journey and to be curious and to find sort of your way. But, you know, you also lived in a society that rewarded that and that basically tolerates this and sometimes even encourages it. And to me, I grew up in Romania - two of us Mihaela too - and when I when I hear that story, I'm always thinking, okay, so this must be a society where failure is not catastrophic, failure is not fatal. So, is that an ultimate sort of an ultimate mark of development, so to speak, or when a society that allows citizens to experiment and to do some of this tinkering until they find their way?
Chris Blattman: Yes and no. I mean, yes, for the obvious reasons. I mean, no, because I think that level of security and development can encourage a certain kind of complacency. So, I've worked in very desperately. Poor places, as I think all of you have to some degree and there you're forced to experiment and trial and error becomes something you do, whether you like it or not. And you have to sample many professions. And, and so actually, so yeah, so the ability to sort of stretch and try new things is of course like a function of development, but then I think fewer people do it. There's just the idea that if you, like, if you lived in, I don't know, pickup country, Uganda, and you started a job as 21, the idea that you'd be doing that same job when you're 41 in the same career is almost nil, right? But it's actually not insubstantial for someone in a developed country. And so there's maybe some optimal level of risk taking and sampling that we, we don't do in developed societies.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Yeah. And I wonder also how that affects, you know, economic growth through entrepreneurial risk taking and so forth. I spent some time working on supporting young people across across the Middle East, for example, a lot of countries to who were just about to graduate from university and helping them, develop the creativity and the risk taking that we associate with entrepreneurship and became, frustrated not with their you know, unwillingness because that was there, they were extremely passionate, extremely wanting to, but that societal frame didn't didn't allow very much as Paul was alluding to that experimentation. So how do you think on an economic level of a country, how do you think that, that plays in, or how do you think we should be considering those forces there.
Chris Blattman: Do you mean in more developed countries or in the less developed countries?
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Yeah. No, if we can think of a correlation between the risk taking and the creativity that is, is allowed within the culture of a country and perhaps fostered by the education system of that country and the growth trajectory and how the growth is driven.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I guess, so, you know, I spent a lot of my early career working in Africa where I think actually the, one of the great impediments to that kind of entrepreneurialism was what an economist might call a really high cost basis of the economy.
So in the sense that everything's, you know, transport is costly and acquiring goods and inputs is costly and electricity is costly. There's some very basic inputs that are very costly and thus anybody you want to hire, they too need more income than otherwise from you. They need, so their reservation wage is higher because of all of these costs.
And thus it becomes all of these things that would be profitable in another place, or at least would be worth taking a risk on, are no longer are no longer so. And I think if you go to India or you go to China, it's just a very different space and there's, it's lots of reasons. I mean, they have many development advantages over sub Saharan Africa in terms of maybe just having hundreds of years of cohesive developed bureaucracies and states and markets and trade networks and all of these things are advantages, but fundamentally there's just a much lower cost basis of that economy.
And so, and so just, there's just a lot more possibilities for an ordinary person to access and to experiment on. So that's always just struck me. Like all of the people I know, all of these quite bright and brilliant entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, economic entrepreneurs in sub Saharan Africa can get, just face these insurmountable costs and odds just to start up otherwise good ideas. And then on top of that, I think they're just beset by a lot of much more idiosyncratic shocks. So it's just a much more volatile economy. And and so, so things just fail with more frequency.
Mihaela Carstei: So what you just said right now about the volatility and the ability of those societies to absorb either opportunities or risks that come their way, makes me wonder, what do you think about fragility, the concept, and what does fragility mean to you?
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I mean, fragility has become this sort of overused term, so my first reaction is always to almost dislike it and try to avoid using it whenever possible, which is maybe not the answer you want to hear if you run a podcast with fragility in the title, but maybe it is. I think it's, it tends to be one of these words that, that people hijack to pursue their cause.
And to me, my sense is like the original definition was, in the original meaning, was really about the ability for things to fall apart, which usually means the ability for there to be some kind of political collapse, and then typically at least violence on some scale. And but it implies that hasn't yet happened, right?
So you're not at war, you're not in the middle of a societal collapse. You're just on the, maybe not even on the brink. It's more that it's like within the realm of possibility. It's almost scarily possible because there's some set of fundamentals that are not in place that have sort of pulled you back from the brink.
And so, we'll get to the book and how I talk about Why We Fight, but in the book, when I sort of towards the end, I talk about fragility and I say, well, they're, you know, the book tries to cover the fundamental reasons we fight and being fragile is essentially having really little insulation from those fundamental reasons that we revert from bargaining and parliaments and boardrooms and things to using violence instead and all of the things that prevent us and keep us from doing that are there, but they're just much weaker than they, they would be otherwise.
Mihaela Carstei: So I have a follow up to this. How would you - as I was reading your book, I kept thinking about fragility every time you talked about the wedge of the pie that's open to negotiation. So, from your answer, I'm understanding the following: the wedge is almost gone.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, that's exactly right. And, for the, I guess for the benefit of the listeners, the whole idea is that. Maybe the number one thing we've learned from decades of social science is that fighting is the worst way to settle our differences because it's just ridiculously costly.
And, and so every, the two adversaries sort of face a choice, like they're, let's say they're bargaining over a territory or a parliament or an issue, they can and let's say you're evenly matched. They can split it down the middle roughly in proportion to each other's ability to burn the house down.
Or, you can decide to fight over it, destroy a share of the thing you're both trying to get, and then, since you're evenly matched, you flip a coin to see who gets it. And... And that, that, that cost of war sort of is like a peace bonus. You both sides get to divide if you can find a way to split it.
And that means that there's always a split that both sides prefer to conflict. And that's that wedge. So, in the book, you know, it's harder on a podcast, but in a book, I can show you nice little pictures and I can sort of say, well, there's a pie and there's a, you can create a, you can take a slice out of the pie and then divide it, or you can just divide the pie.
Mihaela Carstei: We're actually going to show a visual, sorry to interrupt you, but we're actually going to show a visual.
Chris Blattman: Oh, you are going to show the visuals. Well, so yeah, so, so nonetheless yeah, and then all of the reasons we fight are basically reasons that societies or the leaders ignore the costs of war willing to pay them.
Like that's basically what the book is about. And then it turns out there's only so many ways that happens. And so I think you're right. Like when we're in a position where. Our societies are either ignoring those costs or willing to pay them. That wedge is very small and then you're fragile. And that's when killing an Archduke in some random Balkan city can send the world to war.
Not because killing Archdukes killed causes war, right? But because only when the fundamental forces have made things very narrow and treacherous can something as idiosyncratic as that matter.
Paul M. Bisca: Okay. So, Essentially before we get forward and we focus on the book, I just wanted to ask for your clarification on something.
You mentioned that fragility is essentially a statement about the present or the future, about how likely a society is to succumb to these pressures, but what is the role of the past here? A lot of scholars, even institutions focus on root causes or fragility drivers, they go back, you know, you'll read an analysis that goes back to 500 years ago, saying which ethnic group was dominating, which and sort of, and so the role of resentment and so on and these things.
So, if you are fragile today, for the lack of a better expression, how much is that explained by what happened in the past?
Chris Blattman: So, I mean, the present is the past in the sense that a lot of the things that shape our decisions today and whether or not we're insulated from all these reasons that we can ignore or be willing to pay the cost of conflict are sort of rooted in the past.
And a lot of the things that hold us back from the brink and build lots of room between us and turning to violence are built up slowly. But, at the same time, I do think because there is a tendency to, I think maybe overemphasize some of these past forces because, you know, where I sort of open the book, as you know, is, is sort of saying, well, you know, one of the problems we do is we write, we, most people, we write books about the wars that happen and we don't write books about the wars that don't happen.
And so if you write books about the wars that happen, you'll see things like these ancient hatreds and these things, these issues and these injustices that go back decades, if not centuries. And they're obviously important, but the thing is nine times out of 10 or 99 times out of a hundred, or in fact, 999 times out of a thousand, two rivals chose not to fight - we just didn't write a book about it. And you find those ancient hatreds and rivalries in just about as many of the cases where violence does break out as when they do and. And, you know, this is one reason, I think, why when people go, when are we forced to confront this? Well, when people have gone and collected data on conflicts that break out, and then they try to analyze whether conflict's more likely when there's ethnic fractionalization, they've really struggled to find to find any relationship.
And yes, you can sort of bend and twist and eventually some ways you can sort of find a little bit of relationship because of course this thing matters, right? But the reason, the reason it doesn't sort of pan out, the reason why it doesn't turn out to be very important is because I think most, as I like to say in the book, most enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace. And so loathing isn't a sufficient condition for violence.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: No, it certainly isn't and I'm sure there are, I really like that mental idea. But if we dive in a little bit into the book and into the reasons and the logics for war and the unchecked interests, I particularly was caught by this When you write about the political agency problems and riots and because I think it really goes to this, this, this core misperception that, that rights are spontaneous, whereas there is as you, as you write, no data driven evidence for this particularly and, you know, most recently case in point of this and, and the recurring cycle of this is Haiti.
You know, as we see there is, as you say, this industrialized riot machines, which have really been built up in, in Haiti. And even, you know, it's not a perfect. Control group on the other side of the island in the Dominican Republic, but at least you have you know, a certain level of similarities in that.
So, when we think about this kind of right machines, this this unchecked interest of politicians, what are some ways in which we can start to get at them, start to kind of break down these unchecked interests when we are at such a low point in this trajectory.
Chris Blattman: Yeah. So, I mean, it's sort of, or another way to put the question is, okay, so when do we fight? Well, we fight when the people who are deciding whether to fight don't bear most of these costs. And so, why factor these costs and risks of war into your decision if some mother or child or soldier or city is going to bear these and I don't have to bear the burden.
And so, yeah, ethnic leaders who build riot machines is an example. Warlords, criminal bosses, autocrats. This is, you know, in the book, I sort of say in some sense, this is the most basic and fundamental driver of conflict. It's one that I don't think I appreciated until I thought deeply about it and wrote the book.
I don't think we talk about it enough as a community, just how the fundamental driver of fragility are unchecked leaders. And so the solution is to then try to check them. And this is like this millennia's long process in which most human societies have been engaged, because the consequences of having an unchecked autocratic leader aren't just, you know, repression and all the other terrible things that can happen, but but they'll actually end up being more likely to take you into conflict against the better interest of your group with that unchecked leader, with that warlord or institutionalized riot leader next door.
And I think that there's many answers to how to do that. I mean, I think the broad answer is - it's when other people claw a little bit more influence from that ruler or that elite circle and that circle widens a little bit. That's one way it happens. You know, the merchants forced their way to sort of into like the Lord's circle or the personalized, charismatic, ethnic leader sort of gets checked and balanced by some other powerful business interests or, it also happens from the bottom up when people have rising mobilizational power, new technologies to get wealthier and the entire masses can check the leaders. That's a nice story. It fortunately happens, but more often, I think it's that elite circle becoming slightly less tight and widening it a little bit. And that's an important, you know, margin of improvement for a lot of places.
Mihaela Carstei: So I think we have arrived at the point where let's quickly take a look at the five reasons, what are they, and just very, very briefly, and also in the back of your mind, if you can keep this question, is there a hierarchy because we've had an internal conversation about that and we might have a few follow up questions.
Chris Blattman: Sure. Okay, so yeah, what I like to tell people is - this is just a lens through which to like, I think, look at conflict and it's not so much my theories, believe my theory, all the other books are wrong. It's actually a way to try to organize all the theories you will hear in the literature. It's like a way to taxonomize and then better understand. So I say, so it all starts from this point I said, which is that we fight when we either ignore or are willing to pay the costs.
And so the first way we've just talked about one of those, it's when the people who are deciding don't pay those costs, they can afford to ignore them. They might also have a private incentive. So if that warlord or leader or autocrat thinks that they're more likely to stay in power if they take their group to war against the group's interests, that's a huge problem.
The second is in the book, what I call intangible interests, but you could think of ideals and ideology. It's all the reasons we might choose to go to war despite it being costly because we get something that only violence delivers. And that ranges from glory and vengeance to the pursuit of, you know, ideological ideals like liberty or sovereignty or God's greater glory or something, right? Something that we're like, we're willing to take this risk of violence because we get something that we can't get through compromise.
The third is, when we misperceive the situation. So when we get that basic cost benefit calculus wrong, which is to say, well, we don't realize that it's better to settle than to fight because we, maybe we're overconfident about our abilities to win. We misperceive our enemy. And so that's all about the ways in which we can be wrong day after day after day, even when the stakes are very high.
The fourth is when we're uncertain. And we could get into the details, but we're not, we're actually not sure how strong we or our adversary are. And so not only does that mean we could end up gambling and erring, but it also creates these strategic incentives and dynamics where we can't ever believe our adversaries protestations that no, no, no, no, no, there'll be severe consequences, we're very strong, don't do this because we're worried they're bluffing. And so uncertainty introduces instances where it's actually strategically optimal for us to fight some of the time, despite it being costly.
And then the last economists, political scientists call it commitment problem. It's sort of like you could, another sort of good tagline would just be unreliability, which I just don't trust my adversary to keep this deal. I think something will happen in future that they'll have an incentive to renege and so the deal unravels before it can begin. And the classic example is when my adversary is going to be more powerful in the future. And I think I can lock in my advantage now, and then I won't have to worry about them taking advantage of me in future.
So, so those, you know, and it's sort of funny to think that all, I guess if you told me two years ago that most explanations for most conflicts fit in one of those five categories, I wouldn't have believed you, I would have thought, surely there's more, and there's a whole grab bag of, other things or there's some other huge categories and over time, I actually persuaded myself that the five capture most things and so we merely need to look at learn to look at all of these purported causes of war, decide whether or not they fit in one of these logics and how, and it's going to give us a new perspective, or it's going to point out a bunch of things like the ethnic and ancient hatreds that actually don't fit in.
And maybe these aren't a cause of war.
Mihaela Carstei: So as a follow up question. Is there a hierarchy? And let me just sort of explain what I mean through hierarchy. When you get the commitment problem, I'm just going to go to that level is the commitment problem. Ultimately, uncertainty above a particular level.
If you have an uncertainty dial, let's say from 0 to 100. And you turn up the volume of uncertainty to a point where in the absence of an institution or an enforcement mechanism for a commitment, you end up with the commitment problem. And as a second question to this. I really like how you mentioned in the book that we tend to think about dating when we hear commitment problem, but I think that's not too far from what, what we should be thinking because ultimately in the international realm, we don't really have anything that's sort of the marriage contract with the prenup enforcement to guarantee the commitment problem and maybe the closest we come is NATO or the U. S. Constitution. If you're thinking for internal tensions versus international tensions. So what do you think about the commitment problem being almost like another form of uncertainty where it uncertainly just grows, it just strengthens so much that we just have to act.
Chris Blattman: Okay. I would say that as always, these five are I think logically distinct, but they often augment in one another. And so it's possible to have a commitment problem with no uncertainty whatsoever, which is to say that we both know that you, you know, people will use this to understand World War I. People will use this to understand the U. S. invasion of Iraq, which are both examples I talk about in the book. It, you know, it's, people have used it to explain the Peloponnesian War. It was the rise of Athens and the fear this inspired in Sparta that, that led Sparta to invade.
So even if, so even if you know your adversary, so you know for certain your adversary is rising, and then your adversary, knows that you know this and you could, and you're temporarily strong, you could lock that in. So you have, the adversary has an incentive to do something to, to basically make its commitment credible.
Any uncertainty. So if you, and it's inability to do so prompts an invasion. This is a classic story in history. If you layer in uncertainty, it sort of augments that commitment problem and makes it worse. Right? So yeah, I, you know, any set of institutions that sort of makes that commitment less certain in future, I'm gonna discount.
I'm gonna take a little bit less seriously, and that's gonna make the commitment problem harder to solve. Now, I should say most societies for most of history actually solved the commitment problem, right? We've just experienced the rise of China and it's continuing ascent and for 40 years, it's sort of gone from economic backwater to nearly the largest economy in the world. And there's been, at most, you could say there's, there's currently some strategic tensions between China and the rest of the world, which is, which could, but it's unlikely to result in war. And so clearly we can manage the rise of great powers without automatically triggering a commitment problem.
But I think if you add in a tremendous amount of uncertainty about that rise and a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the ability to commit, then it augments. But, but it's principally because you're now interacting, I think, two of these factors and that's, that's what fragility is. It's the interaction of all of these five contributing to, to basically all this normal incentive to find peace starts to erode.
Mihaela Carstei: Just a very brief follow up. So we have you have a lot of examples. You've just given us Sparta. So when we're looking history, it's pretty clear how the two sort of can both coexist or actually act independently of one another.
How has that changed in the modern world? I'm thinking here, post enlightenment, post when you have a group of countries like the country's holding Western values, and those are not just in the West, does that then change the calculus and the nature of the commitment problem? Because it's almost like these new found values, post enlightenment values might, let's say, maximize for different intangible incentives, different utility function, rather than just that slice of the pie when they're thinking about war.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I mean, in in earlier times, to the extent that look, if you were if you were too small city states in Greece, you could turn to Athens or Sparta to enforce your contract. Right. But, but if you were a regional great power, you didn't, there was nobody for you to turn to really. And we're still in that dilemma today, but we've constructed slightly stronger global institutions to, to manage conflict between rivalries and I think we've also created a lot more interdependence between.
Our societies and so, so, we're, we have more economically invested with adversaries. We have ideas of universal human rights, so it's harder to dehumanize them. We do care a little bit when innocents, at least a little bit when innocents are killed. And often there's so much intermigration and intermingling, we are socially and culturally connected to even very distant places. So I mean, if the West were to go to war with China, like who among us would not have a close friend who is not affected by this because of their close family ties to China and that, that matters a lot. So I think our intermingling of our worlds and these institutions we've constructed sort of give us more insulation than we had in the past. But maybe less than less than we'd like.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Another huge change that's that's been going on, I mean, for the last few decades is, of course, the dawn of better and better technology and digital technology and connectedness.
And and when we think about uncertainty, you know, I could see that. go both ways. And I would love to hear your thoughts because on the one hand, information is more freely available across the world. It travels in no time. So, you could possibly have, you know, much more accurate information about what, what's going on in Beijing, in DC, in the blink of an eye.
On the other hand, you know, more recently we have AI, we have all these opportunities to create deep fakes and voices and images and, you know, new frontiers for propaganda making and disinformation that are being broken on a daily basis. And, you know, in my country, Sweden, now we're seeing this.
Really scary campaign against the social services that is being you know, marketed as, as basically child abductors by, by, by forces that want to create disharmony in society. So, when it comes to uncertainty or to maybe even more broadly, this four forces or five forces, I should say, how do you think technology has it improved or we're deteriorated from our chances to, to keep the peace.
Chris Blattman: Yeah. So I think as you've just illustrated, like the answer is it depends. So there's some technologies that have been uncertainty producing, right? So I don't know the ability to have, I don't know if it improves our spy satellites and both sides and we both know what either side is doing in theory, that's actually that can be stabilizing.
I think technology can be destabilizing in two main ways. One is when it actually helps elites exploit the biases or create biases among the masses. And by elites, I just don't mean governments. I could mean some leaders, some nefarious group that's trying to make people believe something that's false, right? And so, whether it's the Rwandan genociders or Hitler using radio to, to propagandize, right? So, clearly human beings, we are susceptible to propaganda, we're susceptible to certain biases, and skillful users of technology can mobilize support, right?
They're doing so principally to, not to create violence per se, but to create the credible threat of violence, right? Like, if I can rise up people to be willing to fight, and be willing to undertake great costs to pursue some, say, social, cultural objective, then that gives me more bargaining power with you. Like, you better give in to us and give us more of the pie, or else I can unleash these crazies on you. And so it's a bargaining tool. And the problem is when that bargaining tool gets out of control and then gets used, most of the time it doesn't, right? Most of the time the crazies are held in reserve. So that's, that's one. So, I think when, that information technology or that communication technology gives an edge to the propagandists over the truth seekers, right?
The second is that there's a small number of technologies that I think are uncertainty increasing. And a good example is cyber warfare. Because the whole point of cyber warfare is for your adversary not to know who attacked them, right? And so, so the U. S. receives an attack and it looks like it comes from Russia, but that's too obvious and it has these markings of maybe it's the Iranian National Guard. But then you think, well, that's true, but maybe these markings are a little bit too, you know, maybe it was the North Koreans. It's making it look like it came from Russia, but actually from - and so in that situation, again, your strategically optimal choice is not to attack none of them none of the time. And your strategically optimal choice is not to attack all of them all of the time. It's to attack some of them some of the time, and to essentially gamble, right?
And it's what game theorists call a mixed strategy. That's really terrifying, right? That's, that actually, because otherwise you signal weakness, and you invite more attacks in future, which is why it's your optimal strategy. So, fortunately, I think these uncertainty increasing technologies don't come around very often, but unfortunately, I think we're living in the middle of maybe one of the most uncertainty increasing technologies we've ever experienced.
Paul M. Bisca: So first, you just mentioned Russia. So I guess this is the part of the podcast where we're going to start asking you questions about that. I have two questions in mind, and I like to set it up the first one, maybe they're intertwined in the following way.
One of your arguments as to how we can prevent conflict, violence is through interdependence. Now, if you look at Russia and the West before this war of Ukraine, there was this very tacit sort of understanding with Western Europe, particularly with Germany, but others that, you know, this is the dictator, we don't particularly like Putin, he turned worse, but he supplies cheap gas and we'll just live with him. And we're very interdependent. On the other hand, they definitely need a lot of Western capital and technology. Many, many consortiums were involved in the Russian market. So there's, you know, we tolerate the noise, there is peace, and Ukraine is stuck in the middle of this.
And there is this almost powder keg because the Ukrainians, they don't want to be stuck in that middle. They want, you know, they want to join the free world for whatever that means, you know, they want to join the West. And so one question then is, you know, what does, how does some of the other logics play out to override interdependence?
And then the second one would be, how do those play out at a societal level? Because one is the individuals. We always heard this question, you know, somehow in the, in the middle of the war, there's this question so in the middle of last year, you know, is this Putin's war is this Russia's war? So how do these things play out?
Chris Blattman: So I think I mean, for me personally - before we get to interdependence, because I think interdependence was very important. It's never sufficient to avoid war, but I think it actually provided a lot of insulation. So the way I think about why this war broke out is in the context of these five is the following.
So first of all, it's worth pointing out that Russia tried everything 20 years to co opt the politics of Ukraine without reverting to war. So war was a last resort because it is extraordinarily costly. And what's more is Russia and Putin's regime has managed to co opt the politics of most of its other neighbors, as most great powers do, has managed to co-opt the politics of its other neighbors without this level of violence or invasion.
It's merely through the threat of coercion and other means that they've managed to create a compliant Belarus and Kazakhstan and etc. And on some level, I don't want to say reasonable, it was natural for, I think, Putin to assume that he was going to eventually get his way, or much of his way in Ukraine, that it wasn't worth them fighting, and it wasn't worth the West and he gambled and lost.
So, so what happened and why did that happen? Well, one is, I think, first, I think he was too willing to use violence because he's an unchecked leader. He's almost the epitome of an unchecked leader, which is a nearly personalized dictator. And so he doesn't bear most of the costs. And so he could choose to, he was much readier to use violence than a more checked leader would be.
And moreover, to the extent that he believed, and we don't know if this is true, right, nobody actually, not even the intelligence services, as I understand it, no one's, it's not like anyone has like a line into his inner circle, let alone what he's thinking. So it's all, everybody's, everything you read in the newspaper is all kind of, not quite made up, but educated guesses.
And one educated guess is that he saw this democratic exemplar, you know, not that Ukraine was an exemplar, but by Russian standards, it was an exemplar tossing two Russian facing presidents in 20 years. This democratic exemplar is a threat to his regime because it, because Russians identified with Ukrainians more than anybody else on the planet, arguably.
And so that's, that's an incentive for him to extinguish this democratic flame through whatever means necessary. So this is just the logic of the unchecked leader. And then you add to that the stories you read in the newspapers, which are essentially ideologies and intangible interests of Putin. These ideas of greater glory for himself or for Russia or getting the empire back together, things that he was willing to pay some costs for.
And which may be true, I think are probably overstated, but are surely true to some extent. And then the third thing you read in the newspapers, which is also likely true, is the story of the insulated, isolated leader. So someone who overestimated the chances of victory. Not maybe for psychological reasons, but mostly for institutional ones.
This is a classic problem with autocrats. People don't tell the guy at the top, the bad news. But you know, it's also a story that's told about lots of democratic governments, including the Bush White House. So, this is a perennial problem, right? Of telling the executive bad news. And so a lot of people stop there, right?
We have an unchecked leader with sort of ideological intangible interests to pursue, systematically getting bad information, and I think we don't appreciate the role that uncertainty plays, which is, you know, so we're nearing, you know, as we record this for about two or three weeks from the invasion, right?
So this time last year it's, it's hard to remember how uncertain was, you know, Russia's military strength, Ukrainian sort of pluckiness, willingness to resist, and Western resolve. And the idea that Russia would get a bad draw on all three of those things was, I think, always in the realm of possibility, but I don't know that anyone predicted it, least of all Vladimir Putin.
And so in that instance, it wasn't incorrect for him to think that there was a very good chance the Ukrainian government was going to fall or collapse very quickly. In fact, quite honestly, if in the multiverse, if we could sort of observe a million worlds and how many of those worlds does, does Ukraine actually do end up here? And how many worlds do they capture Zelensky in the first week or the tanks roll into Kiev or Ukrainians back down? I don't know. Maybe it's the majority of those worlds.
Paul M. Bisca: But one thing part of the answer that you gave, at least the first notion that Russia tried everything short of war, I would posit that many people who are from countries nearby Russia would definitely disagree with that.
Because basically, you know, 2008 you have Georgia. Right? Russia does that. 2014, you have the little green men that go to Crimea. It's an invasion without invasion. And then, you know, they have this little coups all over the east and the only places they succeed are Luhansk and Donetsk. Then what Putin does is all over the West, he poisons his rivals.
And so why do you believe, it seems, if I were to infer from your answer that you think there's a threshold of violence. that is quote unquote acceptable and it's not acceptable I don't think you think it's acceptable in ethical way, but for there to be peace, you know, globally and not the kind of catastrophe that's happening right now with missiles hitting apartment buildings and so on. Is that true? Do you, do you think that's, that's the case?
Chris Blattman: I mean, okay, so the cold economist answer which is as you know, obviously I don't but I mean the cold hearted economist answer Yeah, exactly there's a set of things that are nefarious and and less inefficient, right? So full scale invasion is grossly costly, right if you can achieve through a coup or an assassination or a poisoning or little green men the same objective obviously one should do so right and I don't approve of this but this is clearly what most look we live in an unequal world where warlords and autocrats and superpowers have always done nefarious things in their self interest. And what I'm merely pointing out in the book is most of the time they choose to do the nefarious things that, that don't result in large scale death and violence.
Sometimes they do, right? So, so as I say, like, there's nothing, there's nothing just about peace, right? If you have 80 or 90% of the power, then you're going to expect 80 or 90% of the pie. And most of the time you'll get it. Most oppressed peoples don't revolt, right? And and so, so we don't have to like that state of the world.
And we don't have to like the way that the powerful. Extract their disproportionate share, but we should understand it, you know, clinically at the very least and so, yeah, we do have to we do have to recognize that there are all these other tools of both diplomacy and I'm not sure what you want to call this other category of repression and that aren't that aren't war.
Mihaela Carstei: Just a quick follow up also on Ukraine, and this is about intangible incentives. A lot of people did not expect the Ukrainians to hold up the way they did.
Chris Blattman: Including the Ukrainian. I mean, I think everyone's, even the West, everybody, the West is surprised at how resolved they are. The Ukrainians seem to be surprised at how resolved they are. This has been a process of self discovery as well.
Mihaela Carstei: They are surprised, but not as surprised as the West. And this is where I was curious about the role of intent in intangible incentives, because, also coming from that part of the world if you look at the history and I'm going to refer actually to somebody who actually Netflix just did, just did a fantastic series on this leader and it's Vlad Tepes the inspiration for Dracula.
And the notion of sort of what makes you fight when you know you stand absolutely no chance of winning. And so the intangible incentives, the long history of that part of the world, where there comes a point where the oppression is worth whatever you have, including your potential extermination. And it's the same sort of mind frame and what drove the the Vietnamese right to fight against the U.S. So a lot of analysts missed that. And a lot of people missed that. And I know it's one of those things that that's why a lot of the Eastern European countries are so happy to be NATO because of that just giant fear that the one half that might be one day that might be faced with that decision.
Do we fight and do we potentially lose big? So the role of intangible incentive sort of I'm trying to understand how you're thinking and why analysts in the West maybe missed that for Ukrainians.
Chris Blattman: So, first of all, I think you're 100% right. Like, I do think, in some sense, you know, I sort of gave a very Putin centric account of the war. There's a very Ukrainian centric account, which is simply to say that Putin and his regime had 80% of the influence, and Ukraine refused to give them what was quote unquote natural for them to demand, and for what others had yielded. And so, there is a war because the Ukrainians were stubborn and principled.
And that's the story of every revolutionary freedom fighting movement, right? That's the story I tell in the book of the American revolution. That's the story of, of Algerian resistance to the French and on, and on, and on. Right? So, we can admire that. And I do admire that. And I supportive of the conflict for that amongst other reasons.
But that's why we're fighting, right? Because that's the difference between the Ukrainians and everyone else that Russia has cowed. So why get it wrong? Well, I'm not sure. Like in some sense most of the time, that's just not how we respond to that kind of oppression, right? The Belarusians have not risen up.
The Russians have not risen up. The Xinjiang has not risen up against the Han and even the, the Han have not risen up against the regime. We can just go to, we just walk around the world country by country and find a people potentially more oppressed, with more to fear than the Ukrainians that have not risen up.
And so there is this puzzle, like, but what is it? Why do we tolerate so much injustice? You would, you know, and one answer is, well, some societies have more collective action there. No one would have, I don't know that anyone would have pointed to Ukraine and say, this is like the heartland of better collective action.
Although some do point to interesting local government reforms that might have actually facilitated this. So that's an interesting possibility. Maybe they had certain forms of governance. Maybe it was, you know, I think another persuasive idea was that, look, we give into oppression when we feel like our oppressor is, when it's insurmountable and Russia's actions in the first week or two of the war signal that it was not insurmountable.
And so, and I think there's some truth to that, and even the statistics bear that out. And so I think that's why I say if we ran the world a million times and we got to observe the multiverse, a world in which Russia demonstrates efficacy, even by chance, in the first week is maybe a world where Ukrainians don't, right?
So, I guess my answer to why I expected why so many people expected this to go another way was because we expected Russia to show its efficacy. And for that, for people then to sort of basically accept that injustice to some degree, and then Russia just did the opposite, right? If anything, it over signaled its inefficacy, and so perhaps, maybe that's why. But I don't know. It's just to say that's one of the great mysteries of social science. Why more of the oppressed peoples don't revolt.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: So moving on to another one of your reasons for war, which may also be playing into the Russia conflict, but we don't have to dwell more on it necessarily, is misperceptions.
And of course, you know, in many leaders, as you say, the good leaders want to dispel misperceptions. I think Putin has made it his goal to do the opposite. And also as you know, you, you propose mix that up with passion in a way.
Chris Blattman: Well, you know, definitely, good leaders, all leaders are trying to foment misperceptions in their favor.
Right. And so even the righteous side, you know, which is of course, often the side we belong to, that's always the righteous one. And you know, sometimes I think there's more justification for the righteous side. So, so here's an example. Like, why do I think the United States is fighting or rather not fighting, but supporting the fight in Ukraine? It's pure self interest.
It's there's also, it's, it's wonderful when the United States can support people who are freedom fighters rather than pursue self interest through less noble means. But let's be very clear. The United States sees an opportunity to weaken one of its greatest adversaries as well as draw a line in the sand and sort of say that nuclear blackmail will not be rewarded. So don't try nuclear blackmail in future. Giving less incentive to acquire nuclear weapons amongst other countries. And send a signal to other adventurous autocrats that they cannot invade their neighbors. And then they get to do it, not for free, because it costs money, but almost for free because there's a group of people who are just going to fight till their last breath, you know, against this invasion. And so they get to do it relatively cheaply.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Yeah. And, on top of that, I mean, they also gain in, in goodwill, you know, for whatever that's, that's worth. But, but there's an interesting parallel perhaps when you, when you, when you talk about, you know, supporting freedom fighters which the US also did in Afghanistan and, you know, in the, in the seventies and eighties.
Chris Blattman: Well, I'm not sure I would call them freedom fighters. Right.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: But, in a sense, the logic was, you know, what was similar because it was Russia there, it was trying to strategically kind of push back the other power, you know, of course it was within the context of the cold war. So they're, you know, they're different.
Chris Blattman: You're saying the bad guys use propaganda. I'm just pointing out like. Look, like, this entire conflict in the United States is framed as supporting freedom fighters. And very few politicians stand up there and say, Hey everybody, in addition, this is in our strategic interest for these three reasons. As well as in the interests of peace and security in the world to sort of draw a line in the sand and we don't do that, we create this propaganda and we make it, and Twitter has made it almost impossible to contest that narrative, right?
I happen to be supportive of this conflict because I happen to think that's the strategically is I love the opportunity to draw these lines in the sand and I think it is, I think it's important for world peace and security, not just for the interest of the United States. I think we're all better off.
But if I didn't, I'd be terrified to talk about it. I think because we've, the good guys also propagandize and prey on misconceptions, I guess was what I wanted to say.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Yeah, no, absolutely. And you've done some really interesting work on this, which I think you, you mentioned in the book, in, in in Liberia with the programs that on a much more individual level perhaps try to dispel this these challenges that we have you know, within ourselves, all of us through cognitive behavioral therapy.
So, so I would love to hear a bit more about kind of, You know where such programs are moving forward today in terms of you know, being able to address those root causes of conflict and not the root causes, but these drivers and, and how do we create the incentives to really fund and scale this, if that is the right way to go?
Chris Blattman: Yeah. So, right. So, we don't get to randomize. world leaders into interventions that reduce their misperceptions, right? So I can sort of wave my hands and talk about what was or not driving Putin to invade, but we don't get to test that. So people like me who do more quantitative social science, we can do that at a smaller level.
And so I've tried running some of these interventions to solve these five problems or some of these five problems at a lower level, so in villages between ethnic groups or in cities between gangs or even to some extent among individuals. And so some of these involve many of them involve the same, some same principles of reducing misperceptions, reducing uncertainty.
Reducing intangible incentives and through a set of interrelated tools. So with individuals or small groups, there are these techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy that are principally designed to people understand the misperceptions that they make, slow down their thinking and thus become a more aware of their biases, and thus not employ violence, regrettably. Or it's to help recognize that they might have these intangible incentives to use violence, but that there are ways they can pursue those intangibles of personal glory or status or vengeance in a less costly way, right? So our fast thinking biases keep us from, we leap to the violent solution when we actually see, Oh, there's a whole other set of solutions that are better. And, by the way, the way we bring that to scale is probably all of our, if you have children, like all of them probably learned a lot of these skills in preschool or elementary school, because we've now embedded this in school curricula and early childhood development globally, you know, in almost every society. So, there are ways in which we are and have scaled these and if, and then some of us need remedial help, right? And so shooters and the most violent in the city might need some remedial help then.
And lots of people, you know, people go to marriage counselors because they need remedial help because these things are hard to navigate. A lot of the same skills are embodied in what we call alternative dispute resolution systems and systems of restorative justice. These are things that communities use to process ethnic conflicts or herder farmer conflicts, or any system of formal or formal informal dispute resolution in a lot of countries are embodying these same things.
They're trying to help people realize that they can achieve their goals through means that don't require inefficient things like violence or long court battles and become more aware of their biases and, and not make them. And so what's interesting is now, does that mean if we prove that these things work between ethnic conflicts or gangs or individuals, does that mean they would work for Vladimir Putin?
I mean, who knows? I mean, the generalizability has its limits, but I do believe there's a degree of generalizability and that we get some insight from these from these programs.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: So, you also talk about how, and perhaps this, you know, we have a hard time not thinking about and relating everything to Vladimir Putin now as we've brought him up but because I think this relates to him, but we can also depart from the topic. You talk about how the single largest correlate of what leaders took to a country to war in the last few centuries is that they have military training, but no battle experience. Do you think - and I understand we don't have particularly you know, good data on this - but do you think there could be a similar correlation with development practitioners who have a lot of academic training, but no field experience in terms of their ability to produce something that is useful and how, how would you think about this factor in in, in perhaps, you know, getting people involved in the development development sphere.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, well, I guess I think about it. It's an interesting question. What comes to mind is, you know, the problem with so many leaders is they don't have any. Skin in the game, right? They're unchecked. They, they don't bear the costs of conflict. And so I think the reason, you know, this is, this of course comes from someone else's study, but this correlation of leaders who have, are militarily trained, but never had actual battle experience is perhaps indicative of someone who's quick to think of military solutions, but then doesn't really understand the cost because we, maybe we benefit from personal experience.
So, I mean, how would I extend this to people who do international development? I mean, I do think the fact that so few people who do development, and it's not so much about academic versus non academic practitioners, I actually think it afflicts, This is a problem that afflicts everyone, including sometimes, especially those who are actually practitioners is, we often don't have skin in the game, right?
So we are not really accountable for our decisions, at least to the people who, you know, and that's not just true of some international do gooder, right? That's true of of any elite group in any society, any mayor, any planner, any policymaker, the extent to which you are not checked by your society means that you don't have skin in the game, you don't maybe really internalize what the consequences of your actions are, and therefore you're more likely to make mistakes and you're then less likely to correct those mistakes over time. And I actually ended up, I teach classes on conflict, I also teach a class occasionally on the social science of policymaking. Basically, I call it How to Save the World, but it's basically all this, it's all of these different political scientists, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, who've brought all these different perspectives over the last few decades on like why policy succeeded or failed.
And they, sometimes they read one another, but mostly they're in their silos, and it's amazing how many of them come to the same conclusion that the fundamental driver of bad policy, be it development policy or otherwise, is overcentralized powers and leaders who don't actually have any mechanisms of feedback, don't have any downward or lateral accountability and are thus able to make bad decisions with a great deal of impunity.
I think we've just described every development organization, right?
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Yeah, more or less, I think, and a lot of states as well, while we're at it.
Chris Blattman: Exactly.
Mihaela Carstei: And actually this, this made me think of the wicked problems. I, my background is a bit in systems dynamics, and I've always found that people have a pretty hard time thinking in complex systems, especially those that are dynamic and adaptive, and ultimately that's what wicked problems are.
So can you help us understand because I'd love to eventually move on to your commandments. I really liked the 10 commandments. But can you talk a little bit about the wicked problems and how hard it is, because you know, we're teaching people CBT, but can we teach them to think differently? Can we teach them to understand the differences between a simple problem and a wicked problem? How hard is that?
Chris Blattman: I mean, so it's one of these things where we seem to be, I mean, both these leaders that get put in these positions where they get to make big decisions, like even a mayor of a, you know, your city or my city, and the people who vote for them, we have a tendency to oversimplify problems. And there are some simple problems in the world. But we tend to see the complex problems as overly simple ones. And so like a classic example is, you know, Chicago has a violence problem at the moment and a classic reaction when you meet, and I meet mayors and police chiefs who are at the helm of these, of a city experiencing violence. And they'll say, well, we heard that New York did this, and so we think we should do that. You know, and it's as if they're like, oh, we heard you got, you invented this new vaccine for this disease. Like, we'd like to get that vaccine. And you know what, if it was the same disease and we didn't have a vaccine, that would work really well but they, they haven't even stopped to think, oh, actually, you know, this is a really complex phenomenon and maybe the problems that plague New York are totally different and maybe the treatment is, right? And I don't know why we do that. It's funny, because like, look, if your mom got cancer or something and received radiation therapy and was cured, and then you woke up the next morning with a headache, you wouldn't think, you know what I probably need is radiation therapy.
You would say, oh, you know, only, you know, and yet we're like that. We're sort of like, oh, this worked for New York. Radiation therapy worked for New York. Maybe we need radiation therapy. And I don't know why we do that. But that's, that's maybe one of these other things that I think these... And over and over again have noted is our ability to mistake complex problems for the simple ones.
Mihaela Carstei: So just a quick clarification. As you were answering, I started thinking about the misperceptions and ultimately, what are politicians, right? Because you said all policymaking, one of your commandments, all policymaking is political. So politicians need to create misperceptions in their favor. And that's the whole purpose of existence for PR machines, right? And in order to do good PR, you have to simplify, you have to create a very simple problem that then the politician can come up with a very simple solution that's usually a silver bullet that looks good in a slogan. So, and that is that's just purely how politics works. How, how do we break that?
Because unless we can break that cycle, then we cannot ask our politicians to understand the wicked problem, because even when they understand it, they still have to turn into a slogan. And I was listening to somebody talk recently and. The whole notion, you know, how the World Bank and other development institutions, when they realized there was a slogan, I forget how many cents of development can avoid how many dollars you know, of violence or vice versa, we get, we tend to turn things into taglines in order to convince other people that they're good ideas, ultimately what politics is, how, how do we break that cycle? Because otherwise we're never going to be able to solve wicked problems.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I don't know. Now we're straying far from my expertise. Yeah, I guess I would say, I mean, I feel like, you know, representative democracy works reasonably well at this, at least in slightly equal societies. And why do I think that? I mean, the empirical record's pretty good. I mean, I guess the thing is a lot of politics, I guess, some of politics is elite politicians just trying to create tag lines and convince the masses of what they're doing.
But actually, I think a lot of politics are interest groups with real skin in the game struggling over what the policy of the decision should be. And then what you do to sort of bring the masses, you know, being able to bring the masses along in a popularity contest is like a tool you can use to strengthen your interest group over the other interest group, but maybe not the most important one. So, actually I think like, I think some things, I think cities tend to function well when you've got a large number of interest groups, no one of which can sort of capture, you know, the politics of that place. And sort of lock in their advantage and stagnate, that's like maybe a super oversimplistic version, but of, so, that's, and then, you know, anything we can do to sort of, I suppose, make that popularity contest harder to win by, I don't know, educating the public or whatever might be a good thing, but Well, I guess I would invest my energies in making it hard for the interest groups with a really big stake to capture the center and lock it in.
And I will say that's where a lot of underdeveloped countries and non democratic countries struggle. They're by definition places where usually one elite group has managed to lock in its advantage and actually the absence of development is a possibly like a deliberate outcome of that because they don't have an interest in development And development would undermine their control and so the there'll be the rhetoric of development. But none of it happens because the people who have power have decided it's not in their interest.
Paul M. Bisca: So this is in many ways that that's sort of the perfect segue to to your Ten Commandments. And I'm just going to mention the few of them. So thou shall not worship grand plans and best practices. Thou shall not forget all policymaking is political. Thou shalt find the path by exploring many and thou shalt embrace failure. I think this is, I just named, thou shalt be patient. So all of these things run, there are the anathema of a lot of the international development or aid structures the way it is. It is built. You talked a lot about the problem of unchecked leaders. Well, these are usually the partners, the authorities that you have to deal with.
You have to shake hands with them and say, we have this new program, it's going to help everyone out. And there is this magical country ownership that somehow will develop. And one thing that jumped out is, you know, before we go into maybe a few of them reading this and hearing you talk about your path early on seems that it's very much a bit of the same model.
So which is, you know, you find out what works and you allow for the space to experiment. And this is for someone who's in it for the journey, who's in it for, you know, the ultimate intangible incentive, which is, you know, make a difference. But a lot of the temperaments and this is just a personal observation of, of those who are in this field is, you know, we want to have the best practice, we want to deliver what is best. The ability, the room for failure isn't tolerated. You know, you have to report on your donor money and you have to show success. So, I guess this is a broad question, but what are the some of the things you can do to actually implement some of these commandments?
Chris Blattman: Yeah, well, maybe I'll say like where I was coming from with this was that we, you know, we all want a better society, right? So it's not just, if you want to do better in international development, we all want to live in a better society and a better community and a better city and a better country and a better world. And then we tend to make a bunch of mistakes about how to attain that world and that's a problem because we'd all like to live in a better society and help others live in a better society.
So it's not just, it's pervasive, I think, in international development, but it's also pervasive in government, and it's also pervasive in community transformation efforts. So, so what would I say? I guess I would say, you know, and here's the thing. It's a funny way to end a book, right? I don't think it's what the way my publisher would have wanted me to end the book.
But you know, but people usually you either have to end on like some note it's all getting better and here's your 10 step plan to peace and and I didn't think that was true. And in fact, I know it's not true so I couldn't bring myself to write that concluding chapter. So I ended up with this, well, what is the 10 step plan to peace?
Well, the 10 step plan to peace is actually, there are no steps and you actually have to figure them out. And there's this thing, it's not just with peace building, but again, going back to this literature, I've talked about all these great thinkers and all these great politicians and practitioners who have figured out ways to succeed they said it's, it's, you know, I already mentioned, they said it's over centralized powers is the worst, elite capture is the worst, but what do over centralized elites do when they have great power? Well, they take these sort of grand steps in one direction, right?
They try to remake society and that almost has always has failed. And all of these people from all these different disciplines from the right and the left and science to social science to practitioners have said, well, it all happens step by step. And so like, what do you do is you always try to, I guess I think you try to think on the margin.
So, so an example is a moment ago you said, well, how do we just stop people from, how do we, you know, humans are broken. We were easily fooled by our politicians. Like, how do we fix that? And the answer would be, well, actually you look for like little, you know, you were not going to fix it. Right? But you could try to make it, you could try to do things that make it a little bit better.
Right. So I pointed to say, well, actually, I think the problem is. Elite group capture. So I'd actually focus on making it just that much harder for an interest group to capture the center in my city or in my community or in my country. Or, or you could say, well, what could I do to make it 3% harder to fool the democratic public into, you know, and so you, you know, you spend a few years working on a lot to make this or that harder or to restrict this or to open up that, or to, so I just think like, I think that's just this general story about how progress is made.
You have to sort of identify what you think is the problem. Maybe you use something like the five roots of war to identify what's driving violence. And then you sort of think about like in this place, how could I just move the needle a little bit? And and, and when you think like that, then the progress gets made and it probably sticks.
Paul M. Bisca: Well, the, the challenge, to go back to a bit to our discussion from a few minutes earlier is, you usually get something from a development plan called vision 2050 or, or, you know, some grandiose thing, you don't get the whatever aid project called, 3% better over 50 years this is what we promise.
So, so that's in a way, it's interesting to think also about, you know. How can you communicate this to people who actually walk in a building and say, am I optimizing to make the world 3% better? You know, I have only this many years to live and so therefore I need, I need that grandiose plan to help me get through the dredging of writing a log framework for a project or something like that.
Chris Blattman: Well, the people who say those are often the most unconstrained leaders, I would say. Who have also have the weakest and the weakest public that's least able to hold them to account. So, I would almost say it's symptomatic. I think it becomes less common as you and less of a path of success as you get to better functioning political systems, which are more checked.
I mean, still, there's always a tendency to sort of think this is going to happen too easily, too fast with grand plans. I think like good, I just know a lot, I mean, I'm sure we all do. I know a lot of people who have just accomplished a lot, like one step at a time. I mean, we've just passed I think it's legislation in the United States that allows families or churches or things to get together and sponsor refugees. Right? That's something you can do in a lot of countries. You can do it in Canada, for example. And they basically, like, took the Canadian law, adapted it, got it through. Right? That was the work of about three people. I mean, it was the work of a lot of people, but it was like, sort of three people in the State Department, who really thought this was a good idea, and worked for many years to make it happen. They made that happen. And now it's law. And it's probably going to, I think it'll take off. That's like the perfect example of this sort of piecemeal engineering, right? You know, how many millions, how many hundreds of thousands of people are going to, refugees are going to make it to the United States as a result of this that would not have otherwise.
And so I think we all, they just sort of saw the margin they could work on and they did it. And so I think, I think, and I think that's like a model for us all.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: And so how do we then help people identify that margin you talk about in this chapter as well this idea of becoming anti politics machines and I thought your explanation of your colleague and, you know, the hypothetical of someone being able to explain so richly why something is extremely difficult and so hard in the society you, you come from, and then being able to enunciate a very clear Time bound five year project and plan to achieve gargantuan results in another society is also, it's equally easy. So how do we, you know, what's the training program for preventing people from becoming anti-politics machines and finding their margin to, to be able to be more effective over the longer term?
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I haven't figured that out.
Paul M. Bisca: What's the best practice, Chris, right?
Chris Blattman: Exactly.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Have a solution across the board. That'd be great. If you have one.
Chris Blattman: I mean, I do, I do think, I think there is like a, there's almost like a cultural mentality. I mean, I do think some organizations, some of the public sector, private sector, nonprofit. Have been very good at creating cultures and mentalities of trial and error and permitting failure You know, I like to tell the story.
So, my wife is an executive at a real one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the United States and when they go to USAID to talk about their - which is one of their major donors - to talk about, you're not allowed to say "oh we failed." You can't say we failed like 10 or 20% of the time and that's, and whereas when she goes to talk, when she goes to Silicon Valley to talk to some of their other donors, and she's like, we failed 40% of the time.
And they're like, what? We don't even let people in our door unless they're failing 90% of the time. So, clearly like Silicon Valley and the VC culture has managed to inculcate, you know, a sense of risk taking and trial and error in that has become almost an ideology. I would love to see some of that permeate the nonprofit sector and government more broadly just so I do think, I do think there's almost a cultural shift that can, is occurring a little bit and could occur with more alacrity and would make us better off.
Mihaela Carstei: So, just the notion that the two cultures are so different is just always so funny to me when you don't, if you don't fail enough in Silicon Valley, you're actually not really interesting or doing a good job. But actually, what I wanted to ask about was completely different. I was reading your blog a couple of days ago, and you changed your mind a bit on China. Have you changed it further? And if you can tell sort of the audience kind of what was your previous perspective and how it has evolved, because you wrote a very good piece in October and I'm wondering if it has evolved since then.
Chris Blattman: Yeah, well, I'm not even sure I remember my brain two cycles ago. So, it's also been a fast moving year, especially with respect to China. I guess I grew slightly more pessimistic about the prospects for a war with between China and Taiwan, and then by extension, the U. S. and the region, Taiwan's regional allies, Japan and Australia. For a few reasons, one is this trend over the last year or two of Xi Jinping to centralize and personalize power. That's a really worrisome trend. It's by no means certain he'll succeed. But that's that's a path Putin very deliberately set himself down 20 years ago and was surprisingly successful.
So, that's hard to do, so maybe Xi Jinping won't be successful. But that, to the extent that he makes himself and any future Chinese leader more unchecked and more insulated from the truth and and less willing to make credible commitments, I think that's worrisome. I think anything, the thing that hasn't happened, but I sort of see as possible and thus being potentially leading very quickly to a conflict, it would be any ideological surge amongst the Taiwanese of sovereignty and liberty at all costs.
So I, many of us would admire that at the same time. But putting in, say, electing a president who declares independence. That would, that could very well precipitate a war given China's strategic and own ideological preferences on top of any government being unchecked. So, I just think we're very, I just sort of see us being in a very fragile place where.
Yeah, a particularly ideological election in Taiwan could precipitate a conflict that would bring in Japan, Australia and the United States fairly quickly.
Mihaela Carstei: Do you think for the Taiwanese, do you think that what's going on in Ukraine is having an impact? Meaning, are they drawing inspiration or hope?
Chris Blattman: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've never, I don't want to pretend I know it, I've never been to Taiwan. And so I don't know, but that's exactly the kind of, that's the kind of sequence events you could imagine happening, right? Is that this becoming a, I mean, you can imagine a lot of ways in which Taiwan and China could draw lessons from this that's more, that leads to the likelihood of more peace.
Taiwan could say, oh, we've just learned 18 things to do, like the porcupine strategy, just to make us incredibly difficult to swallow. And we're going to do them, which will just deter China that much more. And China may look at this and recognize the risks of sending a military on an extremely ambitious adventure without ever having been tested, right?
China's military has never faced any, has never engaged, the current military is not engaged in any large scale conflict anywhere. So, so maybe that's that would be pacifying, right? But I still think it's to go back to that initial discussion of fragile. I feel like several of these factors have narrowed down to the point where it's we're closer to violence being used than usual.
Paul M. Bisca: So maybe one more question before we conclude. If we look at your logics you know, unchecked interests, you could think of the either the problem or the quote unquote antidote for that to some extent in governance, and commitment problems in institutions, codes of conduct sort of writ large but a lot of it, it's whether it's intangible incentives, whether it's our relationship to uncertainty or misperceptions have to do with human nature.
And so, part of why we do conflict analysis or fragility analysis is to forecast. And what you seem to be saying is it's far less important to get the answer to understand how these symptoms sort of appear and how these signs appear and try to imagine maybe how they play out. Is this a method that you see would be far more useful in the future?
Chris Blattman: Well, it's interesting I think yes, because I you know, a few years ago, I sort of started a project with a few colleagues of mine. We decided to go to the places that are, to places that are fragile, that have tremendously rich data - so Indonesian Columbia - and over the span of decades, sort of see whether or not we could, and use some of these new machine learnings and AI tools of prediction and sort of say, could we, can we forecast conflict at this local level?
Could we forecast which villages and which towns and which cities are going to flare up? And we were able to - with ridiculously rich data, more than we'll ever get for any other country - we were able to identify the places that were fragile, so to speak, that had a potential to flare up, but our ability to predict the small number of those that would actually flare up, let alone the timing was virtually zero.
And so, what do I draw from that? Well, one might be, well, maybe just we had better data or there's lots of ways we can improve potentially, but I think fundamentally it's like, why were we able to predict the fragile places? We're able to predict the fragile places because those are the places that probably had that narrow wedge.
And then it was very difficult to predict the idiosyncratic factors that then set things off. So that, that might not be the way the world works, but I think it probably is. I think that, that and that's the difficult job of anyone who wants to counter fragility, is, is the fact is there might be a hundred spots that are especially fragile, and only one of them will flare up, and our ability to forecast which one it is, is nil and and yet we spend endless amounts of time after that flare up happening happens sort of saying, Oh, wasn't it obvious that was the place? And we sort of trace back. But, but but I think often it's not. And so, so it complicates this job, but I anyways, to me, it sort of settles down and sort of focusing on these five fundamentals.
Is becomes, I think, our biggest job, most of all, if I had to pick one, you talked about a hierarchy was focusing on checks and balances, like just reducing the power of these concentrated elites at the gang level, the city level, the ethnic group level, the country level, anything you can do on the margin, difficult as that is, is probably going to be incredibly pacifying.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: So as we wrap up, you know, F-World and you and the book, we have a similar mission, which is to bring these big ideas and these complicated somewhat concepts to it, to a broader audience. So final question, if you were to talk to. One of these people who were probably all of us at some point when you were an accountant or before I got my master's and switched careers into development.
What would you advise them in terms of the most wicked and interesting problems to work on or to think about or to study if their goal was to have an impact on where we're headed with the world in the next few decades?
Chris Blattman: Well, I mean, I think most of all, you probably have to pick on the one hand, I think you have to pick the one you're most passionate about because you're going to have to get up and do this every day for however many years and you're more likely to do that and enjoy it if you're actually passionate about it.
So the answer won't always be the same for everybody, right? Like that's, we're all gonna pursue different passions. And then I think you can start to think about your comparative advantage, like what are you good at? So, you know, I end the book with find your margin. I, in the end, I became an academic mostly because I, I think I was actually good at sort of going and finding other people's clever ideas and demonstrating that they work and I was good at communicating all of these ideas. And that's what you get to do as an academic. Your goal as an academic, if you believe in social change, is trying to change the conversation. But, there's lots of ways you can, other people say, Oh, I'm, I think I'm the kind of person who can push a law through.
Right? I think I'm the person who can actually organize my church and host a refugee. So I think we all have different, you know, margins and things we're passionate about. So I, I usually tell young people to use that as their guide.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for this incredibly rich and wide ranging interview.
I don't know if the initial title from KFC to FCV will stick, but we'll have a, we'll have a quick think about that. But the amount of ground we've covered is really, incredible and just wrapping up with this idea that from your book that that luckily still the war is very much the error term that, that, you know, we do live in a, in a largely peaceful world and hopefully we can continue doing so for many decades to come. So thank you very much, Chris for joining us on F-World.
Chris Blattman: No, thank you.
Johan Bjurman Bergman: And to all of our listeners thank you very much for joining. Please follow us on Twitter at @fworldpodcast and on Instagram and tune in to our coming episodes as well. Thanks so much.