Statistics of Deadly Quarrels

"This gem is out of print and hard to find, but it is revered among scholars who study war and genocide quantitatively. Richardson was an applied physicist who treated war as a statistical phenomenon. Writing in the early 1950s, when the ashes of World War II were still warm, the Cold War was in full swing and the nuclear arms race was underway, he defied every historian and pundit and wrote, “A long future may perhaps be coming without a third world war in it.” A half-century later, we know that the number-cruncher was right and the eminent historians were wrong. Yes, and intuition was exactly what he avoided. As the title of his book indicates, he approached war not as a narrative historian telling a story, but as a physicist looking at statistical patterns. Richardson was already a pioneer in the use of statistics to predict the weather, and he had also anticipated the invention of fractals by Benoît Mandlebrot several decades later. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His main project was to assemble a database of 315 wars, from just after the Napoleonic wars to the early 1950s, and to test a variety of hypotheses about how they are patterned and what causes them. His first discovery was that wars start and stop at random. There are no cycles, no rhythm of tension and release. If you have a long period with many wars, that doesn’t mean that the world is due for a respite. Nor does a period of peace mean that tensions are mounting and inevitably seek release. Richardson also showed that the frequency of wars seemed to be decreasing over time – although the magnitude of wars, at least of the largest wars, may have been increasing. Subsequent studies have shown that he was right about the period from 1815 to 1950. But in the past half-century, both the frequency and the destructiveness of wars have been in decline. Any individual war has its causes, but the causes go in different directions for different wars, so in the aggregate there is no fine structure to the patterning of wars. Richardson did not deny that there could be a decrease or an increase in the rate of wars, even if their patterning was random. If you roll dice, the odds can change – for example from winning on 12 to winning on eight – while each throw of the dice, and the overall patterning, remains random. He pretty much stayed away from theory and tried to establish the quantitative patterns. But despite taking on a gruesome subject, he wrote with a puckish wit and interlaced the statistics with charming asides. He was a Quaker, and so by cultural background was predisposed to seek ways of minimising violence. His analyses, he claimed, were necessary steps in doing so. He writes: For indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it. If the reader should object that I have abandoned ethics for the false doctrine that ‘tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner’ [to understand all is to forgive all], I can reply that it is only a temporary suspense of ethical judgment, made because ‘beaucoup condamner c’est peu comprendre’ [to condemn much is to understand little]."