Critique de The Sleepwalkers par Josh

Interesting overview of long lead up to WW1.

A random thought I had while listening: it's no wonder that game theory was primarily developed by Europeans born in the pre-war period. Oskar Morganstern was born in the German Empire in 1902 and John von Neumann was born in Austro-Hungary a year later. While they wouldn't formalize game theory until the late 1940s, the diplomat and politicians of the empires were clearly thinking along proto-game theoretic lines decades earlier.

The problem with the use of game theoretic thinking in international relations is that it requires one to speculate about the intentions and capacities of other players. Equally important, everyone had an incentive to deceive others about their capacities and (in some cases) their intentions.

Ironically, von Neumann and Morganstern's work probably wouldn't have helped avoid the conflict. The problem was not a lack capacity for complex multi-player analysis. It was subjective evaluative judgements going that analysis were fundamentally flawed. As Clark notes, the complexity of the causes of the war enabled all of the parties to see themselves as engaged in a defensive rather than an offensive war.

If you should choose to listen to or read this book and you know logical notation you may be tempted to try to formalize the relations between the powers. I didn't, and as a result I never really did follow the details of what happened.