There is a minor paradox in economics called "the war puzzle".
It goes like this: in any situation where two groups of people are in conflict, they will almost always gain the greatest net benefit by cooperating or negotiating. To engage in conflict with each other requires--first--redirecting some scarce resources that might be applied to the source of the conflict toward the business of conflict, and--second--if the conflict actually comes about it involves directly destroying potential resources that could also be directed toward fixing the source of the conflict.
Resource scarcity scenarios are frequently cited as "causes" of war. Germany in the 1920s was increasingly concerned about food security, as the domestic yields were insufficient to supply domestic needs. The country was not self-sufficient in food. This concern could have been addressed in at least two ways that would have almost certainly worked: employ Germany's world-leading chemists--many of whom were experts in nitrates--to create more effective fertilizers to increase yields, or commit to building international or transnational institutions that limited the possibility of trade sanctions impacting food supplies.
Neither of those solutions--both of which were tried with great success decades later--appealed. Instead, Germany opted for what Sir Terry Pratchett once described as "kill everyone and invade Poland." One of the primary goals of the German Reich was to create an agrarian empire in Eastern Europe that was loosely (very loosely) modelled on British India that would feed the growing German population.
This "solution" to the problem of food security did not succeed, and it's difficult--for me at least--to understand why anyone thought it would.
This is the war puzzle: not every problem has a solution, but among the vast majority of problems that do have solutions, the rational solution is never "organized mass killing and destruction," where by "rational" I mean what an economist would: a rational choice is one that gives the highest likelihood of satisfying a want at the lowest cost.
While there is a lot of nuance and complexity that can be used to extend or modify this definition of "rational", none of that addresses the human proclivity for routinely choosing a course of action that has an incredibly low probability of success--by definition never more than 50%--and an incredibly high cost: war.
The general approach within economics to addressing the war puzzle, which is the disconnect between a theory that says war should never exist and observations that tell us it practically always exists, at least somewhere in the world, is to look at cognitive biases that might make an economically rational actor decide that war is a better solution than diplomacy or innovation to solve any given problem.
The most common bias considered is overconfidence, which is very likely part of the puzzle. Where data are available, it is not uncommon for both sides at the start of a conflict to think they are nearly certain to win it. This is the diplomatic equivalent of "all the children are above average": one ends up with the summed probability of winning close to 200%.
Even though overconfidence plays a role, it still doesn't explain our central fascination with war. After all, the chancellor of Germany might have been overconfident that invading Poland would lead to a rapid solution to the problem of food security, but he might just as well have been overconfident that investing in chemical fertilizers would have done the same.
Why would we be systematically overconfident that the least plausible course of action is correct, while not being similarly overconfident that ideas that are much more likely to work, will work?
That is, why are we overconfident of our success in war, and not in diplomacy or innovation? Even though we know in the modern world, especially, overconfidence in innovation is extremely common. Much of my own business for the past quarter-century has been working with innovators to take their work out of the lab and into the world, and if I counted up every over-confident innovator I worked with, it would be all of them. Including me, when developing my own ideas: a few years ago I had a brilliant idea for a new kind of well pump that I've only reached the point of success with in the past month.
So overconfidence can't explain war, and blaming this or that economic system is implausible because war has been a staple of human behaviour from Sumerian times to the present day, and neither the early slave states nor the feudal societies that replaced them, nor the capitalist societies that replaced those were unique in having wars, although democratic capitalism does seem to have fewer than the alternatives.
War, or something like it, exists today among hunter-gatherers, although precisely to what degree is hotly debated, particularly given the existence of Roseauian ideologues for whom no amount of evidence will suffice to shake their belief in "Noble Savages".
And war--or something like it--existed in hunter-gatherers long before the agricultural revolution, as shown by recent analysis of skeletal remains from the Nile Valley that appear to have been subject to periodic violent raids. Of the 61 bodies, 41 have at least one healed or unhealed wound, and at least sixteen have both, suggesting that violence was a relatively regular episodic event in the life of their community.
It is incredibly unlikely we have a "war gene" or anything like it. But we are a hyper-social primate: we get together in large, extremely organized groups to do all kinds of things. The four "F"s of evolutionary biology are "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction", as the saying goes, and we organize ourselves in the pursuit of all them, from farms that integrate complex supply chains to bars and other social venues that play a critical role in our mating rituals.
War may simply be the hyper-social realization of what in any other species--elk, say--would be individual conflicts over mates or territory.
“ Steven Pinker says human beings are getting less violent, especially since the Enlightenment. What do you think of his argument?
It’s a very interesting argument, which he makes with great evidence and subtlety. We no longer have prizefights where people batter each other to death. We no longer have public executions. And in most developed societies and many less developed societies, the homicide rates are way down. Your own country, the United States, is something of an outlier there. I think his argument that we are becoming more peaceful in domestic societies is right. But I don’t think that’s war. War is something different.
There’s a very interesting counterargument by Richard Wrangham called “the goodness paradox.” He argues that we have, in fact, become nicer and less violent as individuals. We may have domesticated ourselves by our choice of mates and by breeding out those who are most violent, or killing those who are most violent among us, like the way wolves have been domesticated into friendly dogs who sit on your lap. We may have become nicer as individuals, but we’ve also become better at organizing and using purposive violence. That’s the paradox. We’ve gotten better at making war even as we’ve become nicer people.
Nationalism can be the same as religion. You will die for something bigger than yourself.”
http://m.nautil.us/issue/94/evolving/humans-have-gotten-nicer-and-better-at-making-war
An interesting analysis of some of our least explicable behaviour…