Augustus
…
It is quite common these days, exemplified by Steven Pinker's Better Angels..., to claim we are living in a an era of unprecedented peace and security: the long peace.
Isn't it true though that this time it really is different?
This isn't the first time people have made such claims, the following if from 1858, and we all know what happened half a century after this.
That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history. If we compare one country with another, we shall find that for a very long period wars have been becoming less frequent; and now so clearly is the movement marked, that, until the late commencement of hostilities, we had remained at peace for nearly forty years: a circumstance unparalleled... The question arises, as to what share our moral feelings have had in bringing about this great improvement.
One mistake is focusing too much on war frequency, rather than deadliness. As technological advances make wars more costly and dangerous we would expect them to decline in frequency in the same way you would expect increasing the cost of a product significantly would lead to fewer purchases.
In the past, the purpose of war was often to make your opponent sue for peace (at a cost), and 2 countries could be at war without it most people in either country even being aware of it. War could be a relatively low-cost instrument of foreign policy, so people took advantage of it more frequently.
The trade-off for reduced frequency of modern wars, is increased deadliness. What does this metric tell us about "the long peace"? Basically nothing much until the end of the century as we haven't had a long enough timeframe to make any claim meaningful given the trend would be negated by a single large event.
At that moment in time, the long peace pattern will have become statistically significant, by conventional standards, relative to the stationary model, and we could say with confidence that the time since the Second World War was governed by a different, more peaceful underlying process. In this extrapolated future, the post-war pattern of relatively few large wars becomes progressively more unlikely under a stationary hypothesis (Fig. 5). However, it is not until 100 years into the future that the long peace becomes statistically distinguishable from a large but random fluctuation in an otherwise stationary process. Even if there were no large wars anywhere in the world after 2003, the year of significance would arrive only a few decades earlier.
On the frequency and severity of interstate wars
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05086.pdf
Unfortunately, we will likely all be dead before we find out if we are living in a long peace (although we might well find out if we are not).
Isn't it true though that this time it really is different?
This isn't the first time people have made such claims, the following if from 1858, and we all know what happened half a century after this.
That this barbarous pursuit is, in the progress of society, steadily declining, must be evident, even to the most hasty reader of European history. If we compare one country with another, we shall find that for a very long period wars have been becoming less frequent; and now so clearly is the movement marked, that, until the late commencement of hostilities, we had remained at peace for nearly forty years: a circumstance unparalleled... The question arises, as to what share our moral feelings have had in bringing about this great improvement.
One mistake is focusing too much on war frequency, rather than deadliness. As technological advances make wars more costly and dangerous we would expect them to decline in frequency in the same way you would expect increasing the cost of a product significantly would lead to fewer purchases.
In the past, the purpose of war was often to make your opponent sue for peace (at a cost), and 2 countries could be at war without it most people in either country even being aware of it. War could be a relatively low-cost instrument of foreign policy, so people took advantage of it more frequently.
The trade-off for reduced frequency of modern wars, is increased deadliness. What does this metric tell us about "the long peace"? Basically nothing much until the end of the century as we haven't had a long enough timeframe to make any claim meaningful given the trend would be negated by a single large event.
At that moment in time, the long peace pattern will have become statistically significant, by conventional standards, relative to the stationary model, and we could say with confidence that the time since the Second World War was governed by a different, more peaceful underlying process. In this extrapolated future, the post-war pattern of relatively few large wars becomes progressively more unlikely under a stationary hypothesis (Fig. 5). However, it is not until 100 years into the future that the long peace becomes statistically distinguishable from a large but random fluctuation in an otherwise stationary process. Even if there were no large wars anywhere in the world after 2003, the year of significance would arrive only a few decades earlier.
On the frequency and severity of interstate wars
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05086.pdf
Unfortunately, we will likely all be dead before we find out if we are living in a long peace (although we might well find out if we are not).
