Pro-war bias

The Kahneman/Renshon article is Why Hawks Win, yes?.

This is not ‘war’ in the traditional sense; it appears to be an attempt to resolve internal political standoff in Iraq. The US troops will assume the task of ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arabs (currently performed by Shia militias) and in response the Shia organizations will dissolve their militias and accept the rule of the puppet government. This seems to be the plan – last month Mr. Bush met Mr. al-Hakim and apparently they made a deal. Mr. Sadr, of course, still appears to be a wild card there, unless there’s something we don’t know, some kind of a deal there as well.

Don’t forget the general failure of people to properly handle sunk costs. If we quit now, all that money and all those lives we spent were wasted! When we consider that victory means justifying past expenses, then it’s worth investing roughly as much effort as has already been spent to try to recover a win.

> After all, war is a negative-sum activity, so
> war between rational parties doesn’t make sense –
> there’s always a potential settlement that would
> leave both sides better off*.

As far as this specific war goes, IMHO the old “follow the money” adage works quite well.

But for war in general, the older I get the closer I come to this conclusion: male humans between the ages of 15-35 (more or less) like to fight. And they like to form small heirarchical groups to extend the fighting to the next village. All in good fun, although the weak and the unluckly are of course culled in the process along with a few bystanders.

Unfortunately, civilization and mass industrial culture have provided a ground for organizing groups and fighting vastly more fertile than anything Gaia envisioned when she crafted homo sapians. Sort of like what happens when you toss tons of sewage sludge into a small eco-balanced lake: the lake becomes totally clogged with algae and puetrifies within a few months.

Cranky

The shift from looking at rational motives to irrational ones is a bit awkward. Couldn’t a rational motive consist in massing wealth in a military-industrial complex? In other words, one need not look at the state as a whole as the benefactor.

Every beginner’s guide to poker-type manual has a section on factors you should consider when deciding whether to stay in a hand and factors you shouldn’t consider. The most important factors to consider are, of course, your probability of winning and the potential cost relative to benefit (size of the pot). (Also important is the size of your bankroll relative to the opponents’.) The most important factor to ignore is, of course, the amount of money you’ve already sunk into the pot.

Wouldn’t it be fun if policy-makers were forced to play on one of the ever-proliferating cable TV amateur poker shows?

OK it would be tedious. But in theory, it would be fun.

The claim that war is a negative-sum activity only makes sense when the fight is over resources or something tangible. When one side is fighting for some kind of ideal, like freedom or independence or the triumph of true religion, war can be be positive sum if the ideal is valued highly enough. I think this kind of war is more common than a simple fight over resources.

I recall Bertrand Russell pointing out in one of his books that uptil the Boer War every war waged by the British government was unpopular among the common people. The Boer War was fought at a time when mass circulation of newspapers had begun,and they were able to change public opinion.
The Iraq war is no exception. The mainstream press in the US went along with the viewpoint projected by the government, and over 70% of the population supported the invasion.

It doesn’t seem to me that people in places other than the US or Britain (and some of its cultural cousins) harbour strong enthusiasm for war.

Any sentence that leads to the exclamation “Ah, those peace-loving Afghans!” should probably be re-examined. Or, for that matter, the Vietnamese, who spent basically the entire time from 1940 to 1980 fighting someone or other. (NB: justifiably in many cases, true; doesn’t alter the fact that they fought a lot.)

As for popularity – notably, none of the 19th century wars were unpopular enough that the army was unable to find enough volunteer soldiers to fight them. The British Army was a volunteer army until 1916; the colonial armies remained so until independence.

I usually like Kahneman’s work, but this article points to the problems with disembedding a sequence of actions from a more general context. War as an active thing – a fight – exists, at least since the 30s, in a more general war culture. This is Hitler’s most successful legacy, actually – the incorporation of military structures into every part of the political economy. That was taken up by both the Soviets and the U.S. In that sense, we still live in Hitler’s world. From the interstate highway system the U.S. built in the fifties (which was officially funded, it should be remembered, in a bill that carried the title ‘security’) to the scattering of suburbs away from target cities to the reliance of the Clinton administration on arms deals to keep at least one small part of the American manufacturing sector working, war is ‘prehended’ in the entire system. Individual and real ‘wars’ are simply accidents of that larger system. The war is all the time, 24/7.

I wrote a paper (The Decision for War and the Limits of Rationality — HTML; PDF here) about this a few years ago in grad school. It doesn’t break any new ground but it’s a half-decent start on the literature, at least as of late 1999.

After all, war is a negative-sum activity, so war between rational parties doesn’t make sense – there’s always a potential settlement that would leave both sides better off.

The main problem with this is that with imperfect information, in the absence of an enforcement mechanism or a reasonable balance of power, it’s hard to determine what that settlement is and hard to credibly commit to it. If you were North Korea, would you trust G.W.’s assertion that the US had no plans to invade? If you were G.W., would you trust Musharraf’s assertion that al-Qaeda had been expelled from Pakistan and wouldn’t be allowed to return?

H. E. Baber (#18) writes:

Cranky’s quasi-right—human beings by their nature like to fight. Young males do most of the fighting because they can win—women and older men do less fighting because they’re not physically strong enough or energetic enough to survive in a melee that includes young, fit males.

I suspect that I am at most a few years younger than Cranky, and probably considerably older than Baber. I don’t think that young men fight just because they are the ones who can win. After a certain age – probably 18 or 19, but it only becomes noticeable decades later – men’s testosterone levels decline.

I recall a passage in one of the Platonic dialogues (probably the Symposium, but I cannot find it now) where Socrates (I think) mentions this – about how as you get older, the decline in sex drive is like being relieved of a burden, of freeing oneself from a harsh slave driver, about how much more pleasant life is as a result.

There is much to this view. I recall not being able to understand how any self-respcting male could hold this opinion. Having reached that age, and discussed this with a few friends, it makes sense. There is a reason for the minimum age restriction on being president, and it is not only to ensure a certain degree of experience and the resulting maturity. Young men are a bit insane from what is, in society as opposed to states of nature, a chemical overdose.

Young women may have their own hormonal issues, but I am not so intimately familiar with them, so I restrict my comments to the male of the species.

When one side is fighting for some kind of ideal, like freedom or independence or the triumph of true religion, war can be be positive sum if the ideal is valued highly enough.

Not really. The belligerent who is expected to loose should just agree to have a certain portion of the population convert or to accept the new beliefs but with old dressings or to agree to some kind of quasi-independent status. That way both avoid the inevitable costs of conflict.

Of course this kind of approach may contradict the very notion of a “strongly held ideal”. But in some sense “strongly held ideal” is very akin to being not-rational (though not necessarily “irrational”)

The answer is that people don’t intuitively deal well with the problem of opportunity costs nor do they deal well with sunk costs.

Those two issues show up in all sorts of areas of life–including war.

Think of Churchill !

Speaking of Socrates and the Republic, perhaps the dialog with Glaucon where Socrates discusses how injustice originates in the luxurious state (as opposed to his initial description of the ideal, non-luxurious state) is the more pertinent passage. Since greater resources will be required in order to provide wants beyond needs:

“S: …Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want…

S: …Then a slice of our neighbours’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?

G: That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

S: And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

G: Most certainly, he replied.

S: Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, this much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in States, private as well as public.”

It’s a very old equation: the pathological obsession with the pursuit of wealth requires vigilant militarism. Security of one’s possessions (or wealthy lifestyle) becomes confused with the security of one’s existence.

The fact that people are so willing to support war is a puzzle that requires an explanation.

~sigh~

John, do you really need to be reminded of Herman Goering’s quotation, reproduced at Snopes.com?

The quotation that was paraded around the Internet was bad enough. The actual quotation, at the bottom of the Snopes.com page, was far worse

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Read it and weep.

“When one side is fighting for some kind of ideal, like freedom or independence or the triumph of true religion, war can be be positive sum if the ideal is valued highly enough.

Of course this kind of approach may contradict the very notion of a “strongly held ideal”. But in some sense “strongly held ideal” is very akin to being not-rational (though not necessarily “irrational”)

Huh, accepting such a compromise would make the instigator stronger and more capable of demanding more in the future. Bad, bad idea.

Cranky’s quasi-right—human beings by their nature like to fight. Young males do most of the fighting because they can win—women and older men do less fighting because they’re not physically strong enough or energetic enough to survive in a melee that includes young, fit males.

Actually, there is a more practical reason for keeping women from combat (when it is major part of your economy). This stereo type alone raises the question, “if women are so useless, why not use them as fodder?” The practical reason for perpetuating the stereo type is that your population growth rate is far more dependant on the number of women in the population than men.

“After all, war is a negative-sum activity, so war between rational parties doesn’t make sense – there’s always a potential settlement that would leave both sides better off.” Am I missing something, or do you mean rational parties with perfect foresight? If both sides believe they will win a war with little effort (see WWI), then both sides can be rational to want to fight. (Or is your claim that the sides cannot be rational if they believe contradictory things???)

Along the same lines, why do people litigate, rather then just settle out of court? Same principle.

And some people do have an antipathy type of utility; “I don’t care how much I suffer as long as my opponent suffers some!” But yeah again, that’s not really in the realm of the “rational”.

Cranky is 100% correct.

Men seem to love explosions.

The bigger the better.

And those physics geeks at Los Alamos
got to make the biggest human created
explosion(s) of all time!

Radek,

I don’t see your point. I claimed that war is typically a positive sum game, since for intangibles like freedom, one side’s gain doesn’t have to equal the other’s loss. You argue that there’s always a peaceful solution that dominates war (presumably on the assumption that contracts can be costlessly enforced).

In fact, your argument proves the opposite of what you claim. You acknowledge that war can have a positive payoff. You reply that peace will always have a bigger positive payoff. But increasing the payoffs to peace makes the game *more* positive-sum, not less!

@25, the Finns, e.g., tend to feel that a war in which they managed to avoid becoming Soviet citizens was a positive sum game. But I guess they could have agreed to a certain percentage of the population being murdered, a certain percentage sent to Siberia and the rest enslaved. I’m not quite convinced that they would have come out ahead, in terms of people killed and property destroyed, though.

war is a negative-sum activity, so war between rational parties doesn’t make sense – there’s always a potential settlement that would leave both sides better off

Eli is right – this belief only holds if both sides agree on the probability of winning and the costs involved. War between rational, fully-informed parties doesn’t make sense, because at least one of them will realise either a) that they cannot win or
b) that their probability of winning is small enough to make the expected payoff very negative, or
c) that the payoff from winning doesn’t outweigh either the expected cost of fighting or even the cost of winning.

But this is not the case! War isn’t a dice game, it’s an extremely complicated and uncertain endeavour. Both sides can have wildly different estimates of the probability of victory, the cost of victory and the cost of defeat. Both sides will generally be wrong; and when, based on their own assumptions, the numbers work out for both sides, you get a war.

I don’t see why this is such a puzzle. Either JQ’s making some subtle point I don’t get, or he has a very odd idea of war and intelligence.

And some people do have an antipathy type of utility; “I don’t care how much I suffer as long as my opponent suffers some!” But yeah again, that’s not really in the realm of the “rational”.

It may be irrational, but I think there’s something here to say for the concept of justice. Many people won’t settle for the optimal utilitarian outcome simply because they feel it’s unjust, unharmonious. Just like one may starve to death even when there is perfectly good source of protein available (like human flesh or something).

John Quiggin,

Sure the payoffs in the PD can be chosen to make the game positive-sum. But they can also be chosen to make it negative-sum. And one counterexample suffices to disprove an argument.

(I’m speaking of the 1-shot prisoner’s dilemma, while I think that in JQ’s reply, he’s thinking of the repeated PD).

In any event, the PD is a perfectly good model of a rational war. Peace may yield the highest payoff, but both sides know that that if they strike first, they will win big and the other guy will lose big. So they both decide to attack, getting the low payoff of war.

“First, this is inconsistent with what economists call common knowledge of rationality. The fact that the other side is willing to go to war even though, on your assessment, this is a bad decision implies either that they are irrational or that they know something you don’t.”

No! The fact that the other side is willing to go to war implies either that they are irrational or that they *believe* something you don’t. If it were knowledge then it would have to be true (but a belief doesn’t have to be true…).

This discussion seems to assume that all parties in a war are irrational, but only one must be irrational. And that all motivations for war are selfish.

Two motivations for an agressive war are: The perception that the opponent is incompetant in managing his resources and the world would benefit from removing the governing insitution from a region/populus; Selfishness, oppressing a people or taking their resources without compensation for the benefit of a different population.

I guess a more nerdy way to put it would be that the set of renegotiation-proof contracts is empty.

Many wars have been initiated on the assumption that war was inevitable and the relative strength of the potential combatants would change over time. The party with the early advantage then has an incentive to initiate the conflict. The “lessons learned” from previous wars are often used to reinforce this assumption.

Is this assumption ever valid? History provides us with plenty of opportunities to engage in “what if”s.

Because wars occurs when both parties believe they can win:

In cases with two type II motivation parties, there will be a net negetive.

In a case with type I and type II, it depends on the victor.

In cases with two type I parties, there will be a net posetive, because with both parties believing they will win, the one with be best institutions will win, resulting in greater longrun growth and productivity.

You’re right John though I think in the case of the ’44 Rising the leaders were also banking somewhat on the Germans’ being “rational” – not wasting resources on defending a city which was bound to be captured anyway (and most of the German troops were being pulled out right before the rising). In both cases – reactions of Germans and Soviets – they got it wrong, with tragic consequences.

Here: Analysis: Iraq PM’s silence telling. Similar to what I said in #3:

Al-Maliki aides have suggested the prime minister will attempt to avoid an all-out attack on the militia by attempting first to focus the new security drive on Sunni insurgent-held regions of the capital. If that were to prove successful, the theory goes, al-Maliki could then go the Mahdi Army and demand it disband because Shiites were no longer under threat.

And that appears to be the deal: Americans help SCIRI/Dawa kill some Sunnis – and then SCIRI/Dawa help Americans crack down on anti-American militias, Sadr. Then, I guess, the SCIRI/Dawa ayatollahs are somehow supposed to become American clients? Well, why not, if Saudi princes and Jordanian kings are…

38: The Swiss, Swedes, and Norwegians were military thugs during their early history—the Swedes as recently as 1709. They’re pretty much the same people genetically, so the difference must be institutional. (Unless hundreds of years of war weeded out the aggressive genes.)

Indeed. Walking around the Royal Palace in Stockholm, a Swedish and peaceloving blogger explained to me with some relish that Charles XII’s invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth killed a percentage of the population that can only be compared with Hitler’s impact on Poland.

72: Middle Eastern warlords don’t go away when you kill them. (See Lebanon, Sadr’s dad, al-Hakim’s dad…)

Even without Sadr, there’s that whole hezbollah thing Iran built for his father.

Charles XII’s invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth killed a percentage of the population that can only be compared with Hitler’s impact on Poland.

I think that peace loving Swedish blogger is taking too much credit. There was like, 8, different wars going on in Poland during this time. Swedes, Cossacks, Russians, Transylvanians, Prussians, not to mention a nobles’ rebellion and a peasant rebellion. So yeah in total it’s true but the credit should be properly divided.
And anyway, it was downhill for the Swedes since that time too, the big winners of all that mess being Russia and Prussia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deluge_%28Polish_history%29

and Sienkiewicz wrote some books about it;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deluge_%28book%29