{"id":42129,"date":"2018-12-31T08:52:44","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42129"},"modified":"2018-12-31T08:52:44","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:52:44","slug":"2019-are-you-ready-for-a-new-world-war-a-statistical-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42129","title":{"rendered":"2019: Are you Ready for a New World War? A Statistical Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

2019: Are you Ready for a New World War? A Statistical Analysis<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Detail from Picasso’s “Guernica” – 1937<\/i><\/div>\n

With the end of 2018, also the centennial of the end of the Great War (or WWI) is past. It passed remarkably in silence: a few celebrations, but little or no discussion of the reasons and the consequences of that war, supposed to be the one that would “end all wars.”<\/p>\n

Reasonably, it was too much to expect that wars would ever end but maybe we could have at least learned something from rethinking to a conflict that caused some 40 million victims. But that didn’t happen (if you can read Italian, you may be interested in a reflection of mine<\/a> on the subject). The world situation, today, looks more and more similar to the military build-up that took place in Europe in the years preceding the Great War. The “Great Powers” are arranging their forces as if they were setting their pieces on a giant chessboard. At some moment, someone may well decide to make the first move. And in this giant chess game, the kings can wipe out all the pawns in a single move with their nuclear warheads.<\/p>\n

It would be nice to follow Steven Pinker’s optimism<\/a> about modern times becoming less violent. There may be such a trend for the past few decades, but it is always dangerous to extrapolate from a limited dataset. In this case, the optimism of Pinker seems to be simply wrong if measured over a time span of several centuries. This is the result of an analysis of the data<\/a> for the conflicts of the past 600 years that myself and my coworkers Martelloni and Di Patti performed in 2018 — it was thought, in part, as a way to celebrate the centennial of the Great War.
\n\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2019: Are you Ready for a New World War? A Statistical Analysis Detail from Picasso’s “Guernica” – 1937 With the end of 2018, also the centennial of the end of the Great War (or WWI) is past. It passed remarkably in silence: a few celebrations, but little or no discussion of the reasons and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10777,23518,154,19125,22928,20041,2692,891,18328],"class_list":["post-42129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-cassandras-legacy","tag-complex-societies","tag-complexity","tag-emergent-phenomena","tag-first-world-war","tag-steven-pinker","tag-ugo-bardi","tag-world-war","tag-world-war-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42130,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42129\/revisions\/42130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}