TALEB VERSUS PINKER. As is shown by the archive feature, two of the writers that have been the subjects of many of the posts on this blog are Steven Pinker and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Wootton points out in his review that Pinker and Taleb have had a “vitriolic dispute” over Pinker’s BETTER ANGELS on the issue of whether major wars are becoming less frequent. Yes, vitriolic. Pinker’s reply to Taleb is entitled “Fooled by Belligerence”.
Taleb’s view, as expressed here, is that for a “conflict generating at least 10 million casualties, an event less bloody than WW1 or WW2, the waiting time is on average 136 years…The seventy years of what is called the “Long Peace” [the period after 1945] are clearly not enough to state much about the possibility of WW3 in the near future.”
I think that Pinker and Taleb are working with different models. Taleb considers only the numbers of wars while Pinker is including several additional variables which he thinks support his argument (for example, “that territorial conquest has similarly all but vanished in the planning and outcomes of wars; that the period without major war has also seen sharp reductions in conscription, length of military service, and per -GDP military expenditures; that it has seen declines in every exogenous variable that are statistically
predictive of militarized disputes; and that war rhetoric and war planning have disappeared as live options in the political deliberations of developed states in their dealings with one another.”)