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So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract. BEGIN TRANSMISSION---- From the Paratime Economi

by hyperion2010 12y ago

So I have a little piece that I've written about this, it is woefully incomplete, but I'll post the abstract. BEGIN TRANSMISSION---- From the Paratime Economics and Sociology Department, University of New Earth, 2332 Dept of War Studies, University of Mars Investigation of countries at peace and at war: A trans-worldline study. Status: Failure Recommendation: Further study of evolution requested There has been significant debate over the past n centuries as to whether war or peace is more successful at driving innovation and progress (however measured). Given the recent cataloging of trillions of new worldlines with the advent of our new transworldline sensing technology, we set out to search for the ideal ‘natural’ experiment: two world lines, one where a country was at war, and one where it was not. We initially found practically countless potential pairings, so with high hopes we entered the second phase of our research program. To our great dismay, as we began to filter through potential world lines for a situation where a single country was at war and not at war, we stumbled upon a serious problem--we could find no perfect control! Whenever one country switched from a state of war to another, so did some second country as well! To make a long story short, despite having direct access to countless possible worldlines, we have been unsuccessful in answering our fundamental question. The state of war and the state of peace, while often considered duals, are in reality ahistorical names we give to the states of societies that come about by long, path dependent processes. We would attempt to account for the interaction effects between society and environment, however our colleagues working in Evolution and Transtemporal studies inform us that they remain decades, if not centuries away from having tools to answer such questions, and they have had a four century head start developing their tools. We believe that these results would be of interest to researchers and policy makers across the multiverse. END TRANSMISSION---- tl;dr You can’t possibly measure this.

diziet 12y ago
How about Civil Wars?
- hyperion2010 12y ago
  An interesting proposition, however I would argue that it is actually even harder in the case of civil wars because you don't know what to compare to. Let's pretend that we compare the set of all worldlines where country A goes to war with itself to the set of all worldlines where it does not. The variance within each of those sets is going to be enormous with regard to the relative rates of progress. Another thing to consider is that in the case of a civil war we could simply treat the two parties as distinct states for the purpose of analysis. Yes, there will be some peculiarities such as supposedly being governed by the same set of laws, however if we take only the United States and France as examples, the factions that ultimately developed basically lived under two (or more) distinct sets of laws. I say this because in the US federalism was much weaker before 1865 and in France the class system divided the population and the difference in the treatment of different classes under the law has been argued to be one of the key factors contributing to 1789 (see Tocqueville).
webmaven 12y ago
"Whenever one country switched from a state of war to another, so did some second country as well!" I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here...

diziet 12y ago

How about Civil Wars?

hyperion2010 12y ago
An interesting proposition, however I would argue that it is actually even harder in the case of civil wars because you don't know what to compare to. Let's pretend that we compare the set of all worldlines where country A goes to war with itself to the set of all worldlines where it does not. The variance within each of those sets is going to be enormous with regard to the relative rates of progress. Another thing to consider is that in the case of a civil war we could simply treat the two parties as distinct states for the purpose of analysis. Yes, there will be some peculiarities such as supposedly being governed by the same set of laws, however if we take only the United States and France as examples, the factions that ultimately developed basically lived under two (or more) distinct sets of laws. I say this because in the US federalism was much weaker before 1865 and in France the class system divided the population and the difference in the treatment of different classes under the law has been argued to be one of the key factors contributing to 1789 (see Tocqueville).

webmaven 12y ago

"Whenever one country switched from a state of war to another, so did some second country as well!" I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here...