Speak Softly and Carry Big Data

Speak Softly and Carry Big Data (Ep. 395) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"PAPE: So after 9/11, I compiled the first complete database of all suicide attacks around the world. At that time, it showed that half of suicide attacks were not driven by Islamic fundamentalism. Many were done by purely secular groups such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, which is a Hindu group, not even an Islamic group; a Marxist group, an anti-religious group.What I found was that 95 percent of suicide attacks around the world since the early 1980s, were in response to a military intervention, often an army, being sent on the territory that terrorists prize...

LEVITT: So I would say honestly my research has had no direct impact on public policy. The only — I’m not joking — the only law change I know that occurred because of my work, there was a small town in Alaska which passed a law which made walking drunk a crime because we had written in one of our books about the dire risks of walking drunk. And I think that is the lone policy success I’ve ever had in almost 30 years...

DUBNER: So I’d like to talk about the research you’ve been doing looking at economic sanctions. So this is something we all read about all the time. I’ll be honest, as a layperson it’s really hard to know what “works.” And how it works, if it does, and what kind of timeframe we’re supposed to be looking at as a success. Some of the U.S.’s current economic sanction targets include Russia and Iran and Venezuela. So what can you tell us empirically about the efficacy of this kind of sanction?

PAPE: Yeah. It really matters whether you’re pursuing sanctions for ambitious foreign-policy goals like regime change, to pull back a military offensive like Russia going into Ukraine, or to stop a W.M.D. program. Or you’re doing more modest things, like you’re trying to cut a trade deal, you’re trying to free some hostages. It’s really important to see the division between the tough goals and the easy goals.

Sanctions work really well for easy goals. The tough goals, much poorer track record... sanctions for tough cases work less than 5 percent of the time... they not only work less than 5 percent of the time, but about 5 percent of the time they have catastrophic failure...

July 1941. We want Japan to stop using all the military force on its adventures in Asia. So we slap maximum-pressure oil sanctions on the Japanese. We think what we’re doing is that we’re going to tilt the balance. We’re going to weaken hawks and empower the doves. We did exactly the opposite. What we did is we weakened the doves and we empowered the hawks. The guy who led the Pearl Harbor attack was Admiral Yamamoto. We know this because we got all the documents, and what Yamamoto did was he flipped his position on Pearl Harbor as a result of the sanctions. Before July ‘41, he was opposed to the Pearl Harbor attack. July ’41 sanctions were what caused him to do the Pearl Harbor attack, because it was a brushback pitch. The more we threatened the survival of Japan, the more he wanted to take a risk to push us back. And that, I’m afraid, is what we’re seeing with Iran today...

I believe that the sanctions have had no effect on Putin. They have weakened the economy but they’ve also fed nationalism. So one of the reasons why sanctions don’t work is because, rather than in terms of just raw cost-benefit calculation, you produce nationalism, which shifts things in favor of the hawks, even though they’re losing wealth...

The common perception, Poast told us, is that the U.S. is always willing to step in and provide this help... these new democracies can’t get what they need from big countries like the U.S., or big organizations like NATO. Instead, they rely on what Poast calls “middle democracies.”...

POAST: Even if you go back to the early 1990s, it wasn’t the U.S. that was leading the way. It was the smaller, middle democracies who lead the way. Or if you go back to the 1940s, with the creation of NATO, it was Canada that came along and said, “Hey, U.S., there’s this thing you might want to get involved with that would really help out Europe.”...

DUBNER: I’d like you to tell us, in all honesty, how the Defense Department considers the sort of academic research and analysis we’ve been hearing about tonight. Do you take it seriously or do you dismiss it as the work of a bunch of pencil-necked geeks who don’t know how the real world works?

HAGEL: We have to take it seriously. The mistakes that we’ve made, and Bob Pape talked about some of them — Vietnam, Iraq — I don’t think we had a very clear understanding of information. Culture, religion, history of these areas. And Afghanistan is a good example here. Eighteen years in Afghanistan. That country has never been ruled by a central government. Great powers of different eras have tried and all failed because they’ve lost the people. And research and analysis helps guide you — not guarantee — but guide you into smarter, wiser decision making...

FLOURNOY: It’s estimated that China has stolen hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property from U.S. companies and that’s part of what’s fueled their economic rise... the offense tends to have the initiative and certain advantages, but I also think that drawing too clean a line between offense and defense doesn’t really work in cyber. And I’ll give you an example. It has to do with what happened just before the midterm elections, where our cyber command got indications that the Russians were preparing to try to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections. And so as a defensive measure to prevent that, they went on the offense, which was basically doing denial-of-service attacks on the Russian entity. And so it was an offensive move, but in the context of an imminent threat. So it was part of a defense. So these terms they get blurry a little bit in the cyber world...

If you read Chinese military doctrine, they talk about their opening salvos being cyberattacks against critical infrastructure in the United States to keep our military from leaving their home bases and attacks in space to blind us, to keep us from communicating, from navigating, from seeing, from processing. And they hope that that will stop us in our tracks or buy them enough time to create a fait accompli in Taiwan or the South China Sea or where have you. So they don’t want to actually confront the United States Navy, for goodness sake. They want us never to be able to fully get our forces there, and so they’re thinking about very different means.


Yet, 9/11 caused an explosion of Islamic fundamentalism - so that would probably be a structural break

Ironically, the people who dismiss academics as idiots who don't know anything, live in ivory towers, don't have skin in the game and haven't accomplished anything mostly - by their own logic - would have to defer to Chuck Hagel here since he says you need to pay attention to academics