Statistics of Deadly Quarrels

By B. Hayes. American Scientist, 2002

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Look upon the phenomenon of war with dis passion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically, it hardly mat ters. War deaths amount to something like 1 per cent of all deaths; in many places, more die by suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving hu man lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war. But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions?pity and love as well as fear and ha tred?and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in ta bles of vital statistics. When war comes, it mus cles aside the calmer aspects of life; no one is un moved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to stop the fighting, feelings run high. ("Antiwar mili tant" is no oxymoron.) The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one's own culture and ideology is also a challenge?not to mention the bounds of one's time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the pres ent purpose. One defense against such distortions is the sta tistical method of gathering data about many wars from many sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. If s a dumb, brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promis ing. A pioneer of this quantitative study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorolo gist whose ambitious but premature foray into nu

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Assuring the quality of volunteered geographic information (2012, methodology): “Mandelbrot (1967) describes the use of an analysis attributable to Richardson (1960) to demonstrate the fractal nature of coastlines by creating a double-log plot of measured length against the scale of the measuring device.”
Power-law distributions in binned empirical data (2012, methodology): “Indeed, this procedure has a long history, being used by Pareto in the analysis of wealth distributions in the late 19th century [Arnold (1983)], by Richardson in analyzing the size of wars in the early 20th century [Richardson (1960)], and by many researchers since.”
Forecasting: theory and practice (2020, background): “…and the number of casualties, has received quite some attention in the scientific literature and the media (e.g., Cederman, 2003; Friedman, 2015; Hayes, 2002; Norton-Taylor, 2015; Richardson, 1948, 1960), falling within the broader discussion about violence (Berlinski, 2009; Goldstein, 2011;…”
Dynamics of two-actor cooperation–competition conflict models (2008, background): “…models of conflict have been based on either qualitatively defined reaction functions between the actors [7] [8] [9], or a metaphorical application of the concepts from dynamical systems [10] [11] [12] or were based on linear mathematical models [13] [14] or piecewise linear models [15] [16].”